The Mystery of the Gospel, Part 6: Why Do We Still Sin?

This is from the book The Mystery of the Gospel:

Why Do We Still Sin?

"A leading London newspaper once said, 'If Christians have so much joy, why don't they tell their faces about it?'

"The believer's life was meant to be joyous! It was meant to be a glorious daily experience. In the case of Paul and Silas, in jail after a lashing, their inner joy enabled them to sing hymns of praise in the middle of the night.

"Peter said that though those to whom he wrote were in severe trial, yet they 'greatly rejoice with joy inexpressible and full of glory.'

"Glory! Yes, life in Christ was meant to be glorious! Not just in a 'praise' meeting, but in all of the seemingly mundane matters such as washing the dishes or sweeping a factory floor. Our existence was meant to be thrilling, challenging, and creative.

"On the eve of His death, Jesus said that He had glorified His Father on earth, and now He looked forward to that fuller glory by which even His human body would become radiant. He had lived a fulfilling life, a glorious life. And now, speaking of us, He told His Father:

And the glory which you have given Me I have given them; that they may be one, just as We are one. John 17:22

"Though we have awaiting us the same future glory that Christ now has, and though it will far transcend what is possible in the flesh, spiritually we are already in the heavenly places and are meant to experience a measure of glory now. We are called 'from glory to glory'--the justified and glorified people of God (Rom. 8:30).

"So what is 'glory'? Is it just a nice charismatic word, to be repeated over and over again?

"Jesus had no halo, nor did He wear an especially 'holy' expression. Jesus was an ordinary person, but for those whose focus was on the inner life rather than the outer appearance, glory shone through Him. God is glorious, and because we are human expressions of Him, we will gloriously express God through our human vessels.

"Many sincere followers of Jesus know very little about this 'glorified life.' Instead, they feel that they have to renew their relationship with God every morning--that they need to 'top up' with the Spirit every day.

"The way to a glorious life is to live as Jesus lived. And how did He live? He lived in a constant awareness that He was One with His Father. Many Christians are not aware that they, too, are one with God, that they, too, are in union with Him, and that Christ is their life. Therefore, they live frustrated lives, instead of fulfilled lives.

"When Jesus came across a Samaritan woman drawing water at a well, He took the opportunity of using the incident to illustrate a vital facet of new covenant life. He contrasted the water that sustains physical life with the living water of eternal life. He told the woman:

. . . Everyone who drinks of this water shall thirst again; but whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall become in him a well of water springing up to eternal life. John 4:13, 14

"To know and to live in a constant awareness of our union with God--to partake of His life--results in fulfillment. The searching and seeking for reality will substantially come to an end. The dryness is quenched by God Himself as we come to an awareness of the life of Christ within us. There is a continual feast, an inner joy that cannot be touched by external circumstances.

"The prophets of the Old Testament often spoke of this day when people would no longer continually hunger and thirst for spiritual reality. Notice Isaiah's description of the inner life of the Spirit:

The afflicted and the needy are seeking water, but there is none, and their tongue is parched with thirst; I, the Lord, will answer them Myself, as the God of Israel I will not forsake them. I will open rivers on the bare heights, and springs in the midst of the valleys; I will make the wilderness a pool of water, and the dry land fountains of water . . . For I will pour out water on the thirsty land and streams on the dry ground; I will pour out My Spirit on your offspring, and My blessing on your descendents; and they will spring up among the grass like poplars by streams of water. Isaiah 41:17, 18; 44:3, 4

"Is all this too much to hope for? Is this attainable only after death? Is that what Isaiah had in mind--just a future glory? Or didn't he rather mean that in the thirsty, parched places we find ourselves in right now we can know the abundant life?

"The abundant life is indeed the life Jesus came to bring. But this spiritual Eden is not some thing that He gives, but some One; for He gives us Himself. And we can know this abundant life as reality just as soon as we quit looking to Jesus just for the forgiven past and an assured future, while only substituting consecrated self for our present life.

"Paul urged the Colossians not to let anyone spoil their experience of the life of Christ through external 'ought to's,' which at best can only restrain an individual's outward actions but cannot rule his heart and spirit. Since we have died with Christ to the childish elementaries of external commands, we ought to refuse to allow anyone to place us back under such 'self-made religion' which cannot really produce the controlled, law-fulfilling life (see Col. 2:20-23).

