Omission Sins Quotes

Grace is not opposed to effort, it is opposed to earning. Earning is an attitude. Effort is an action. Grace, you know, does not just have to do with forgiveness of sins alone.

I have spent weeks in the desert, forgetting to look at the moon, he says, as a married man may spend days never looking into the face of his wife. These are not sins of omission but signs of pre-occuopation.

The slickest way in the world to lie is to tell the right amount of truth at the right time-and then shut up.

Not only our actions, but also our omissions, become our destiny.

Don’t ever underestimate the destructive power of sins of omission.

All the opportunities you let slip by! The idea, the inspiration just doesn´t come fast enough. Instead of being open, you´re closed up tight. That´s the worst sin of all - the sin of omission.

I never cut my neighbor's throat; My neighbor's gold I never stole; I never spoiled his house and land; But God have mercy on my soul! For I am haunted night and day By all the deeds I have not done; O unattempted loveliness! O costly valor never won!

I lay and cried, and began to feel again, to admit I was human, vulnerable, sensitive. I began to remember how it had been before; how there was that germ of positive creativeness. Character is fate; and damn, I'd better work on my character. I had been withdrawing into a retreat of numbness: it is so much safer not to feel, not to let the world touch one. But my honest self revolted at this, hated me for doing this. Sick with conflict, destructive negative emotions, frozen into disintegration I was, refusing to articulate, to spew forth these emotions - they festered in me, growing big, distorted, like pus-bloated sores. Small problems, mentions of someone else's felicity, evidence of someone else's talents, frightened me, making me react hollowly, fighting jealousy, envy, hate. Feeling myself fall apart, decay, rot, and the laurels wither and fall away, and my past sins and omissions strike me with full punishment and import. All this, all this foul, gangrenous, sludge ate away at my insides. Silent, insidious.

Sins of omission, Louis said. You don’t believe in sins. I believe there are failures of character, like I said before. That’s a sin.

To live without self-respect is to lie awake some night, beyond the reach of warm milk, phenobarbital, and the sleeping hand on the coverlet, counting up the sins of commission and omission, the trusts betrayed, the promises subtly broken, the gifts irrevocably wasted through sloth or cowardice or carelessness. However long we postpone it, we eventually lie down alone in that notoriously uncomfortable bed, the one we make ourselves. Whether or not we sleep in it depends, of course , on whether or not we respect ourselves.

I don’t know how to tell her that she feels like fucking heaven, sending waves of euphoria spiraling through my chest. At the same time, she’s hell, too; wicked, delicious sin crafted especially for my taste buds and served on a silver fucking platter.

As Christians, if sin were the reason for our afflictions, then we should all be in ICU" ~ R. Alan Woods [2012]

God! when you think of all the things you could do and yet somehow never do! All the opportunities you let slip by! The idea, the inspiration just doesn't come fast enough. Instead of being open, you're closed up tight. Thats's the worst sin of all - the sin of omission.

The dismal fact is that self-respect has nothing to do with the approval of others — who are, after all, deceived easily enough; has nothing to do with reputation, which, as Rhett Butler told Scarlett O’Hara, is something people with courage can do without. To do without self-respect, on the other hand, is to be an unwilling audience of one to an interminable documentary that deals with one’s failings, both real and imagined, with fresh footage spliced in for every screening. There’s the glass you broke in anger, there’s the hurt on X’s face; watch now, this next scene, the night Y came back from Houston, see how you muff this one. To live without self-respect is to lie awake some night, beyond the reach of warm milk, the Phenobarbital, and the sleeping hand on the coverlet, counting up the sins of commissions and omission, the trusts betrayed, the promises subtly broken, the gifts irrevocably wasted through sloth or cowardice, or carelessness. However long we postpone it, we eventually lie down alone in that notoriously uncomfortable bed, the one we make ourselves. Whether or not we sleep in it depends, of course, on whether or not we respect ourselves.

I would almost forget about Ida Durbin. But a sin of omission, if indeed that's what it was, can be like the rusty head of a hatchet buried in the heartwood of a tree -- it eventually finds the teeth of a whirling saw blade.

There are sins of omission and sins of commission, my friend. I've dealt with mine and i've forgiven myself... you should do the same.

However, we all sin by omission. Therefore, we are all sinners in constant need of a 'Savior'." ~R. Alan Woods [2010]

No matter how many they may be we should go to God in all confidence and with true sorrow for our sins, saying “Our Father Who art in Heaven, forgive us our sins of thought and those of speech, forgive us our sins of commission and omission which make us infinitely guilty in the eyes of Thy Divine Justice.

There is a good explanation for why Emotional Neglect has been so overlooked. It hides. It dwells in the sins of omission, rather than commission; it’s the white space in the family picture rather than the picture itself. It’s often what was NOT said or observed or remembered from childhood, rather than what WAS said.

Omission is a sin only if, in the process of deceiving, you forget the truth. Lying is a sin only if, in the process, the lie becomes the only truth.

His old priests might have told him there's sins of commission not omission. It's not always the things you do but the things you don't do that will cost you your soul. Sometimes it's not the spoken lie but the unspoken truth that opens the door to betrayal.

A few shy stars and a pale moon had already appeared in the sky, ready to take up reign from the sun that had abdicated for the night. 

We don’t get to opt out of living on mission because we might not be appreciated. We’re not allowed to neglect the oppressed because we have reservations about their discernment. We cannot deny love because it might be despised or misunderstood. We can’t withhold social relief because we’re not convinced it will be perfectly managed. Must we be wise? Absolutely. But doing nothing is a blatant sin of omission. Turning a blind eye to the bottom on the grounds of “unworthiness” is the antithesis to Jesus’ entire mission.

