We tend to reserve the word sin for things loud enough to scandalize us. Murder. Adultery. Theft. Drunkenness. Apostasy. But there is another class of sins that can sit quite comfortably in a church pew: impatience, envy, resentment, ingratitude, self-pity, gossip, loveless criticism, subtle pride, discontent, and the anxious insistence on controlling what God has not put in our hands. These are sometimes called “respectable sins,” not because Scripture regards them lightly, but because we do. Their earthly consequences are not all equal, certainly, but they share the same ugly anatomy: a heart failing to love God and neighbor as it ought. Beeke and Smalley put their finger on the problem: “We are often more concerned about sin’s consequences for ourselves than its offense to God.”¹ Cornelius Plantinga approaches the same reality from another angle. Sin, he argues, is “culpable shalom-breaking,” the guilty vandalizing of the order, flourishing, communion, and peace God loves.² My impatience may never make the evening news, but it can still tear a small hole in shalom.
And the category is hardly a recent invention. More than a century ago John Watson published sermons under the wonderfully uncomfortable heading Respectable Sins. The first six, originally printed in 1901, dealt with evil temper, the false tongue, egotism, bigotry, and discontentment. Watson even called bigotry “the most venomous and injurious of respectable sins,” while carefully distinguishing it from principled conviction.³ That distinction still stings. We are remarkably good at laundering sin through respectable vocabulary. Impatience becomes efficiency. Harshness becomes “speaking truth.” Gossip slips into the prayer request. Envy masquerades as discernment about somebody else’s success. Pride becomes standards. Resentment becomes boundaries. Theological combativeness gets baptized as contending for the faith, even when we seem to enjoy bruising the people for whom Christ died. Anxiety, when it hardens into a refusal to entrust ourselves to God, can sound almost virtuous: I’m just being responsible. Respectable sins rarely arrive wearing horns. Usually they come carrying a Bible and a plausible explanation.
Jerry Bridges called these the “acceptable sins of the saints,” precisely because believers can become highly sensitized to the spectacular sins outside the church while strangely numb to the quieter sins within themselves.⁴ Jesus had already demolished that arrangement. The Pharisee in Luke 18 can inventory another man’s wickedness with impressive accuracy while remaining almost completely blind to his own pride. Paul likewise tells people already raised with Christ to “put to death” what belongs to the old life (Col. 3:1–10). He commands Christians to put away bitterness, wrath, anger, and slander (Eph. 4:31–32), to do all things without grumbling (Phil. 2:14), to give thanks in everything (1 Thess. 5:18), and to refuse conceit and selfish ambition (Phil. 2:3). These are not optional refinements for unusually serious saints. Owen, working from Romans 8:13, presses the point with characteristic severity: “Be killing sin or it will be killing you.”⁵ Repentance begins when we quit negotiating with the vocabulary. Irritability is not merely a bad morning. Envy is not admiration with a headache. Malice does not become holy because our opponent happens to be wrong.
The danger is that repeated “little” sins do not remain little episodes. They become grooves in the soul. Rebecca DeYoung helpfully distinguishes an individual sinful act from vice, a settled disposition formed through repetition. A vice is a habit of character; repeated choices gradually wear a path until what once required deliberation begins to come almost naturally. She compares it to sleds repeatedly running down fresh snow: each trip deepens the rut until the sled glides along it with scarcely any steering. The vices, she writes, are “corruptive and destructive habits.”⁶ This helps explain why the respectable sins deserve more attention, not less. Every indulged outburst trains anger. Every rehearsed grievance educates resentment. Every little comparison feeds envy. Every complaint tutors the heart in discontent. Eventually we are no longer merely people who occasionally commit these sins. We are becoming irritable, envious, resentful, thankless people. Sin is not only something we do. Indwelling sin works upon the sort of people we are becoming.