"Christ Himself is the reality, and there is nothing to add to His indwelling presence:

For in Him all the fullness of Deity dwells in bodily form, and in Him you have been made complete. . . . Colossians 2:9, 10

"The Jews of Jesus' day couldn't give up the Law of Moses. For over fifteen hundred years it had been 'the way of life' to them. The Law seemed so wonderful, they could conceive of nothing better. Didn't it spell out the path to a full life?

"But Jesus told them that they needed to forget about Moses, for Moses himself had spoken of One to come who would usher in a new way. Restraint of the flesh through external commandments was all well and good, but in the final analysis the end result of that way is still death. Only Spirit is reality:

It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh profits nothing; the words that I have spoken to you are spirit and are life. John 6:63

"There is no greater reality than to know union with Christ. He is total reality for each of our lives:

. . . I am the Bread of life; he who comes to Me shall not hunger, and he who believes in me shall never thirst. John 6:35

"No more hunger, no more thirst. Instead, total sufficiency in all things, so that we can do 'all things' through Christ within us. Yet it is not we doing them as independent selves, but we operating in union with Christ. We are His unique containers, and He has chosen to express Himself to our world through us.

"Because Christ is the 'fullness of Deity,' all fullness dwells in us! No wonder Paul said that we are 'adequate' servants of the new covenant! We have a contentment that leaves nothing to be desired, which enables us to abound in situations of either abundance or want. We are focused on the One who is our life--on spirit-reality--instead of on our external circumstances.

"So Paul said that for every believer, regardless of his physical birth or situation in the material realm, 'Christ is All, and in all' (Col. 3:11). Christ is 'all' in you, and He is 'all' in me! We are indwelt by the 'fullness of Deity'! In the same vein, Paul wrote to the Ephesians: 'the church, which is His body, the fullness of Him who fills all in all.'

"There is nothing more to add. We are complete--fully filled up--in Him who is our total reality. Christ didn't merely give us a part of His life, He came to indwell us and to be our life.

"Just as Adam and Eve got more than they bargained for when they entered into union with Satan--ultimately learning that there is more to reality than can be seen with the physical eyes--so in our union with Christ there is more to life than meets the eye.

"God doesn't intend that we stay the same externally as we were when first born anew internally. He purposes that this new life burst forth in the material dimension.

"But once again, we have to learn that it is all of Him--that just as we could do nothing to save ourselves when lost in sin--so now we can do nothing to bring this inner life into fruition. Growth is a fruit of the Spirit, not of human effort--growth is recognition of who we are in Christ and who He is in us.

"Before we come to the point where we live by faith, we all go the negative route of trying to make this new life 'work.' We have been made new, so we imagine that we ought to be able to live a new life. We proceed to try to do so.

"But before we know it, we fall flat on our faces. So we try again. And still we find we cannot do it. We become discouraged and defeated; condemnation begins to set in. 'Why can't I do it? What's wrong with me?' we exclaim.

"And that's just the problem! We have been trying to do it. Instead of realizing that we are still just containers through whom Christ now expresses Himself even as the god of this world formerly did, we act as if we were the 'I Am' ourselves--as if we were now something.

"But the Scriptures do not say that God has love--or peace, or joy, or patience--to dispense to us. They tell us that 'God is love.' God will not give us love so that we can become independent of Him, dispensing our own love like gods--that is the way of the knowledge of good and evil, whereby mother Eve saw that the fruit of the tree would make her wise, so that she of herself could live like God.

"Instead, God's way is to become one with us through Christ and to express Himself through us as containers of His life. So we become more loving, more joyous, more peaceful, or more patient because He who is these attributes dwells in us, and shines gloriously through us.

"In Romans Seven, Paul tells of his own struggle with trying to make the new life work. But the whole experience is one of 'I' and 'me.' No wonder he concluded that he was a wretched man who needed Christ to deliver him from his web of self-effort. He finally recognized that he was still 'nothing,' and that he was only meant to be a container of God, and not something of himself.

"Growth, then, is to express more of the One who is our life manifesting Himself through us. As we recognize that we are already filled, already complete in Him, and rest in that fact, He will simply be Himself in our unique forms of expression.

"So when Paul urges us to 'be filled with the Spirit,' he does not mean 'get more of the Spirit.' He is simply telling us, as he wrote to the Colossians, that as we have received Christ--in all of His fullness--we should walk in Him. We should let Him be 'all' in us, for that is what He is. In other words, Paul is saying, 'Christian, be yourself. Act your age.' It is much the same as a parent saying to a fifteen-year-old child who is acting like a nine-year-old, 'Act your age.' By telling him to act his age, the parent is not suggesting that he has to add some additional years, but that he should simply walk in recognition of who he already is.