I would rather commit a sin of commission than a sin of omission, and the evangelical community is exactly the opposite. The evangelical community would rather not do something wrong and the price they're willing to pay for not doing something wrong is they're willing to fail to do something right; they're so afraid of making a mistake. Now the reason they're afraid of making a mistake is they're cowards and our community produces cowards.

Never once did Jesus charge them with something they did wrong. His entire indictment was on what they didn’t do right. It was a sin of neglect, a crime of omission. And it went far beyond ignoring poverty. Jesus explained that when we ignore the least, we ignore Him.

The test of man then is not, 'How have I believed?' but 'How have I loved?'. The final test of religion is not religiousness, but love: not what I have done, not what I have believed, not what I have achieved, but how I have discharged the common charities of life. Sins of commission in that awful indictment are not even referred to. By what we have not done, by sins of omission, we are judged. It could not be otherwise. For the withholding of love is the negation of the Spirit of Christ, the proof that we never knew Him, that for us He lived in vain. Pastor Henry Drummond, 1890

As all this suggests our relationship with evidence is seldom purely a cognitive one. Vilifying menstruating women bolstering anti-Muslim stereotypes murdering innocent citizens of Salem plainly evidence is almost always invariably a political social and moral issue as well. To take a particularly stark example consider the case of Albert Speer minister of armaments and war production during the Third Reich close friend to Adolf Hitler and highest-ranking Nazi official to ever express remorse for his actions. In his memoir Inside the Third Reich Speer candidly addressed his failure to look for evidence of what was happening around him. "I did not query a friend who told him not to visit Auschwitz I did not query Himmler I did not query Hitler " he wrote. "I did not speak with personal friends. I did not investigate for I did not want to know what was happening there... for fear of discovering something which might have made me turn away from my course. I had closed my eyes." Judge William Stoughton of Salem Massachusetts became complicit in injustice and murder by accepting evidence that he should have ignored. Albert Speer became complicit by ignoring evidence he should have accepted. Together they show us some of the gravest possible consequences of mismanaging the data around us and the vital importance of learning to manage it better. It is possible to do this: like in the U.S. legal system we as individuals can develop a fairer and more consistent relationship to evidence over time. By indirection Speer himself shows us how to begin. I did not query he wrote. I did not speak. I did not investigate. I closed my eyes. This are sins of omission sins of passivity and they suggest correctly that if we want to improve our relationship with evidence we must take a more active role in how we think must in a sense take the reins of our own minds. To do this we must query and speak and investigate and open our eyes. Specifically and crucially we must learn to actively combat our inductive biases: to deliberately seek out evidence that challenges our beliefs and to take seriously such evidence when we come across it.

Little sins of omission that loom large now. You could go mad.

Despite the Saint-Nectaire, this analysis would be absolutely reasonable if it did not sin grievously by omission

Silence is not a lie. A sin of omission, but not a lie.

Sins of omission, Louis said. You don’t believe in sins. I believe there are failures of character, like I said before. That’s a sin.

Both glory and dominion last forever but glory is for God and dominion is for mankind.

To do without self-respect, on the other hand, is to be an unwilling audience of one to an interminable documentary that details one's failings, both real and imagined, with fresh footage spliced in for every screening. (...) To live without self-respect is to lie awake some night, beyond the reach of warm milk, phenobarbital, and the sleeping hand on the coverlet, counting up the sins of commission and omission, the trusts betrayed, the promises subtly broken, the gifts irrevocably wasted through sloth or cowardice or carelessness. However long we postpone it, we eventually lie down alone in that notoriously uncomfortable bed, the one we make ourselves. Whether or not we sleep in it depends, of course, on whether or not we respect ourselves." To protest

Doing nothing is a sin of omission rather than commission. Doing nothing is a choice to let your body decay before its time. Doing something is the choice to stay vital, healthy, and youthful.

A personal sin may be one of commission (doing something that is prohibited) or a sin of omission (failing to do what is required of us). It may also express itself in either an act or attitude.

This is what God taught me through Judas at Jesus’ table, eating the broken bread that was His body: We don’t get to opt out of living on mission because we might not be appreciated. We’re not allowed to neglect the oppressed because we have reservations about their discernment. We cannot deny love because it might be despised or misunderstood. We can’t withhold social relief because we’re not convinced it will be perfectly managed. We can’t project our advantaged perspective onto struggling people and expect results available only to the privileged. Must we be wise? Absolutely. But doing nothing is a blatant sin of omission.

People talk about the sins of omission. What does that mean? Who decides if something is a sin? I know that I'm being semantic, but judging by the way people moralize and jump to conclusions, anyone would think that the truth is real and solid, that it's something that can be picked up and passed around, weighed and measured, before being agreed upon. But the truth isn't like that. If I were to tell you this story tomorrow it would be different than today. I would have filtered the details through my defenses and rationalized my actions. Truth is a matter of semantics, whether we like it or not.

It’s tragic that the country’s biggest sin is racism and the Church’s biggest omission is racial justice. The tragedy gets compounded when one remembers that some quarters of the Church were once the strongest supporters of this sin. That means we’re working our way out of a deficit. The roots of racism are tangled with our faith.

It is impossible for those who tasted Christ to fall back upon the old foolish ways ,and if he or she does, then that act of commission or omission comes within the ambit of sin and that would indubitably imply that the person is  crucifying Christ all over again and exposing Him to contempt , being the bearer of His name ( Christian).

