Sin may still be active in our lives, but we must consider it dead, or at least dying. We need to consciously stand against it considering ourselves to be, first and foremost, who we are “positionally” in Christ.
The redeemed child of God is still capable of wrongdoing. If this weren’t true the Bible would not tell us of our need to confess our sins to one another. In fact there are many New Testament verses that are quite clear about the fact that fully initiated Christians do continue to transgress against God. Through the centuries some teachers have dealt with this dichotomy by declaring that we remain only “sinners saved by grace”, the implication being that our central nature continues to be somehow sinful in its essence despite our receiving that saving grace.
As Luther purportedly said, the believer is somehow simultaneously 100% saint and 100% sinner and will be until death frees him of his enduring sin nature.
The problem with this kind of theology is that it ignores the fact that Christians are called “new creatures”. While the Scripture testifies to our continuing ability to choose to do wrong, it also testifies in several places that we now possess the nature of Christ Himself, and Jesus was and is sinless. If we believe this than we cannot believe that our deepest nature continues to be a slave to evil.
Now we somehow still have a dying old nature, it is true. The Bible tells us that we must contend with something called the “flesh”, an element of our previous selves that does remain, but remains only to be progressively “crucified” and overcome. Apparently as long as we dwell on Earth we have at least the ability to choose to sin even though we are no longer slaves to sin, and this is the crucial distinction. When we were dominated by our flesh, with a spiritual nature that remained untouched by the redeeming work of Christ, we were dead to God and alive to sin. Once we availed ourselves of the redemption offered through the shed blood of Christ we became the opposite, dead to sin and alive to God. Positionally we became seated in the heavenlies with Him and since God sees us there as sinless, through saving faith in His Son, we are sinless indeed in the eternal sense.
Temporally though, in this life, we have to overcome our remaining sinful tendencies through the work of sanctification, a work that, like salvation, also finds its efficacy in the received power of our Lord. Our task is to so focus on Him that the remaining power of temptation is progressively rooted out of our being. This is a lifelong task and one that likely will not be completely finished until we stand before our Savior in Glory. In the meantime we must continue to rely on His grace to fill in the gap between whom we are today and who we will be in eternity.
An accurate reading of the Bible, in context, will show that we are no longer “sinners” in the sense that sin is our only identity. We are still capable of falling, but we are no longer defined by the wickedness that we strive to avoid. We are now children of God, and thus children of light. The darkness is being put to flight within us because it is no longer a permanent part of our essential nature.
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