"And this recognition changes everything. As we face life's situations, we will have an inner awareness that we are one with Christ, and so when difficulties and trials come to us, they are coming to Him in His expressed forms. Financial worries, marital problems, ill-health--all of these are a natural part of life, and they come upon us because only in such seemingly negative circumstances can we really learn we are one with Him.

"Our first reaction in any trouble is to feel a sense of separation--that He is 'up there,' and that poor me is 'down here.' We don't immediately see the crisis as coming to 'us'; we see ourselves as separate, instead of recognizing the union. But gradually, as we go through these various difficulties and see Him handling them, we learn to take the faith position of oneness and union more quickly. And so adversities become an adventure, as we watch expectantly to see how He means to glorify Himself through us in these situations.

"The righteousness of Christ in the believer is not based on works, but is 'from faith to faith.' It begins in faith, goes on in faith, and ends in faith. Christ is the author and finisher of our faith: 'The righteousness man shall live by faith.'

"It is only as we meet life's trials that we begin to learn how great is the 'fullness' of God's power to us. We don't know the reality of His fullness at first. But as we believe that we and He are one, we recognize more and more that we really are complete in Him, and so experience a fulfilled life here and now.

"Paul wanted the Ephesians 'to be strengthened with power through His Spirit in the inner man,' and he knew that this would become a practical reality in their lives as they recognized by whom they were indwelt. As the recognition grew, they would 'be filled up to all the fullness of God' in their daily lives.

"When we were born again, we had to take God at His word that we really were saved. At first, we may not have felt saved at all. But we spoke the true word, and we confessed before others that we were saved despite appearances. The word that we spoke by faith against all appearances now became inner evidence to us, and we had the witness in our spirits that we were saved.

"In the same way, this is how the victory life is lived. Perhaps at first the evidence of sight and feelings may scream at us that we have no hope of living the victory life. But we see beyond sin and outer appearances to what God says is true of us--we are the righteousness of Christ.

"But why, if we are the righteousness of Christ, do we still commit sins? In Romans 7:22, 23 Paul explains this paradox:

For I joyfully concur with the law of God in the inner man, but I see a different law in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind, and making me a prisoner of the law of sin which is in my members.

"Though we are one in spirit with the Lord, our mortal bodies and souls are still subject to the outer pulls of temptation and sin.

"The feelings of the soul and the desires of the flesh are not sin. Temptation is not sin. But if we choose to succumb to temptation, sin will result. Being pulled by temptation can be likened to an elastic band which is stretched by an outside pull. The band remains one, but the two ends are drawn apart until the band snaps back to its natural, relaxed form once again. Does acting like a nine-year-old suddenly make a fifteen-year-old a whole six years younger? Of course not. He is still fifteen, although he temporarily forgot his age and acted like a nine-year-old. And that is what happens to us when we commit sins. We are temporarily attracted by some external temptation, which diverts our attention from who we really are and momentarily grabs us.

"What all too often happens is that we begin to think that we are still in the kingdom of darkness. And the moment we start to see ourselves that way, we live up to that image of ourselves. That is the delusion of the man of Romans Seven. He has not yet got it finally fixed in him that he isn't a wretched sinner, living in the kingdom of darkness, but a saint. He is still living as if he were an independent self who must strive to obey God. He hasn't yet seen that he is wholly free of this law of sin and death and will spontaneously fulfill the righteousness of Christ (Rom. 8:2, 4). He still thinks he must try to become righteous, when God says that he already is righteous.

"The man of Romans Eight may fall back into the illusion that he must try to be righteous, and so get caught out, but he doesn't live in that kingdom any longer. Because we have been translated from the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of His beloved Son, the devil can never again control us from within, though he can attack us from without, causing us to temporarily misuse the faculties of soul and body and actually commit some act of sin. And when we do, we should confess--admit--our sins, simply agree with God that it is so, and recognize at the same instant that the blood of Christ covers the sin completely. We admit we chose to follow an outer pull, but we also affirm that we are not that kind of person any longer. We may have acted like a nine-year-old, but we truly are fifteen.

"When Satan shouts, 'You're no saint!' we resist him 'steadfast in the faith'--standing tall in the knowledge of who we are in Christ. We don't take his accusations. 'It is Christ who died; who is the one who condemns?' We 'fight the good fight of faith'--we affirm that we are saints, no matter how it may momentarily appear from the outside. We may glance sideways at times, but we never change course and go wholly into evil. The 'old man' who did that no longer exists, because he died when our union with Satan was broken."