The five dollars I gave her would never reach her. I knew that: because I wanted my class to think me good for giving it. Spiritual Pride the nuns called it, a Sin of Intention, sister to the Sin of Omission, which was the price for what you hadn’t done but thought. Sometimes I prayed so hard for God to materialize at the foot of my bed it would start to happen; then I’d beg it to stop, and it would.

Until that time of faith becoming sight, we strive to look like Christ. If there is to be whittling, let it be the whittling away of our sins of commission. If there is to be carving, let it be the carving out of our sins of omission. The Ten Words show us how to live on earth as in heaven, conforming to the image of Christ as representatives of Yahweh. They are engraving tools. The more we obey them, the more we reflect his character, visibly, to a world that very much needs us to.

And is one to be sorry that the doctors brought her back to life and operated, or not? She, who did not want to lose a single day, “won” thirty: they brought her joys; but they also brought her anxiety and suffering. Since she did escape from the martyrdom that I sometimes thought was hanging over her, I cannot decide for her. For my sister, losing Maman the very day she saw her again would have been a shock from which she would scarcely have recovered. And as for me? Those four weeks have left me pictures, nightmares, sadnesses that I should never have known if Maman had died that Wednesday morning. But I cannot measure the disturbance that I should have felt since my sorrow broke out in a way that I had not foreseen. We did derive an undoubted good from this respite; it saved us, or almost saved us, from remorse. When someone you love dies you pay for the sin of outliving her with a thousand piercing regrets. Her death brings to light her unique quality; she grows as vast as the world that her absence annihilates for her and whose whole existence was caused by her being there; you feel that she should have had more room in your life—all the room, if need be. You snatch yourself away from this wildness: she was only one among many. But since you never do all you might for anyone—not even within the arguable limits that you have set yourself—you have plenty of room left for self reproach. With regard to Maman we were all guilty, these last years, of carelessness, omission, and abstention. We felt that we atoned for this by the days that we gave up to her, by the peace that our being there gave her, and by the victories gained over fear and pain. Without our obstinate watchfulness she would have suffered far more.

Perhaps it is a deep-seated reluctance to face up to the gravity of sin which has led to its omission from the vocabulary of many of our contemporaries. One acute observer of the human condition, who has noticed the disappearance of the word, is the American psychiatrist Karl Menninger. He has written about it in his book, Whatever Became of Sin? Describing the malaise of western society, its general mood of gloom and doom, he adds that ‘one misses any mention of “sin”’. ‘It was a word once in everyone’s mind, but is now rarely if ever heard. Does that mean’, he asks, ‘that no sin is involved in all our troubles...? Has no-one committed any sins? Where, indeed, did sin go? What became of it?’ (p.13). Enquiring into the causes of sin’s disappearance, Dr Menninger notes first that ‘many former sins have become crimes’, so that responsibility for dealing with them has passed from church to state, from priest to policeman (p.50), while others have dissipated into sicknesses, or at least into symptoms of sickness, so that in their case punishment has been replaced by treatment (pp.74ff.). A third convenient device called ‘collective irresponsibility’ has enabled us to transfer the blame for some of our deviant behaviour from ourselves as individuals to society as a whole or to one of its many groupings (pp.94ff.).

Bless me, readers, for I have published. It's been five years since my last book. Greetings, fellow sinners! If you picked up a copy of this book, it means you are either: 1) wracked with guilt and are looking for penance, or 2) need to spend over $10.00 at the airport newsstand so you can use your credit card. Either way, welcome to Stephen Colbert's Midnight Confessions. As America's foremost TV Catholic, it was natural for me to do a segment inspired by the church. After all, the Catholic Church and late night TV actually have a lot in common: our shows last about an hour, we're obsessed with reaching younger demographics, and the hosts are almost always men. This religious-adjacent tome contains all my favorite confessions from The Late Show. These are things that aren't necessarily sins, but I do feel guilty about them. For instance, repackaging material from the show and selling it in a book. I've always been a big fan of confession. The confessional is a great place to go to relieve yourself of your sins. Unless you're claustrophobic, in which case it's a suffocating death trap of despair! And while most confession books just give you run-of-the-mill mortal sins, I go one step further and provide you with mortal sins, venial sins, deadly sins, and even sins of omission (Notice that the previous sentence didn't have a period!) This book is a throwback to a simpler life when people would go to a priest to confess their sins. As opposed to how it's done now - getting drunk and weeping to Andy Cohen on Bravo. Confessing your sins is a great way to get things off your chest. Second only to waxing. The only downside is that you get introduced to it as a kid, before you have any juicy sins to confess. Oh, you stole a cookie? That's adorable, Becky. Come back when you total your dad's Chevy. Now you might be asking yourself, "What if I'm not Catholic - can I still enjoy this book?" Of course. After all, no matter what religion you are - be it Jewish, Muslim, Lutheran, Pagan, or SoulCycle - we all have things to feel guilty about. For example, not being Catholic.

Malthus’s poor laws were wrong; British attitudes to famine in India and Ireland were wrong; eugenics was wrong; the Holocaust was wrong; India’s sterilisation programme was wrong; China’s one-child policy was wrong. These were sins of commission, not omission. Malthusian misanthropy – the notion that you should harden your heart, approve of famine and disease, feel ashamed of pity and compassion, for the good of the race – was wrong pragmatically as well as morally. The right thing to do about poor, hungry and fecund people always was, and still is, to give them hope, opportunity, freedom, education, food and medicine, including of course contraception, for not only will that make them happier, it will enable them to have smaller families.

