What does the Bible say about sins of omission?

See also Sin

• Genesis 40:13-14, 23, the chief cupbearer did not remember Joseph, but forgot him"
• Jeremiah 11:8, "They did not obey or incline their ear, but everyone walked in the stubbornness of an evil will."
• Jeremiah 18:15, "but my people have forgotten me..."
• Jeremiah 32:33, they have turned their backs to me
• Ezekiel 12:2, who has eyes to see but does not see?
• Matthew 7:26-27, the foolish man who built his house on the sand
• Matthew 25:41-43, "I was a stranger and you did not welcome me..."
• Luke 10:30-32, the Good Samaritan
• Luke 11:42, the Pharisees neglect justice and the love of God
• Romans 1:21, they knew God but did not honor him
• Hebrews 2:1, pay greater attention to what you have
• James 1:22-25, be doers of the word
• James 4:17, you commit a sin when you know the right thing and fail to do it
• 1 John 3:17-18, let us love in truth and action

Sermon ideas about sins of omission

Evasion of responsibility to God, neighbor, or others takes many forms, including mindless obedience to authority. Somebody orders a soldier to "waste" civilians, or a plant superintendent to fire a whistle-blower, or a secretary to destroy evidence, and they obey. They may not like to do it, but they do it. Later, they defend themselves with the standard rationalization: "I was only following orders." Of course, killing, unjust firing, and destruction of evidence are sins of commission. The omission in the picture is a failure "to obey God rather than any human authority" when divine and human orders clash.

Evasion may include:

• Conformity to peer culture: If everybody at school parties hard all weekend, then I will too. If everybody else mocks a weird kid, then I will too. If everybody else thinks getting rich is their only comfort in life and in death, then I'll think so too.
• Conniving: a failure to oppose wrongdoing and so tacitly consenting to it. Officers of manufacturing companies might reject the addition of a relatively minor safety feature to the vehicle they make, weighing the cost of the addition against paying legal settlements to the victims of crashes preventable by that safety feature. Board members know of this gamble and do nothing.

One way to evade responsibility is to go limp, play dead, to do nothing of consequence and to do it repeatedly. Hence lazy bosses and lazy employees, neither bothering the other. Hence endless rounds of videogames, aimless shopping, pointless exchanges on social media. The person who will not bestir herself, who hands herself over to Nothing, in effect says to God, "You have made nothing of interest and redeemed no one of consequence, including me."

An attitude like this is tantamount to simple neglect of God. In Scripture, God is brokenhearted that Israel is deaf to God's call and blind to God's purposes in the world. Israel often turns her back on God. And so do we all. Bad spiritual momentum is a constant danger. Its features are dreary and familiar. For weeks at a time we go through the motions, never seriously attending to God, never focusing on God, never — with all the weight of heart and mind — turning ourselves over to God. The thought that by such neglect we keep on wounding the only Being who loves us unconditionally, the thought that we are deeply entangled not only in our sin but also in the bloody remedy for it — these thoughts become somehow bearable. At last we put them away and sink into functional godlessness. When we are in that state, God does not seem very real to us. So we do not pray. The less we pray, the less real God seems to us. And the less real God seems to us, the duller our sense of responsibility becomes, and thus the duller our sense of neglecting God