"...whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life." - John 4:14 KJV
As Christians, we know that in our walks with God we stumble, we struggle, we backslide, we sin, but the overall direction is "up" as we push toward maturity—toward the prize of the crown of righteousness. But some writers such as John Eldredge (of Wild at Heart fame) teach that once we are justified, that is, forgiven, we no longer sin in the biblical sense because we have been made immediately pure by the baptism of the Spirit. This is not true: I challenge any Christian to affirm that he doesn’t wrestle each day with thoughts and actions that are contrary to the Word of God. In Scripture, Paul says:
"Not that I have already obtained all of this, or have already been made perfect, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me. Brothers, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus" (Php 3:12-14).
Paul teaches us about the road to glory that is full of challenges, struggles, temptations, and sin. These struggles strengthen us and help us grow. But those who believe that born-again believers are immediately glorified Christians with clean hearts say that all hints of sin in our lives are not our responsibility; that the blame is to be placed on "spiritual attacks" from the outside, having nothing to do with what is in our hearts. Jesus says, however:
"For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come: fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly." (Mark 7:21-22)
Eldredge, like Sigmund Freud, believes that evil comes from denying or suppressing our natural desires. But the Bible teaches that the key to the Christian walk is denying ourselves, picking up the cross (i.e., dying to self) and following Jesus our loving Lord. If a person carefully considers this, he would never make the error of thinking that sin is caused by the denial of his desires. The Bible tells us that the prisoners in Isaiah 61 are prisoners of their own sin (Gal 3:22), but writers such as Eldredge teach that we are prisoners to the "wound" received from another person. While these wounds can be painful and enduring, we cannot use them as an excuse for our own sinfulness.
The Christian evangelist tells us of our need to repent, but false teachers tell us, with a myriad of deceptive schemes, that our sins are not our fault. While the Bible says that all men are without excuse, Eldredge teaches that the "core reasons" for men being driven "to the darker regions of the soul" are centered on a denial of their deepest desires—straight out of the textbooks of psychoanalysis, and not from the Bible. Just at the moment when a man should be sorry and repentant before God, false teachers tell him that he should not be, because the mess in his life is the effect of his environment.
According to the Bible, sin requires repentance. According to false teachers, sin requires a man to search his life for his personal wounds, find someone to blame for them (particularly his father), understand his sins are not his fault and that had his natural desires not been denied or subdued, he would not be in the mess in which he finds himself. The Biblical concept of repentance is absent in books such as Wild at Heart that attempt to explain the reasons for the many sins in men’s lives today. This is because writers have created new definitions of sin that have no element of personal responsibility. And with no personal responsibility for one’s faults comes the idea that one is made perfect as soon as one is justified.
An individual who has been justified has been acquitted of the crime of breaking God’s holy laws. Justification is being made righteous in God’s eyes through Christ’s substitutionary sacrifice on the cross, which paid the penalty that all men deserved for their sins (Rom 5:12-21). Justification does not mean that a born-again believer ceases to sin and does not mean that God ignores sin. On the contrary, justification is the act of a loving yet just God punishing your sins and mine upon Jesus, without reducing either His love or His justice. The price that was paid on the cross declares to the whole world the enormous depravity of mankind, God’s hatred of sin, and the necessary punishment that it warrants (Mark 15:34, 2 Cor 5:21). At the same time it declares the love of the Almighty for all people by having provided such atonement by the sacrifice of His only begotten Son (John 3:16). All those who believe this, who accept Jesus Christ as their Savior, are justified in God’s eyes (Rom 3:22). "Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus" (Rom 8:1).
It is only through the power and guidance of the Holy Spirit that sin is less prevalent in the believer’s life. This is why John writes to believers, "I write this to you so that you will not sin" (1 John 2:1). The consciousness of sin is what draws the believer closer to God, as he continually is reminded of the depth of God’s love, justice, and forgiveness as exemplified on the cross of Christ. Every time the Christian is reminded that he has done something that deserves punishment from God, he takes heart in knowing that God was satisfied by Christ’s death on the cross. What love and what forgiveness!