This is a political age. War, Fascism, concentration camps, rubber truncheons, atomic bombs, etc., are what we daily think about, and therefore to a great extent what we write about, even when we do not name them openly. We cannot help this. When you are on a sinking ship, your thoughts will be about sinking ships. But not only is our subject-matter narrowed, but our whole attitude towards literature is coloured by loyalties which we at least intermittently realise to be non-literary. I often have the feeling that even at the best of times literary criticism is fraudulent, since in the absence of any accepted standards whatever—any external reference which can give meaning to the statement that such and such a book is “good” or “bad”—every literary judgement consists in trumping up a set of rules to justify an instinctive preference. One’s real reaction to a book, when one has a reaction at all, is usually “I like this book” or “I don’t like it,” and what follows is a rationalisation. But “I like this book” is not, I think, a non-literary reaction; the non-literary reaction is “This book is on my side, and therefore I must discover merits in it.” Of course, when one praises a book for political reasons one may be emotionally sincere, in the sense that one does feel strong approval of it, but also it often happens that party solidarity demands a plain lie. Anyone used to reviewing books for political periodicals is well aware of this. In general, if you are writing for a paper that you are in agreement with, you sin by commission, and if for a paper of the opposite stamp, by omission.

It is the link between satisfaction and redress--the idea that a satisfaction scene, whatever else it is, is a revenge tragedy--that I want to pursue; and the sense that we waylay our desire--make it literally unreal--with pictures of its satisfaction. Pornography, for example, can easily be used, among many other things, to pre-empt the elaboration of erotic fantasy; it can be, in Masud Kahn's words, 'the stealer of dreams'. To put it in old-fashioned Freudian language, fantasies of satisfaction are defences against desiring, the attempt in fantasy to take the risk out of desire; or to put it in more Kleinian language, fantasies of satisfaction are attacks upon desire; they are, in fact, against desiring, both up against it and in opposition to it. Our fantasies of satisfaction are clues to our fears about desiring. Wishful fantasies are the original sins of omission.

Then the Yogi suddenly fell silent, and when I looked puzzled he shrugged and said: ‘Don’t you see yourself where the fault lies?’ But I could not see it. At this point he recapitulated with astonishing exactness everything he had learned from me by his questioning. He went back to the first signs of fatigue, repugnance, and intellectual constipation, and showed me that this could have happened only to someone who had submerged himself disproportionately in his studies and that it was high time for me to recover my self-control, and to regain my energy with outside help. Since I had taken the liberty of discontinuing my regular meditation exercises, he pointed out, I should at least have realized what was wrong as soon as the first evil consequences appeared, and should have resumed meditation. He was perfectly right. I had omitted meditating for quite a while on the grounds that I had no time, was too distracted or out of spirits, or too busy and excited with my studies. Moreover, as time went on I had completely lost all awareness of my continuous sin of omission. Even now, when I was desperate and had almost run aground, it had taken an outsider to remind me of it. As a matter of fact, I was to have the greatest difficulty snapping out of this state of neglect. I had to return to the training routines and beginners’ exercises in meditation in order gradually to relearn the art of composing myself and sinking into contemplation.” With a small sigh the Magister ceased pacing the room. “That is what happened to me, and to this day I am still a little ashamed to talk about it. But the fact is, Joseph, that the more we demand of ourselves, or the more our task at any given time demands of us, the more dependant we are on meditation as a wellspring of energy, as the ever-renewing concord of mind and soul. And – I could if I wished give you quite a few more examples of this – the more intensively a task requires our energies, arousing and exalting us at one time, tiring and depressing us at another, the more easily we may come to neglect this wellspring, just as when we are carried away by some intellectual work we easily forget to attend to the body. The really great men in the history of the world have all either known how to meditate or have unconsciously found their way to the place to which meditation leads us. Even the most vigorous and gifted among the others all failed and were defeated in the end because their task or their ambitious dream seized hold of them, made them into persons so possessed that they lost the capacity for liberating themselves from present things, and attaining perspective. Well, you know all this; it’s taught during the first exercises, of course. But it is inexorably true. How inexorably true it is, one realizes only after having gone astray.

There can be no fear of this infinite, universal God. When you study scripture and see how the Hebrews lived their lives in fear of God’s punishment, and then turn to the New Testament and realize that the Master gave as one of his reasons for being on earth, the forgiveness of sin and sinners, you know there is no reason under the sun for continuing to fear punishment for your sins of omission or commission. As a matter of fact, even if some of those sins should be continuing into our present experience, even if we have not reached the spiritual elevation in which all sin has departed from us–and who has?–even then we are to know we are not under the law of punishment but under the law of grace, under forgiveness, under God’s grace, which not only wipes out the penalty for sin but wipes out the capacity for sin. Sometimes sin lingers on even after the penalty has been wiped out, but it isn’t any different from the chicken that runs around after its head is cut off. It’s just fooling us for a little while; it’s dead but it doesn’t know it. So, too, our past is dead, even if some sins are temporarily being continued in the present. Why is our past dead? Because we acknowledge there are not two powers operating. There is only one.

