Sin. It sneaks up on you. It really does. Sometimes it pounces upon you suddenly, and sometimes it slithers its way into your heart. Either way, the aftermath is much the same, waking up to the devastating reality of your brokenness as you ask yourself, “Here? How did I end up here again?” In that moment, you hate your sin, you really do. You’re fully disgusted by the extent of your treason and the ruin it has brought you. You hope, even promise yourself that you won’t do it again, that you won’t be here again. But that’s what you said the last time…
Trust me, I know this cycle all to well, and I’ve been here more times than I’d like to count. But now that we are here, what next? Where do we go from here? How do we go on? How do we return to a place that we’ve seen ourselves fall so many times, and somehow hope that we don’t fall into the same sin we always do? I’ve been contemplating this question for well over a year now.
Because my first instinct is to run—to avoid the conditions and circumstances that led to my act of sin. Which is not a bad instinct at all, for the Bible itself advises us to “flee the evil desires of youth” (2 Tim. 2:22). There is prudence in avoiding temptation. But running only gets us so far. If we spend our lives avoiding temptation, we will quickly find that there is no place on earth that is safe, for sin seems to follow us everywhere we go.
During the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus suggests something even more drastic. He says “If your eye causes you to sin, tear it out…And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off” (Matt. 5:29-30). A pastor of a church I used to attend once quipped, “If Christians really took the Bible seriously, why don’t we see more Christians walking around without a hand or an eye?”
If only the battle against sin was as easy as plucking out an eye or slicing off a hand! We’re only deceiving ourselves if we think that these would solve our sin problem. Surely we would find some way to sin without that eye or that hand! Later on in Matthew, Jesus points out the true source of our sin: our hearts. He says, “For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false witness, slander. These are what defile a person” (Matt. 15:19-20a).
But in so many ways, drastic action feels safer. The repentance montage in my mind is of saints of old tearing their clothes and sitting in sackcloth and ashes, of men defenestrating their computers—CRT monitors and all, of women finally dumping that boyfriend who distracts them from their walk with Christ. We think that by cutting ourselves off from the stimulus to sin or the resources to sin, we would indeed sin no more.
But there are a couple of flaws to this approach:
First, it assumes our sins of omission are any less grievous than our sins of commission. We think that a day spent not doing anything bad is a day without sin, when it’s far more than that. If I cut off hand to keep myself from stealing, I am at the same time keeping myself from using that hand to serve another. If I cut out my tongue to obey God’s commandments to not lie or gossip, I end up disobeying His instructions to use my tongue to praise Him or encourage a sister. If I completely avoid my brother so I will never act out of impatience and anger, I sin by choosing distance and apathy, the opposite of the love that Jesus commands us to show one another. Romans 6:13 has two parts: To “not go on presenting the members of your body to sin as instruments of unrighteousness” and also to present “your members to God as instruments for righteousness.” To obey only one is still disobedience.*1
Second, this sort of drastic detachment is a binary, black-and-white approach unsuitable for a world that is much more gray. I think this is particularly true in the areas where we experience what St. Augustine calls “disordered love,” when we make idols out of good things—a job, a spouse, a place, an asset. These are things that we cannot, or perhaps should not, leave.*2 As an extreme example, suppose a husband found that his marriage was becoming a priority over his pursuit of the Lord, surely divorce would not be the correct course of action. Or if a mother found herself elevating the demands of her children over the commands of God, surely the solution would not be leaving them on the side of the road. Every so often God does indeed call us—like Abram or Lot, Elisha or Peter—to leave our country and people and father’s house, to drop our nets, and follow Him. But often like the man in Mark 5, we beg Jesus to let us follow Him to a new place, but His call is to follow Him in the place He finds us, the very place we are. Perhaps this is the harder call—to follow Jesus in a world where nothing much has changed…
…nothing and yet everything. Because what takes place when we follow Jesus, is not a drastic external change, but a far more profound internal change: our hearts.
After all, it’s our hearts that are the root of our problem—our hearts that so quickly turn “good” into “god” and seep sin out of any orifice they can find. Nothing short of a heart transplant can save us. And this is exactly what God administers. In Ezekiel 36:26-27, He says this:
“…I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules.”
The beauty of the gospel is this: Because our hardened hearts are incapable of anything but sin, incapable of loving God as we ought to, God gives us a new heart and a new spirit—His Spirit who empowers us to live a righteous life. But much like a physical heart transplant, our spiritual heart transplant required the death of the giver: Jesus, who took on the full extent of death, so that we might have fullness of life. To free us from the bondage of sin, He himself was bound and led to the cross to die. And when He rose to life again, brought us with Him.
Why? Because He so loved us, even while we were yet sinners and enemies of God.
So in light of this, what does repentance look like? How do we battle the sin that seeks to enslave us and keep us from living in freedom and fellowship with God and others?
Repentance comes when, by the conviction of the Holy Spirit, we see the extent and absolute grievousness of our sin, from which comes an absolute determination to turn away from the things He hates, and yet a sober realization that nothing external will ever be able to cure our lust for them. We often think of repentance in terms of doing or not doing, but in her book Openness Unhindered*3, Rosaria Butterfield writes that “Repentance is not just a conversion exercise. It is the posture of the Christian. . . .” (27). It is a posture of humility and submission, relying on not our own strength to fight for obedience against sin, but God’s. Paul, in Romans 7 describes this struggle so clearly: “For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing…Who will deliver me from this body of death!?”
Jesus. Sweet Jesus.
What we could not accomplish in our weak, weak flesh, God did by sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, so that the righteous requirement of the law would be fulfilled in us who walk not according to the flesh, but according to the Spirit, who dwells in us! (Romans 8:3-4,11, lightly paraphrased and smashed into one run-on sentence).
And as long as we walk this earth, we’ll constantly be tempted to re-form the idols we’ve smashed. And we may one day find that idol sitting right back on the pedestal from which we cast it down. We may wake up one morning to find ourselves in bed with the pet sin that we thought we had killed. We may find our fingers curled tight around things that we thought we had given up long ago.
Then once again we will place into the Savior’s pierced hands, these things, these weights and sins that clings so closely, and He will drown them in the ocean of His grace, so we might run with endurance the race set before us, fixing our eyes on Him alone. For, as Romans 6:14 declares, sin no longer has dominion over us, for we are not under the law but under grace! While I long for the day that we no longer live in the presence of temptation and sin, I can rest in the victory of Christ over the power of sin, in His defeat of my slavery and shame and separation from God. I may lose each battle with sin, but the war is already won at the cross.
“It is finished.” It is finished indeed.
Sidenotes and postscripts:
I really did my best not to copy the entirety of Romans 6-8 into this post. I realized halfway into writing this that the Bible already said pretty much everything I was going to say. But to quote the words of Pontius Pilate completely out of context, “What I have written I have written” (John 19:22).
– KT
*1 A caveat: I am in NO way insinuating that people with disabilities are guilty of sin for not doing things that they physically cannot do. My point is only that the voluntary removal body parts neither cures sin nor brings us any closer to true obedience to Christ.
*2 A second caveat: As always, in speaking about divorce and the Bible’s prohibition thereof, I am not talking about abusive relationships. Leaving is the correct course of action in such a situation because staying endangers the abused and enables the abuser to carry on without facing any consequences.
*3 I HIGHLY recommend this book. Extremely gospel-centered and well-written–by a former English professor!), Rosaria Butterfield makes the case for why the Christian must place his or her identity fully in Christ, living in a posture of repentance and obedience, as she clearly addresses sexuality in a compassionate, yet uncompromising way.
a cup of kimitea 