God created us free to do the right thing. Did the devil, though he was crafty and clever, make Adam and Eve sin? It cannot be denied that many pastors are effectively building a defense for the sinner that is summarized by the old cliché ‘the devil made me do it’. This type of distorted teaching is just one example of errors resulting when a person ignores the doctrine of sanctification, which necessarily implies that glorification or perfection does not occur until after this life.
When an individual comes to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ as discussed above and has been saved, that is, saved from condemnation (i.e., judgment or damnation), such an individual will continue to sin, as he will be in the process of being made holy, attempting to walk straight and narrow paths but inevitably stumbling along the way. A great verse to describe this dichotomy is Hebrews 10:14, which reads "by one sacrifice he has made perfect forever those who are being made holy."
The process of sanctification is a process of being made holy, which begins when the Christian has been made perfect in God’s eyes by justification and absolution from the ultimate penalty for sin. If holiness or sanctification is defined by obedience to God’s perfect commands, and the Holy Spirit can catalyze progress towards holiness, then how does the Holy Spirit do this? God the Holy Spirit does this by convicting the Christian of sin, of his falling short of God’s perfect standards, and by enabling the Christian to turn away from sin by destroying the power of sin in his life. Conviction involves an acknowledgement that what the Christian is doing is wrong in God’s eyes, which psychologists term "guilt". This conviction of disapproval for one’s behavior is not condemnation. On the contrary, it is salvation. In being justified, the Christian has been saved from the ultimate penalty for sin, condemnation on Judgment Day. To confuse justification with sanctification is to ignore countless pages of Scripture that tell us that the Christian, though made perfect such that he is freed from the ultimate penalty for his sin (paid by Christ), is still imperfect as regards his daily experience on earth.
Christ highlights the difference between condemnation for sin and conviction for sin in His confrontation with the adulteress who was about to be stoned. After the crowd left, deciding not to stone the woman to death, Christ said to her, " ‘Woman where are they? Has no one condemned you?’ ‘No one, sir,’ she said. ‘Then neither do I condemn you,’ Jesus declared. ‘Go now and leave your life of sin’ " (John 8:10-11). Condemnation, as it is used here by Christ, and as it is used in Romans 8:1, does not mean telling someone that they are sinning and that they ought to stop sinning. No, condemnation equals death, the ultimate penalty for sin. "The wages of sin is death" (Rom 6:23). Christ did not condemn the woman in telling her to "Go now and leave your life of sin." Neither does God condemn the Christian when He disciplines him for his sin. Indeed, this is a sign of the Christian’s sonship (Heb 12:7).
Holiness is the absence of sin, the complete separation from sin. The Bible is clear that sin remains in the believer’s life, but that the believer has been forgiven because he has been justified. I want to place substantial emphasis on our experience as evidence for the fact that sin does not leave us when we are born again, that we are not yet perfect and pure, rather, we are in the process of being made to be so. Though I am indeed a new creation and praise God for it, I am still prone to sin. Now much is made by Eldredge and proponents of the gospel that he advances, about the new desires that the Christian has to serve God. I know that although I still have sinful thoughts, I also have new desires. For example, I never ministered to the homeless before and never enjoyed it so much. However, to ignore the presence of the old desires and sin in the hearts of Christians is to say that we can simply follow all of our desires, and this is just isn’t true. The Bible tells us that whether we believe we have a clean heart or not, God’s will is to be given overriding authority in our lives and in all of creation. Even Jesus, who was sinless, had to keep His desires in synch with the will of the Father as He prayed in Gethsemane, "My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from Me. Yet not as I will, but as You will." (Mat 26:39) If this is what Jesus, who is perfect, said, then what are the implications for us when it comes to checking our own desires against the will of the Almighty? Thankfully, we don’t have to guess, for the Bible gives us clear instruction.