The fact that these statements are true doesn't mean they aren't also rationalizations that you and others use to justify questionable behavior. This uncomfortable truth is crucial to an understanding of the link between rationalization and evil--an understanding that starts with the awareness that sane people rarely, if ever, act in a truly evil manner unless they can successfully rationalize their actions. Hollywood films notwithstanding, villains who proudly embrace evil are virtually nonexistent in real life. The problem is that people are extraordinarily adept at rationalizing. This applies not only to personal misdeeds, but also to the greater sins of omission and commission associated with genocide, slavery, apartheid, war atrocities, and the denial of basic human rights and human dignity. A further problem is that in contrast to the kind of dissonance reduction shown [in studies], the process of rationalizing evil deeds committed by whole societies is a collective effort rather than a solely individual enterprise. Perpetrators are encouraged to rationalize their deeds by leaders and their propaganda machines, who insist that "'they' deserve what is being done to them," or that what is being done serves some noble end or necessary goal.

It so happens, said a moralistic pedant and pettifogger, that I respect and honour a selfless man, not because he is selfless but because he seems to me to have a right to be of use to another man at his own expense. All right, but it's always a question of who he is and who the other is. For example, in a man who is marked out and made to command, self-denial and modest holding back would not be a virtue but a waste of virtue: that's what it seems like to me. Every unegoistic morality which takes itself unconditionally and applies itself to everyone not only sins against taste; it also provokes sins of omission, one more seduction under the guise of philanthropy - and, in particular, a seduction for and injury to the higher, rarer, and privileged people. We must compel moralities first and foremost to give way before the order of rank. We must force into the conscience of moralities an awareness of their own presumption - until they finally are collectively clear about the fact that it is immoral to say "What's right for one man is fair to another." As for my moralistic pedant and fine fellow: does he deserve it when people laugh at him as he advises moralities in this way to become moral? But people should not be too much in the right if they want those who laugh on their side. A small grain of wrong is even a part of good taste.

another said, with more propriety, that the first blessing was assigned to those who had not followed wicked sentiments which revolt from God; the second to those who do not remain in the wide and broad road, whether they be those who have been brought up in the law, or Gentiles who have repented. And "the chair of pestilences" will be the theatres and tribunals, or rather the compliance with wicked and deadly powers, and complicity with their deeds. "' But his delight is in the law of the Lord."^ Peter in his Preaching called the Lord, Law and Logos. The legislator seems to teach differently the interpretation of the three forms of sin—understanding by the mute fishes sins of word, for there are times in which silence is better than speech^ for silence has a safe recompense; sins of deed, by the rapacious and carnivorous birds. The sow delights in dirt and dunc^; and we ouo;ht not to have " a conscience " that is " defiled." ^ Justly, therefore, the prophet says, " The ungodly are not so : but as the chaff which the wind driveth away from the face of the earth. Wherefore the ungodly shall not stand in the judgment " ^ (being already condemned, for '• he that believeth not is condemned already"''), "nor sinners in the 1 Ps. i. 1 (quoted from Barnabas, with some additions and omissions). 2 Ps. i. 2. 3 1 Cor. viii. 7. * Ps. i. 4, 5. ^ j^i^^ jij^ g^ counsel of the righteous," inasmuch as they are ah-eacly condemned, so as not to be united to those that have hved without stumbhng. " For the Lord knoweth the way of the righteous ; and the way of the ungodly shall perish." ^

Not about the perversities of others, not about their sins of commission or omission, but about his own misdeeds and negligences alone should a sage be worried.

When a mass shooting of children at a school occurs, we will claim that this horrible action is the result of just one crazed gunman rather than consider the possibility of a socialstructure problem at work. Some will argue that it does no good to consider social action when clearly this action can be blamed in its totality on just one individual. But we do not consider that doing nothing to prevent future tragedies in the face of a national tragedy demonstrates the sin of omission.

If I wanted, I could come up with reasons to be angry with everyone I know; there are sins of commission or omission I could hang on every last person in my life… The truth is, I will never run out of people to indict. We are all guilty of so many failures to love well that if I wanted--and sometimes I do want--I could find some fault or transgression in everyone I know that I could then use to justify writing them off. I could blaze that trail to hell if I wanted to, and just the thought of it scares me off

Get the army in. Curfews. Crackdowns. Go and sin no more.

Kind of late to help him now. I missed my chance. Sins of omission, they will call it where I’m headed for.

There is another fundamental problem, too, with the life-lie, particularly when it is based on avoidance. A sin of commission occurs when you do something you know to be wrong. A sin of omission occurs when you let something bad happen when you could do something to stop it. The former is regarded, classically, as more serious than the latter—than avoidance. I’m not so sure.

We all guard against sins of commission and we are vigilant toward sins of omission. But achievements—even in small doses—can make us vulnerable to sins of addition: adding niceties and luxuries to our list of basic needs, adding imaginations onto the strong back of vision, adding self-satisfaction to the purity of peace.

am recalling with especial clarity an enraptured disquisition he delivered to us one fine May morning on the sin of looking. Yes, looking. We had been instructed in the various categories of sin, those of commission and omission, the mortal and the venial, the seven deadly, and the terrible ones that it was said only a bishop could absolve, but here it seemed was a new category: the passive sin. Did we imagine, Fr. Foamfleck scoffingly enquired, pacing impetuously from door to window, from window to door, his cassock swishing and a star of light gleaming on his narrow, balding brow like a reflection of the divine effluvium itself, did we imagine that sin must always involve the performance of an action? Looking with lust or envy or hate is lusting, envying, hating; the wish unfollowed by the deed leaves an equal stain upon the soul.

