Welcome to 10 Minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life.

In the time it takes to get to work.

I'm Keith Simon.

There was a book that was published in the 1970s whose title asked a question.

The title was, whatever happened to sin?

The author was a guy named Carl Menninger, and he was a well-respected

psychiatrist who was asking why no one spoke about sin anymore. Remember, this was written in the

70s, and Carl Menninger wasn't a Christian. He asked whether any of our troubles were caused by sin.

Was anyone guilty of anything anymore? Had anyone done

anything sinful or did people just do stupid things? If we've done something wrong, he said we need

to repent, but if we haven't sinned, maybe we just need medication. Menninger concluded that

many former sins had been labeled crimes, so the responsibility for dealing with them had passed from the church to the state, from the priest to the policeman.

Other sins have dissipated into illness, or at least into symptoms of illness, so that in their case, punishment has been replaced with treatment.

Meninger argued that sin hasn't really

gone away, no matter how much we humans attempt to suppress it or redefine it. He thought we needed to

bring back the label of sin to make sense out of our world. We've spent the last few days here on

TMBT thinking about how sin works out in our life through the story of

David Mbashiba, her husband Uriah, and the prophet Nathan. Today we're going to think about

the consequences of our sin and what forgiveness looks like. Lord, I pray that you would open your

word so that we would understand it, and you would open our heart so that we would be transformed by the

power of your word. Amen. One of the most important questions first and second Samuel is answering,

is who is the right king for Israel? The answer has been that David may serve his king because he's a man

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