Is sin inborn?
We all want a happy, carefree life. But the question is: what do we ourselves do to achieve it? We live slackly, we read even our morning and evening prayers without the heart, and all the while we completely lose awareness of our ruinous state. We must grasp the content of prayer, its meaning, and then we shall find both the knowledge of our sinfulness and an understanding of God's mercy. These prayers shape our whole life and activity; they show us how to live, what to do and what to avoid.
In the morning and evening prayers we stand before the Lord and look closely into ourselves. These prayers show us, first of all, ourselves. But what matters most is that even the few prayers we are to say during the day should be lit by the divine light.
The sin living in us darkens us and makes us justify ourselves in our own eyes. And self-justification is offered to us by the devil, until conscience awakes in us — conscience, which is sensitive not only to particular sins but brings us to know our sinfulness without any self-justification. With our sin we bring division everywhere. Every self-justification in our sins is an enemy of our salvation. Only the realisation and understanding of the danger that comes from sin will temper our will for the struggle against sin. We pay no attention to “petty” sins until we realise that it is precisely these that rob us of happiness. We think sin is our own nature. “I'm like this and that, and I can't be any different,” or “that's my character,” we often say; but character is not at all something that cannot be corrected.
When you decide to resist sin, you must remember that it is not something inborn in us, but something that only later clung to us. Our first parents were created without sin. Sin entered our nature only afterwards, crept into it and set itself against the soul's native, sinless state; and the soul's original state is sinless because man is created in the image of God. Sin takes us captive, enters our natural make-up as an alien principle, but then everything becomes merged with sin. The awareness that sin is not a component part of man is most necessary for us, since it helps us in the struggle against sin. The Lord's enlightening of the mind and our awareness of our sinfulness are bound up first of all with our own will; sin settles in a person's will to the extent that the will gives way to it, and so “weakness of will” too comes from the devil.
Each of us may ask: but if my will is mingled with sin, how can I fight against myself with my own will — for a will merged with sin cannot set itself against itself? In order to direct willpower against sin, we must realise again and again that sin is not part of our being, not part of our will. This knowledge strengthens the will in its opposition to sin.
Both the sinful life and the spiritually right life take place inside a person, in his soul; the circumstances of life are the means by which a person must look into himself. It has already been said that sin is a dividing, separating force. For example, people have hurt and insulted one another and parted, offended. This is a misfortune, from which it is clear that sin really does divide, and having divided, then lords it over them. Man is called to happiness and must learn to fight for his happiness against misfortune — that is, against sin — in the setting that is especially close to him.
