'Christians cannot sin?'
1 John 3:4-10 November 12, 1989 (Series on 1 John: No. 11)
We have now come to what has been, throughout the ages, the most controversial and the
most confusing part of John's great letter. John says that because Christ is sinless and
because he came to take away our sin, the person who is 'in Christ', that is, the genuine
Christian will not continue to sin, indeed, cannot any longer sin.
It is not difficult for believers to understand what John has already said in verse 2
of chapter 3, that when we stand before the Lord and see him as he is, we shall be made
like him. It is not hard for us to believe that we shall finally be made sinless in the
world to come. But John is not speaking of the world to come in verses 6 and 9. He is
speaking of this life and this world and of the Christian experience of every believer
while he lives in this world.
How can he say that the believer does not and cannot sin and that anyone who continues
to sin is, by that fact, shown to be no true Christian at all? How can he say that? We
love Christ, we trust him for our salvation. But, there can be no doubt that we continue
to sin: everyday and in every way we continue to sin; sin by what we do and still more by
what we fail to do.
As you can imagine, there have been a variety of suggested solutions to this problem.
First there have been those--and they can be found in the church even today--who take
John's words at face value, and claim that, as a matter of fact, real Christians do not
sin. This view has various forms but, in one way or another, it is argued that Christians
simply have no more sin and what they do, because they are Christians, cannot be and is
not considered by God to be, sin.
But this is obviously not John's view. For this was precisely what the false teachers
were claiming whose teaching John was condemning in this letter. As we already have
seen--in chapter 1, verses 8-10--they were making a claim, to the effect, that Christians
were without sin. And John does not mince his words. Anyone who claims to be without sin,
or beyond sinning, he writes, is deceiving himself and a liar. John speaks in those
verses very clearly to the continuing sinfulness of the Christian life and does so
again in the 16th verse of chapter 5. Whatever John means by his language in 3:6 and 9, he
clearly does not mean that Christians are, in fact, actually without sin in this life.
Others have argued that John is speaking here not of any and every sin but only of
notorious sins or offenses against God and man: blasphemy and murder and the like; or what
Roman Catholics call 'mortal' sins. This was Augustine's interpretation and Luther's too.
But, though there is, no doubt, some truth to this interpretation, it does not fully
answer to the facts--David's horrible crimes come to mind--nor does it agree with what
John actually says. In these same verses he defines sin as any violation of the law of
God.
Still others have argued that John must rather mean that while Christians can sin, as
it were, accidentally, they can no longer sin intentionally and deliberately. Christians
may be overtaken in a fault, but they do not lay plans and go into evil with their eyes
open. Again, does that really meet the demands of the case. Is that true. Was it true of
David or of the man in Corinth who was excommunicated for incest? Is it true of you or of
me? I sin voluntarily, with my eyes wide open, and Christians have, throughout the ages,
bemoaned the fact that they have, so far from being righteous, sought after sin to commit
it. Besides, John says here, plainly, that the sin he is speaking of is any violation of
the law of God. It matters not whether one falls into it or strides into it: sin is any
violation of the law of God.
Others have held that John is speaking of the new nature when he says that the believer
does not sin. His old nature may continue to sin, but his new nature from God cannot and
does not sin. You remember Paul's famous remark in Romans 7:17 to the effect that when he,
as a Christian, does what at bottom he does not want to do--when he lives in a way that
violates his own deepest wishes--at least when he is thinking clearly--then, Paul says,
'it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me.' My true self, Paul says,
is sold out to Christ and to a life of holiness, but the remnants of my old nature are
continually unmanning me and causing me to betray not only the Lord but my own truest and
deepest desires for my life.
But, even there, Paul is not arguing that he can therefore, relieve himself of the
responsibility for his sin. He is not arguing that because his continuing to sin is rooted
in what remains of his original sinful nature that he, Paul, no longer sins. He says
plainly: 'what I want to do, I do not do...the evil I do not want to
do--this I keep on doing.' And so here in 1 John 3. In verse 9 it is not 'God's seed'
which does not sin, but the Christian himself or herself. It is not a nature that sins or
does not sin, but a person.
There is obviously an important truth in this interpretation, but it does not really
answer John's meaning; and, what is more, it comes very close to what the false teachers
themselves were arguing. That while they might continue to do wrong things, those did not
count against them, because that was their worldly, fleshly nature at work. Their true
nature was spiritual and remained untouched by the deeds of the flesh. Sin, John says, is
breaking God's law; and if you break it, you sin--not one of your natures, but YOU!
What are we then to think of John's statement that genuine Christians do not and cannot
sin?