Don’t ever underestimate the destructive power of sins of omission

My heart smites me still for being unlike Epaphras, who “laboured fervently in prayers”.’ ‘One terrible failure confronted me everywhere, viz.: “Ye have asked nothing in my name.” “[w]ant of prayer in right measure and manner;” “Had some almost overwhelming sense of sins of omission in the days past. If I had only prayed more;” “Oh, that I had prayed a hundred-fold more.

We fixate on sins of commission: Don’t do this, don’t do that—and you’re OK. But that is holiness by subtraction. And it’s more hypocrisy than holiness! It’s the sins of omission—what you would have, could have, and should have done — that break the heart of your heavenly Father.

guilt/guilty   The liability to be punished for a fault, a sin, an act, or an omission unless there is forgiveness or atonement; the term normally concerns an objective fact, not a subjective feeling.

But could the good things be fairly weighed against the lies? Or more accurately, against sins of omission?

Although

is, in the words of The Westminster Shorter Catechism, “any want of conformity unto, or transgression of, the law of God” (Q. 14).6 Sin is mutiny, either by its omission (“want of conformity to”) or its commission (“transgression of the law of God”).

Lord gave His church some final instructions. In fact, the very last words He spoke on earth have been commonly known as “the Great Commission.”1 This unchanging command is to “make disciples of all ethnic groups of the world” (Matt. 28:19-20). All four Gospels, along with the book of Acts, repeat the disciple-making mission entrusted to the church.2 In fact, from a hermeneutical perspective, one must interpret the entire New Testament in light of the Great Commission and the redemptive work of Jesus. The salvific mission of Jesus remains the same and has been handed down to every believer. The follower of Christ must obediently pick up the baton and carry on the mission of Jesus. On the other hand, the Great Commission has fallen on hard times and in reality has been re-defined as “the Great Omission.”3 Perhaps one’s conscience has been soothed by the fine art of “making church members” or helping the poor. Nevertheless, the haunting words of the Great Commission continue to echo from the pages of Scripture, “make disciples of all nations” not just casual followers. Far too often, Christians are content with leading people to say a prayer or sign a card in order to ease their guilty hearts. The bar of discipleship has been lowered, and leadership has accepted the fact that most church members will never be involved in the disciple-making mission of Jesus. In fact, low expectations have become the norm in everyday Christianity. The content of preaching continues to be “dumbed down,” and the ever-widening gap between the professional clergy and the common layman continues to expand. As long as the offerings exceed the budget, leadership will accept the status quo. Nevertheless, the church remains oblivious to the mission of Jesus. Perhaps missiologist Ed Stetzer has correctly surmised the situation: The greatest travesty in the contemporary church is we pile hundreds of Christians into our churches and stack them in on padded pews very similar to products stacked on shelves in the grocery store and we let them come and go and do absolutely nothing and we let them think they’re okay. The greatest sin in most churches is that we have made it okay to do nothing and call ourselves a follower of Jesus.4

Sins of omission should be regarded as far more serious than sins of commission,

Christians have seldom been less appealing than when acting in the name of “Christendom.” But when the faithful have ignored political power, they have sometimes again brought discredit on their ideals. Sins of omission can be as deadly as sins of commission. So the exercise of politics requires walking a tightrope. It is both a temptation and a responsibility; it can act like an addictive drug or a healing medicine.

At least in his mind, there wasn’t a difference between a sin of omission versus one of commission. The result was the same. But she didn’t have a better answer.

without easy credit creation a true bubble cannot occur. That is why so many bubbles have their origins in the sins of omission or commission of central banks.

Peace" was the subject of the angel’s carol in the night of the Lord’s nativity; so "Peace" is the first word He pronounced in the ears of His disciples now that He is risen from the dead. So will it be when we meet Him face to face—we, with all our miserable failures, both individual and corporate; we with all our sins of omission and commission; we, with all our bitter controversies, and deplorable divisions. Not "Shame! shame!" but "Peace! peace!

The greatest inhumanity that can be ascribed to men is having an opportunity for doing good to others and doing nothing. The serious sin is not always one of commission, but omission.

Sins of ignorance or infirmity are to be admonished in a different way than intentional sins of malice of intention. The assurance of forgiveness is not to be offered carelessly by those whose conscience is seared, but to penitents who come contritely to the table of the Lord.

Every man makes many mistakes during his lifetime, but there's always one, a single decision, a sin of omission or commission, which towers above all others. An error, a diamond sparkling in the debris, that one can point at and know for eternity to be the fulcrum about which the remainder of one's life turned before spinning off to destruction.

Omissions are sins, and must come into judgment, and particularly the contempt and neglect of the seals of the covenant;

One of the most frequent sins of omission is the failure to get adequate rest.

It partook,’ said Kate, ‘of the nature of a full-scale cursing against one Crawford of Lymond, but whether for sins of omission or commission is not entirely clear.

A sin of omission, not commission.

...SQL is very far from being the “perfect” relational language—it suffers from numerous sins of both omission and commission. ...the overriding issue is simply that SQL fails in all too many ways to support the relational model properly. As a consequence, it is not at all clear that today's SQL products really deserve to be called “relational” at all! Indeed, as far as this writer is aware, there is no product on the market today that supports the relational model in its entirety. This is not to say that some parts of the model are unimportant; on the contrary, every detail of the model is important, and important, moreover, for genuinely practical reasons. Indeed, the point cannot be stressed too strongly that the purpose of relational theory is not just “theory for its own sake”; rather, the purpose is to provide a base on which to build systems that are 100 percent practical. But the sad fact is that the vendors have not yet really stepped up to the challenge of implementing the theory in its entirety. As a consequence, the “relational” products of today regrettably all fail, in one way or another, to deliver on the full promise of relational technology.

