Article
Q: "If you sin but don't know you are, is it still sinning?"
A: Yes. Next Question
OK, OK, just kidding. I just had to do that. Well, the answer to this is a bit confusing, but I will try and make it relatively short:
First of all, if I was driving at 40 miles an hour and a cop stopped me, started to give me a ticket, and said, "Do you realize that you were driving in a school zone, and that means that the speed limit here is 20 miles an hour?"
If I said, "No, I didn't see the sign," do you think that the officer would stop writing me the ticket? No way! The police have a pesky little saying about that. It goes, "Ignorance of the law is no excuse for breaking it." I would get a fat ticket.
The reason is that if I were driving at 40 miles an hour and I hit a little girl going to school (eww...kinda morbid, but don't worry, she'll be ok...plus this is just an example) I would be breaking the whole point of having that 20 mile per hour speed limit. Whether or not I saw the sign, the little girl would still have that big bruise on her knee (see, I told ya' she's fine).
Well, the same thing is true about sin...well...kinda. See, we don't have the luxury of saying "I didn't see the sign" for two reasons. First, we have a handy-dandy book that tells us what God's expectations are for our lives. It is also the penal code book of sin. The Bible pretty much spells it out. Second, God has put His Law on our hearts (Rom 2:15). That bad feeling you get when you do something you know you aren't supposed to do...that's your conscience. It tells you when you've done something against God.
So we have no "I didn't see the sign" excuse. Some people have kind of calloused over their conscience. Like the chunk of skin on the bottoms of your feet, it keeps them from feeling much of anything when they sin. That isn't good. Don't become like that. It keeps you from feeling good things too, and no one is ever proud that their conscience has become that way once it has happened.