First of all, as he said, John has already spoken of the continuing sinfulness of a
Christian's life and will again in chapter five. John knows very well that genuine
believers continue to commit sins.
Further, the Greek present tense, which John uses in these verses, is different from
the present tense in English in that it suggests not only that the action is in the
present time, not the past or the future, but, also, that the action is continuous and
habitual. The NIV translation brings this out. In verse six, John literally says that 'no
one who lives in Christ sins', but the NIV is correct to translate John's present
tense with 'keeps on sinning.' Again in v. 9, John says 'he cannot sin' but the NIV is
correct to translate John's present tense with 'cannot go on sinning.' That continuous,
habitual action is conveyed by the present tense in the Greek in John's original.
So, John is speaking, first of all, not of a sin here or there, one sin or another, but
a life which is habitually, continuously sinful, a life which is dominated and
characterized by sin.
But, still more important: John's language in these verses is typical of the way the
Bible speaks of such things. We might well expect that Holy Scripture would say:
Christians are partly holy and partly sinful; their lives have been profoundly changed and
sanctified, but, still, much of the old sinfulness remains and is in constant conflict
with the new principles of righteousness which God has placed within them. And
sometimes the Bible does speak this way. The flesh was against the Spirit, Paul says,
and the Spirit against the flesh.
But God knows us too well to think that we will get the point with such measured and
tempered language. Scripture tends to speak in extremes and without qualifications, so
that each part of the truth will be heard and receive its due. For example, in Romans 6
Paul in very stirring language teaches us that anyone who has been united with Christ in
his death on the cross has been freed from sin; 'sin shall not be your master' he writes,
'for you are not under law but under grace.' 'We are no longer slaves to sin.'
But one chapter later, Paul agonizes over the fact that he is still so much at the nod
and the beck of sin and goes so far as to confess that he is a prisoner, a bondslave, of
sin.
People have been troubled by the fact that Paul could say that no Christian is a slave
of sin in chapter 6 and admit that he was still a slave of sin in chapter 7; but that is
the way he speaks and the way the Bible often speaks--in extremes, in absolutes. And truth
is found and the true Christian life is achieved not when each of those absolutes or
extremes is watered down and compromised with the other; but when each of the extremes,
each of the absolutes is held in tension with the other. We are no longer slaves in one
way and we remain slaves to sin in another. That is the way the Bible wants us to
think--not that we were sort of delivered and sort of not.
And here John is speaking in the same way. His absolute language, his uncompromising
assertions of the righteousness of a true Christian's life, as one commentator put it,
'the whole artillery of these startling statements' [Candlish], is meant to make us
recognize and face up to the fact that in the most definite, profound, practical, and
absolute way, the power and the grip and the authority of sin has been broken in any
genuine Christian's life. (Had John spoken otherwise; had he said, 'well Christians still
sin a great deal, every day in many ways, but they are righteous too in a certain way';
the point would not have hit home with us as it does and as it must.)
John leaves us in no doubt that he knows we continue to sin--he speaks of that plainly
elsewhere in this same letter--but he refuses to permit us to minimize the sea change that
Christ and grace have made in every Christian life and how in actual fact Christians have
stopped being 'sinners' and have become righteous.
Now if we ask John exactly how Christians are no longer sinners and in what way can it
be actually said that they do not and actually cannot sin, no doubt John, following
the Lord and the rest of Scripture, would say such things as these:
I. Christians cannot sin--that is cannot live a life whose characteristic is
sin--because, being born of God and belonging to Christ, they can no longer sin without
conviction.
The new birth alters irrevocably our view of sin and our capacity to accommodate it
happily in our hearts. For this we should be profoundly grateful to the Lord. The chief
reason why unbelievers do not forsake the sins which will eventually destroy them is
because they do not see their sins as the evil we now know them to be and feel them to be.
Every time we leave our Father's house in order to taste the pleasures of the world,
every time we set off to squander our inheritance, we soon come to ourselves, find
ourselves not amidst the world's pleasures as we had stupidly and forgetfully thought we
would be but groveling with the pigs, and as soon as all of that comes home to us
again--as it must and will if we are born again--home we come to our Father's house,
saying once again, 'Father, I have sinned' and having the Father say, for the umpteenth
time: 'Bring forth the best robe and put it on him.'
We do continue to commit sins; but that sin is always followed by conviction, by the
recognition of the evil of our sin, the danger of it, the ugliness of it, and by the
repudiation of it and our hastening to the mercy seat to get rid of its corruption and
stain. We who are Christians may very well lust and kill as David did, if only in our
hearts, but, like David, that sin will always come home to our reborn hearts and pierce
them to the quick and bring us again to this anguished cry:
Have mercy on me, O God,
according to your unfailing love;
according to your great compassion
blot out my transgressions.