If you preach a gospel that has only to do with the forgiveness of sins, on the other hand, you will be as we are today: stuck in a position where you have faith over here and obedience and abundance over there, and no way to get from here to there because the necessary bridge is discipleship. If there is anything we should know by now, it is that a gospel of justification alone does not generate disciples. Discipleship is a life of learning from Jesus Christ how to live in the Kingdom of God now, as he himself did. If you want to be a person of grace, then, live a holy life of discipleship, because the only way you can do that is on a steady diet of grace. Works of the Kingdom live from grace.

People talk about the sins of omission. What does that mean? Who decides if something is a sin? I know that I’m being semantic, but judging by the way people moralise and jump to conclusions, anyone would think that the truth is real and solid; that it’s something that can be picked up and passed around, weighed and measured, before being agreed upon. But the truth isn’t like that. If I were to tell you this story tomorrow, it would be different than today. I would have filtered the details through my defences and rationalised my actions. Truth is a matter of semantics, whether we like it or not.

The person who is practising frequent Confession must be specially watchful about neglected duties (even if, often, they are only little things), about neglected inspirations and graces, about opportunities to do good left unused, about time wasted, about failure to show charity to the neighbour. He must excite himself to a deep and sincere contrition for these omissions and to a firm resolve to strive earnestly against even the smallest sins of omission that are in any way deliberate.

To live without self-respect is to lie awake some night, beyond the reach of warm milk, the Phenobarbital, and the sleeping hand on the coverlet, counting up the sins of commissions and omission, the trusts betrayed, the promises subtly broken, the gifts irrevocably wasted through sloth or cowardice, or carelessness. However long we postpone it, we eventually lie down alone in that notoriously uncomfortable bed, the one we make ourselves. Whether or not we sleep in it depends, of course, on whether or not we respect ourselves.

First error: Freud failed to notice that sins of omission contributed to mental illness as much as, or more than, the sins of commission, listed above, that constitute repression. In doing so, he merely thought in the typical manner. People generally believe that actively doing something bad (that is the sin of commission) is, on average, worse than passively not doing something good (that is the sin of omission).

To live without self-respect is to lie awake some night, beyond the reach of warm milk, phenobarbital, and the sleeping hand on the coverlet, counting up the sins of commission and omission, the trusts betrayed, the promises subtly broken, the gift irrevocably wasted through sloth or cowardice or carelessness.

The word "Gospel," of course, means the glad tidings of salvation, through the finished work of Jesus Christ, to all the world and all the ages, in so far as the men who hear it are willing to meet the simple conditions. It is, indeed, "glad tidings." It tells rebellious men that God is reconciled, that justice is satisfied, that sin has been atoned for, that the judgment of the guilty may be revoked, the condemnation of the sinner cancelled, the curse of the law blotted out, the gates of hell closed, the portals of heaven opened wide, the power of sin subdued, the guilty conscience healed, the broken heart comforted, the sorrow and misery of the Fall undone, the very King of Terrors himself destroyed, and all the evils and miseries of ruined humanity completely overcome, and transformed into blessings more glorious and lasting than Adam ever lost, Or unfallen man could ever have enjoyed. And the condition of all this blessing is stated in the simplest terms. There is no restriction in the terms, for the message is addressed to every creature, and the only condition is, "He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved, but he that believeth not shall be damned." It is evident, therefore, that the rite of baptism is not a condition - its omission will not bring condemnation, though its acceptance is commanded wherever it is possible. The one essential condition, therefore, is simply believing; that is, believing the "glad tidings.

#6 Keep a healthy blend of upstream and downstream practices The best teachers of the Way I know all utilize the practices almost like a doctor would deploy a medicine or therapy. As a general rule, if you’re struggling with a sin of commission (a behavior you do that you want to stop doing), you will need practices of abstinence. So, to overcome a porn addiction or gossip or compulsive shopping, emphasize fasting or silence or simplicity (respectively). To overcome a sin of omission (a behavior you don’t do that you want to start doing), you will need practices

People are quick to point out action that ends badly. But we rarely recognize the sin of omission.

Ah, yes, passion, that great "equalizer" - the passion to manage an entire household staff, the passion to have been born with the right bracelet. It might seem small, this lie by omission, but its roots worm and wend all the way down to America's original sin, our fundamental delusion: the bootstrap ethos, the notion that the comfortable deserve their place, that capitalism is an opportunity for the exploited to prove themselves, that success is a proportional reflection of hard work, that the rich are rich because they are good and smart. This deliberate spackling over of structural inequality - the death of luck - is the only thing that gives Donald Trump any authority.

Much of the recorded history of slavery, segregation, and racism gives scant treatment to the integral, active role that white Christian leaders, institutions, and laypeople played in constructing, maintaining, and protecting white supremacy in their communities. Writing in the midst of these upheavals, even historians critical of racism and segregation often depicted white Christians as being merely complacent. They were guilty of committing sins of omission by ignoring the post-Civil War turmoil of Reconstruction, Redemption, Jim Crow and the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and beyond. Even those who went further accused white churches only of complicity, of being unwitting captives of the prevailing segregationist culture. Both treatments are essentially protectionist, depicting the struggle over Black equality as external to churches and Christian theology. More recent scholarship, however, has begun to document the ways in which white churches, religious leaders, and members aggressively defended segregation and "worked with the same enthusiasm for white supremacy inside the sanctuary as out.

