Why Do Christians Still Sin?
The Following is the Script for this Video:
“If I’m a Christian, why did I just do, say, or think that? AGAIN!! Am I really saved?” Such questions can prompt us to resort to blame shifting. That really wasn’t me . . .
The devil made me do it.
I was born that way.
It’s the way I was raised.
Excuses like these wrongly diagnose our sin problem. So none of them can point us to God’s remedy. If we really are newly created in Christ, why is sinning still an issue? What’s happening?
The story begins in Genesis. God plants a garden full of all kinds of trees, fruit trees, beautiful to look at and producing great food. Then right among those trees and God places humanity. He makes them in his image so that they can care for his creation. God approves all those fruit trees . . . except one. Yes, it too looks beautiful and produces good food. Yet God put it off limits. Then, living in the middle of all that God has so generously provided, the human beings want something more, something else. And so they cross the line to reach for fruit from that forbidden tree
As they do so, they unleash a new and independent force into the world. In explaining to Cain what he is up against, God names that force: “Sin is crouching at your door it desires to have you but you must rule over it.” Sin, singular, will produce sins, plural. And so begins the long, sad story of sin’s path of destruction ripping through God's very good world. Sin, the invader, wanted to rule God's image-bearing earth rulers. But God's order to Cain is clear: “you must rule over it.” Clearly, Cain failed to do so.
Throughout the Old Testament, this independent sin-force becomes prolific a sin-generator. In the NIV translation, the words, sin, sins, sinful, sinned, and sinning show up 633 times. Wicked and wickedness, 443 times. And idol, idols, and idolatry 183 times. Just think of how this sin-force affected these great ones of the Old Testament.
By eating from the off-limits tree, Adam and Eve unleash the sin-force into the world. Noah gets drunk and lays uncovered in his tent. Abraham twice deceives rulers by making them think Sarah is not his wife. Moses murders an Egyptian and hides his body in the sand. David commits adultery with Bathsheba and arranges for the death of her husband. Solomon takes foreign wives who lead him into idol-worship. In each case, sin punches them hard—and they fall like dominoes. The sin-force hits the rest of us just as hard. As Isaiah puts it, “We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to our own way.”
To understand why we still sin—even after becoming Christians—we need to take a close look at how this independent force of sin works on human beings.
First, consider what we’ll call “natural persons,” those who have not yet opened their hearts to Jesus. Let this outline represent the body of such a person. The mortal body, says Paul in Romans 6:12 contains “evil desires.” The dots stand for such desires. The body—and even the heart—is full of wrongful urges. Just as iron filings respond to magnets, the bodily desires respond to sin. We’ll represent sin with this magnet. Romans 7:20 speaks of “sin living in me.” It exerts its powerful influence to pull those desires into line with itself. Romans 7:14 describes this magnetic grip like this: “I am unspiritual, sold as a slave to sin.” As a result, even though the natural person may know better, those dots are, so to speak, enslaved to the pulling-power of sin. And so various parts of the person—mind, mouth, hands, and so on—follow the dots in obedience to that magnetic attraction.
Now let’s look at reborn persons. Jesus has given them new hearts. As Acts 15:9 says, “he [God] purified their hearts by faith.” God now has a kingdom outpost, territory that responds to him, inside the human body. Reborn persons are now able to answer his pull, to obey his rule. However, they still live in the same bodies they had before receiving Jesus. They are still awaiting the redemption of their bodies. Their bodies are still dotted with those evil desires.
Although sin has been displaced, it continues to pull hard at those particles. This calls to mind God’s words to Cain, this time in The Message translation: “Sin is lying in wait for you, ready to pounce; it’s out to get you, you’ve got to master it.”
But now for the good news. The law of the Spirit has set reborn persons free from the law of sin and death. They can count on the fact that in Christ they have died to sin. This equips them to stand against the power of the sin magnet. It’s possible for them to resist and to follow Jesus instead.
So we reborn persons now have a choice. We are truly free. It is possible to wholeheartedly follow Jesus from the Spirit-filled new heart. But it’s also possible to be double-minded—to follow Jesus part of the time and to let the sin magnet pull us away at other times. Like Adam and Eve, do we still want something more? Something else? We must choose.
Romans 6:13 explains our choices in terms of an offering. “Do not offer any part of yourself to sin as an instrument of wickedness . . . but rather offer yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life; and offer every part of yourself to him as an instrument of righteousness.” Yes, Christians can still sin. Do we have to? No!
God warned Cain, “Sin is lying in wait for you, ready to pounce; it’s out to get you.” And then this cryptic command: “You’ve got to master it.” And, thank God, in Christ reborn persons can actually carry that out. The promise is clear: “Sin shall no longer be you master, because you are not under law but under grace.” God’s grace breaks the shackles of sin and puts us in charge. In Christ, it is possible —as God told Cain—to “master” sin.
Mastering sin takes counting on our co-death with Christ. Because we died with him, we are able to: “Put to death, therefore, whatever belongs to your earthly nature: sexual immorality . . . impurity . . . lust . . . evil desires . . . and greed.” Yes, our fleshly bodies still carry around those urges and drives. But because we died to sin, we can defy its magnetic pull on those desires.
Joshua summed it up in six words: “Choose today whom you will serve.”