II. Second, Christians cannot sin, that is, live a life characterized by sin,
because being born of God and belonging to Christ, they cannot sin without misery.
It is not only that sin comes home, that we are made to recognize that we have, indeed,
sinned against God, that what we have done is wrong and bad; still more, that conviction
leads to a real sorrow, a misery, a disgust and revulsion which make sin as repellant to
us as it was attractive shortly before. Christians, real Christians, cannot sin in peace.
Sin ruins their days and nights; and turns their laughter into mourning. An unbeliever can
be happy and sinning; but a Christian can only enjoy sin momentarily; it will always bring
him or her to gloom and despondency and shame.
David tells us in the 32nd Psalm that during the time following his sin with Bathsheba
and against Uriah her husband his life was ruined, he lost all the joy which usually had
characterized his life.
'My bones wasted away through my groaning all day long.
my strength was sapped as in the heat of summer.'
And when, in his great prayer of confession he cries to the Lord:
'Let me hear joy and gladness;
let the bones you have crushed rejoice.'
Is he not saying, once again, that his sin had made his life misery itself. And Paul
speaks the same way: 'O wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from being so much at
the beck and the call of sin?'
I know a man, who was led to Christ by my father. This man later became a minister in
our church and some years ago fell into some very serious sin for which he was deposed
from the ministry. Talk about 'bones being broken.' This man's sorrow and shame was so
great that after he came to himself and his sin was exposed, he literally could not make
it through a night without vomiting. He drove most of the way across the United States
just because in his shame he felt that he had to make a personal apology to the man who
had brought him to Christ.
Unbelievers have no such experience of such exquisite sorrow and tears for sin, and the
darkness which comes over a soul because of sin, and the shame and the feeling of
corruption which so spoils life because of sin. Unbelievers may bitterly regret the
consequences of sin, but Christians suffer torment because of sin itself--because, as John
says, they belong to the Lord Jesus and have come to think about sin the same way he does,
to know how revolting it is, how much of the Devil it is, how displeasing and dishonoring
to the one they love above all others.
III. Third, and last, Christians cannot sin--that is, live a life characteristic of
sin--because, being born of God and belonging to Christ, they cannot sin without God's
protection.
That is, they cannot sin so as to place themselves outside of the family of God; they
cannot commit that sin which renders them no longer Christians at all--the sin unto death,
sin which amounts to an intentional rejection of Christ and his Lordship and salvation.
John says this specifically in 5:16 and 18: 'If anyone sees his brother commit a sin that
does not lead to death, he should pray and God will give him life. We know that anyone
born of God does not continue to sin, the one who was born of God--that is, Jesus
Christ--keeps him safe and the evil one cannot harm him.
We will speak more of this 'sin that leads to death' when we get to chapter 5. For now
simply note that the Lord Jesus keeps the sinning of his own people within bounds; he does
not permit them to sin themselves out of their salvation.
He does this by restraining the temptations of the evil one; he does it by correcting
and disciplining us when we sin so that we are kept from still more serious sins; he does
this by the ministry of his Word and Spirit in our hearts, deepening our love Him, for his
law and for righteousness, increasing our distaste for and hatred of sin. In these and
many other ways, he keeps our sinfulness under control and protects us from that habitual
sinning which would finally harden our hearts against him and lead us at last to disown
him. This he will not permit.
Yes, Christian do continue to sin--constantly and terribly--we must not deny what is so
obviously and painfully true. But, it is also true that in all of that sinning our new
life in Christ has made us also those who do not and cannot sin: our life is characterized
in relation to sin in an absolutely and profoundly and irrevocably different way than the
lives of unbelievers. We can no longer sin--as they always do--without conviction, without
regret and sorrow and revulsion, and without the Lord's gracious protection, keeping even
our sinning safely within the bounds of faith and eternal life.
The day is coming soon when we will no longer sin at all, in any way. And true
Christians look forward to heaven and to the sight of their Savior for no reason so much
as that they will then be forever done with sin--with the abominable thing which God hates
and which they have come so much to hate as well.
But for the moment, we must not minimize, we must not take for granted the magnificent
change which the Lord has wrought in us so that in a very real way, even now, we cannot
sin. And we must take John's great lesson to heart, the main point he is here making:
sin without peace, sin always accompanied by deep regret and shame, sin always driving
us back to Christ Jesus for forgiveness, sin which makes us long for the eternal country,
sin which continues but which cannot pull us away from our Savior much as it would do so,
sin continuing but always kept within bounds, this our sin, amazingly, this sin in our
lives--is the identifying mark of those who have eternal life.
|