The Sin That Still Lives In You

I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. (Romans 7:15)

If you are anything like me, you know the feeling, even if you have never put words to it. You swore you were done with it and meant the promise when you made it. And then, sooner than you thought, you were back in the same sin, and you got up afterward with a question that has no easy floor under it to stand on. Why, for Pete’s sake, did I do that again? I did not even want to. Or did I?

Paul, the apostle, knew that question by heart and the Holy Spirit inspired him to put it down for us all.

I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. (Romans 7:15)

Read that and feel the relief and the terror of it together. The relief, because inspired by the Holy Spirit, the Apostle in the New Testament wrote those words, which means the war you are fighting is not the mark of a false Christian but the experience of a true one. And the terror, because if Paul fought this, you are not being handed an early discharge either.

Here is what Scripture will not let us pretend. When God saved you, He broke sin’s reign, but He did not, in that same moment, remove sin’s residence. It no longer sits on the throne, but, my friend, it very much still lives in the proverbial house. There is a difference, and your whole peace depends on seeing it. The unbeliever sins and is at home in it. The believer sins and cannot get comfortable because something in him now hates the very thing he did. That hatred is not your condemnation. It is the surest sign that grace has moved in, because a dead man does not grieve over being dead. He doesn’t grieve over anything. He’s dead for Pete’s sake. [Who is this ‘Pete’ anyway?]

As Andrew Lytle, the old Agrarian author who championed the South and all things Southern, was apt to say, there are two ditches that run alongside this road, and most of us have rolled into one or the other. On the one side is despair. The man falls, sees the sin still in him, and concludes he was never saved at all, that the whole thing was a lie, and he lies down in the ditch and gives up the fight. On the other side is presumption. The man falls, shrugs, tells himself that all are sinners and grace abounds, and he makes a quiet peace with the very sin he was charged to kill. The truth about indwelling sin pulls you out of both ditches. You are not lost, so do not despair. But sin is still in you and still deadly, so do not for one moment make peace with it.

And there is a cure, though it is not the gentle one we would like. We want sin managed, kept to a tolerable level, trimmed back like your neighbor’s best hedge. God commands something a little more fierce. If by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live. (Romans 8:13) Put to death. Wow. Not negotiate with, not relocate to a back room, but kill it, show it the black flag. No quarter. And mark how it is done, by the Spirit, not by gritted teeth and white knuckles. The strength to slay the sin in you is not dredged up out of your own resolve, which has already failed you more times than you can count. It is the Spirit’s strength, asked for, leaned on, set to work in the daily, unglamorous business of starving what wants to live and feeding what wants to die. John Owen said it plainly, and no one has improved on it since. Be killing sin, or it will be killing you.

So when you rise tomorrow from a fall you did not want, do not lie down in the ditch and do not make your bed in sin. Cry what Paul cried. Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? And then hear how he answered his own groan, because this war does not end in defeat. Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord. The sin still lives in you. But it will not have the last word, for One stronger than it has already moved into the house, and He does not lose. Kill it, then, in His strength, until the day He finishes the work and there is nothing left in you to die.