God is concerned about what you really are, not what you appear to be.

It is the internal that is infinitely more important than the external.

The righteousness of the scribes and the Pharisees was an external, hypocritical legalism.

And the righteousness that God demands is something internal.

Welcome to Grace to You, the Bible teaching ministry of John MacArthur.

I'm your host, Phil Johnson.

It's a natural thing to do, to put sin into categories.

I mean, a sinful thought or attitude is not as bad as a sinful action, right? But is categorizing sin the right thing to do?

Are your actions the sins people can see the main issue? Or does the problem lie deeper? Well,

John MacArthur will examine important questions like those

as he begins his series called The Sinfulness of Sin. But before we get started, perhaps you're

wondering why that title? What exactly are we getting at when we talk about the sinfulness of sin?

Well, we asked John about this study's title some years ago,

and here's what he said. It really is odd, isn't it, that you have to describe sin as sinful.

But sin has been diminished in the culture. Everybody acknowledges sin. But the definition of sin is almost like some, some slip-up.

It's a mistake. It's a mistake. It's an error you made. Yeah, you hear people say that all the time. I admit, I made a

mistake. I admit I made a bad decision. So we have to redefine sin. And by the way, the

sinfulness of sin is an old phrase. It goes way back into the Puritan era. Even then, there were

people who wanted to minimize sin. There are always going to be people who want to turn sin into

mistakes. Or they want to turn sin into mis and they want or they want to turn sin into

miscalculations that I made because somebody else did something to me or misinformed me.

So the idea of the sinfulness of sin is to set the excuses aside, the cheap, shallow definitions

...