That makes tracing the visible sin down to its root essential. A sharp tongue may grow from pride. Envy may expose dissatisfaction with God’s providence. Chronic complaining can reveal a quiet conviction that we deserve a different life. The need to win every theological argument may have less to do with truth than with the little throne we have built for ourselves. Watson’s warning about bigotry is especially useful here because firm conviction and sinful combativeness can occupy the same theological neighborhood while being entirely different things. One loves truth and wants the neighbor to see it; the other rather enjoys defeating the neighbor with it. Indwelling sin is opportunistic. It fastens itself even to good things and bends them inward. Beeke and Smalley describe it vividly: “Indwelling sin opposes our sanctification like a many-headed hydra.”⁷ Cut off one manifestation and another may appear. So we do not merely police behavior. We ask harder questions of the heart: What am I wanting here? What am I protecting? Whose approval am I craving? Why does another person’s success bother me? What has become more precious to me than obedience to Christ?
But Christian mortification is not baptized self-improvement. We do not conquer pride by becoming proud of our discipline, nor cure self-righteousness with a more strenuous form of self-righteousness. Owen is emphatic that the work belongs to believers who are already free from sin’s condemning power, and its effective agent is the Holy Spirit: “All other ways of mortification are vain . . . it must be done by the Spirit.”⁸ That order matters. Romans 8:1 comes before Romans 8:13. No condemnation, then mortification. We do not kill sin so that God will receive us; in Christ, God has received us, and therefore we make war on everything that contradicts our new identity. Grace is not the enemy of effort. Grace relocates it. The battle moves from the courtroom, where Christ has already answered our condemnation, to the household, where beloved sons and daughters are learning to resemble their Father.
That also means our response must involve more than simply saying no. DeYoung speaks helpfully of “graced disciplines,” ordinary rhythms of discipleship through which we deliberately place ourselves under the Spirit’s transforming work.⁹ If complaining has dug the rut, practice thanksgiving. If envy has trained the eye to resent another’s good, deliberately thank God for that good. If pride craves notice, serve where nobody notices. If the tongue habitually wounds, learn the slower disciplines of silence, prayer, and deliberate encouragement. Bridges likewise insists that the first strategy in fighting these sins is to “apply the gospel”: remember that our guilt has been borne by Christ and that his righteousness, not the cleanliness of today’s performance, is the ground of our acceptance before God.¹⁰ Then depend upon the Spirit, saturate the mind with Scripture, pray specifically, and enlist the help of other believers. Habits formed over years are rarely uprooted in an afternoon. Sanctification is usually less like flipping a switch and more like learning to walk a new road until, by grace, it begins to feel like home.
So bring the respectable sin into the light. Name it without euphemism. Confess it without theatrics. Make restitution where necessary. Ask trusted brothers or sisters to tell you what you have learned not to see. And then look away from yourself to Christ, because endless introspection cannot sanctify anybody. Owen’s final counsel is wonderfully Christward: “His blood is the great sovereign remedy for sin-sick souls.”¹¹ The Messiah who bore the guilt of our pride, resentment, selfishness, envy, ingratitude, and lovelessness also gives His Spirit to break their dominion. There is forgiveness for yesterday’s failure and grace for today’s fight. Even the discovery of sin, painful as it is, can therefore become mercy: God is showing us what he intends to heal. The sin may have become respectable to us. It was never respectable at Calvary. And the Savior who died for it is not finished with us yet.
Notes
Joel R. Beeke and Paul M. Smalley, Reformed Systematic Theology, Volume 3: Spirit and Salvation (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2021), 686.
Cornelius Plantinga Jr., Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1995), 14.
John Watson, Respectable Sins (New York: Hodder and Stoughton, n.d.), vii, 59, 71–72. Watson’s preface notes that the first six essays bearing the title “Respectable Sins” originally appeared in the Sunday Magazine in 1901.
Jerry Bridges, Respectable Sins: The Truth about Anger, Jealousy, Worry, and Other Stuff We Accept, student ed. (Colorado Springs: NavPress, 2013), 7, 18–19.
John Owen, Overcoming Sin and Temptation, ed. Kelly M. Kapic and Justin Taylor (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 2006), 50.
Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung, Glittering Vices: A New Look at the Seven Deadly Sins and Their Remedies, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2020), 6–9, esp. 7.
Beeke and Smalley, Reformed Systematic Theology, 686.
Owen, Overcoming Sin and Temptation, 47.
DeYoung, Glittering Vices, viii.
Bridges, Respectable Sins, 43–44.
Owen, Overcoming Sin and Temptation, 131–33.