We are already acquainted with the phenomena of the growing sensitiveness of conscience. We know how we come to see sin, where we saw none before, and what a feeling of insecurity about the past that new vision has often given us. Yet death is a sudden stride into the light. Even in our General Confessions, the past was discernible in a kind of soft twilight; now it will be dragged out into unsheltered splendour. The dawn of the judgment, mere dawn though it will be, is brighter than any terrestrial noon; and it is a light which magnifies more than any human microscope. There lie fifty crowded years, or more. O, such an interminable-seeming waste of life, with actions piled on actions, and all swarming with minutest incredible life, and an element of eternity in every nameless moving point of that teeming wilderness! How colossal will appear the sins we know of, so gigantic now that we hardly know them again! How big our little sins! How full of malice our faults that seemed but half-sins, if they were sins at all. Then again, the forgotten sins, who can count them? Who believed they were half so many or half so serious? The unsuspected sins, and the sinfulness of our many ignorances, and the deliberateness of our indeliberations, and the rebellions of our self-will, and the culpable recklessness of our precipitations, and the locust-swarms of our thought-peopled solitudes, and the incessant persevering cataracts of our poisoned tongues, and the inconceivable arithmetic of our multiplied omissions—and a great solid neglected grace lying by the side of each one of these things—and each one of them as distinct, and quiet, and quietly compassed, and separately contemplated, and overpoweringly light-girdled, in the mind of God, as if each were the grand sole truth of His self-sufficing unity! Who will dare to think that such a past will not be a terrific pain, a light from which there is no terrified escape? Or who will dare to say that his past will not look such to him, when he lies down to die? Surely it would be death itself to our entrapped and amazed souls, if we did not see the waters of the great flood rising far off, and sweeping onward with noiseless, but resistless, inundation, the billows of that Red Sea of our salvation, which takes away the sins of the world, and under which all those Egyptians of our own creation, those masters whom we ourselves appointed over us, with their living hosts, their men, their horses, their chariots, and their incalculable baggage, will look in the morning- light of eternity, but a valley of sunlit waters.

He is beautiful; it would be a sin of omission to withhold it. His black hair is very shiny—strangers are sometimes irritated that I won’t tell them what they presume to be my secret about what I feed him to get his coat so lustrous, but I’m sorry, it is proprietary information. (The secret is that he’s constructed entirely from eyelash wishes.)

The Roman Catholic Church has historically taught that, as an element of penance and evidence of true repentance, the Christian must confess all his sins without reserve, in all their details and qualifying circumstances, to a priest having jurisdiction; and that if any mortal sin is unconfessed it is not forgiven; and if the omission is willful, it is sacrilege, and greater guilt is incurred. (Cat. Rom., part 2., ch. 5., qs. 33, 34, 42.) And they maintain that the priest absolves judicially, not merely declaratively, from all the penal consequences of the sins confessed, by the authority of Jesus Christ. This is an obvious perversion of the Scriptural command to confess. They bid us simply to confess our faults one to another. There is not a word said about confession to a priest in the Bible. The believer, on the contrary, has immediate access to Christ, and to God through Christ (1 Tim. 2:5; John 14:6; 5:40; Matt. 11:28), and is commanded to confess his sins immediately to God. (1 John 1:9.) No priestly function is ever ascribed to the Christian ministry in the New Testament. The power of absolute forgiveness of sin belongs to God alone (Matt. 9:26), is incommunicable in its very nature, and has never been granted to any class of men as a matter of fact. The authority to bind or loose which Christ committed to his Church was understood by the apostles, as is evident from their practice, as simply conveying the power of declaring the conditions on which God pardons sin;

You will consume much more grace by leading a holy life than you will by sinning, because every holy act you do will have to be upheld by the grace of God.

There was a big fat omission between being alone and being lonely.

IF WE ARE CHRISTIANS simply by believing that Jesus died for our sins, then that is all it takes to have sins forgiven and go to heaven when we die. Why, then, do some people keep insisting that something more than this is desirable? Lordship, discipleship, spiritual formation, and the like?

for a fault, a sin, an act, or an omission unless there is forgiveness or atonement; the term normally concerns an objective fact, not a subjective feeling.

So the argument of some is that the story of Jesus and the wicked servant is how the man asked for forgiveness and was denied. While this is true, it isn’t the point of the parable. The point of the parable is that we stand upon grace and God requires us to love others with the love He has given to us. No exceptions are given. He didn’t say the onus is on our brother to ask. The onus is on us to forgive from our heart – not based on our brother’s worthiness, but based on God’s abundant mercies shown to us. God is not required to honor any loophole we think we can find in His word. The issue is we must forgive from the heart, not out of obligation once a set of rules has satisfied us. The servant held his neighbor to a higher standard than God held him to. So if someone wants to hold their neighbor accountable for unconfessed wrongs, fine. They should be aware that they are placing themselves under the same standard of law. Under that standard, they must go through every minute of their lives and identify every sin they have ever committed. They must then confess them to God and find the person wronged or they thought evil toward, and confess to them. This isn’t only actions, but thoughts, sins of omissions, words, and even wicked emotions such as lust, jealousy, covetousness, envy, hatred, and unjustified anger. To demand this method of religion is utterly foolish. A person under this system will never have joy, never have peace, never have unity, and will never experience intimacy with God. God forgives, shows mercy, and pours out His grace through the Spirit. But that can’t be experienced by the one who lives according to the law. That person is still in the flesh and not in the Spirit.