Jesus Christ teaches that we must acknowledge in prayer that it’s not our will that matters but God’s will and that it is not our kingdom that should be enlarged but God’s kingdom (Mat 6:10). Of course, Jesus teaches that by replacing our will with God’s will, we will be set up for abundant life, but not as the world defines it. Interestingly enough, Jesus contrasts the Lord’s Prayer with the prayers of pagans. Jesus prefaces the Lord’s Prayer with the statement "Do not be like them [pagans], for your Father knows what you need before you ask Him" (Mat 6:8). The root of paganism is the effort of a people to gain the favor of God and thereby gain what they want, thus worshipping their own kingdom and their own will (i.e. self worship). Jesus clearly teaches that God’s will must be supreme in our lives (i.e., God worship).
Though God does promise to give us clean, good hearts as part of the new covenant, we know that perfection is not fully realized during this life. There are some elements of the new covenant that Christians unquestionably have at the point of being born again (John 3). We have the Holy Spirit in us, however, the Holy Spirit in us is not a sign that we’ve fully reaped the benefits of the new covenant. Rather, God "has given us the Spirit as a deposit, guaranteeing what is to come" (2 Cor 5:5).
In addition to 2 Cor 5:5, Philippians 3 teaches us that the new covenant will not be fully realized until after this life, that there is a period between justification and glorification. Paul talks about the "prize" that he and all believers are seeking (v14). What is the prize? When will the Christian get it? The prize is the crown of righteousness that is promised to all "who have longed for" Christ’s coming, and to which Paul looks forward (2 Tim 4:8, Rom 8:23-25). Note that Paul, who likely wrote his second letter to Timothy from a prison in Rome during the days near his martyrdom, had not yet received the crown of righteousness. Similarly, all those who "have longed for His appearing" have not yet received the prize, the crown. The prize is described in various ways throughout Scripture, but we know that it is not the Christian’s until after his sojourn in this world. The crown represents the fulfillment of the promise of the new covenant, the perfection and glorification of the Christian. The theme of pressing on towards obtaining this prize, the crown of righteousness, all the while knowing that we are not there yet, is abundantly documented in Scripture (Titus 2:11, 2 Pet 1:3-11, Heb 12:1-12).
There are constant exhortations to do what is good in the New Testament (Rom 6:19, 1 Cor 6:18, 2 Cor 13:9, Gal 5:16, Eph 4:17, Php 4:8, Col 3:5-10, Titus 3:8). If all we simply have to do is follow our desires as new creatures, why all the encouragement to do good and the promise that good deeds would reach their perfection in the future? Clearly, God chose to put such Scripture in the Bible because we are not perfect on the day we are saved, though our position vis-à-vis the Judgment is perfect (as discussed above). Rather, we are undergoing a process of sanctification as Christians, engaging in a constant battle (Heb 12:4) with sin (Rom 7:23), but having the new advantages of the Holy Spirit in us and thanksgiving in knowing that we are forgiven when we repent of our failures.
Paul says in 1 Thes 5:23-24, "May God Himself sanctify you through and through. May your whole spirit, soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. The one who calls you is faithful and He will do it." Paul concludes his statement, which is a clear acknowledgment that the Christian is in the process of being made holy, by saying that the one who calls us will bring this process to completion in the future. The sanctifying process is not finished in the present. This is why Paul encourages his readers in Php 1:6 by saying, "the One who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus." Also, this is why the author of Hebrews exhorts his readers, "See to it, brothers, that none of you has a sinful, unbelieving heart that turns away from the living God. But encourage one another daily, as long as it is called Today, so that none of you may be hardened by sin’s deceitfulness" (Heb 3:12).
These are only a few of the passages in the Bible that remind us that the perfect heart that is promised each and every Christian is not fully realized during this life, because there is a stage of life between rebirth and ultimate perfection in which we grow and mature. Thank God that the forgiveness, our justification before God, and the process of our sanctification to perfection were established for all believers by Christ’s completed work of atonement for our sins on the cross.
Ryan George
Originally published in The Living Water Letter, May 2004,
by Living Water of Washington DC.
Last revised: May 6, 2004.