The Believer's Guide to the Law of Sin

What Happened?

Do you remember the day you were first saved? Do you remember a feeling of relief, of release, as if an awesome burden had been lifted from you? Guilt was gone and you were convinced that a new life had begun. The grass looked a little greener and the sky a little bluer.

If you were anything like me you may have thought to yourself, “Jesus has done so much for me that I feel as if I never want to sin again. Thank you, Lord.” And, if you are anything like me, it didn’t take long to realize that you were going to sin again and that sinning as a Christian was a miserable experience; far more miserable than sinning as a non-believer because now you knew better.

You started out so well, wanting to please God and do those things which you felt were satisfying to him. Then, invariably, you fell into your same old sin patterns over and over again. You repented, you memorized scripture, you tried to reckon yourself dead to sin, you tried to fight sin and rebuke the devil when you were tempted to sin. You did everything you knew to do and yet, like a dog returning to its vomit, you seemed to choose to sin time and again. (Proverbs 26:11)

At one point in my life I wished I had never known what it meant to be a Christian. I frequently wondered if I was a Christian at all. I read in the scripture that “No one who abides in him keeps on sinning; no one who keeps on sinning has either seen him or known him.”(1 John 3:6 ESV) I reasoned that if I was continuing in sin, I must not know him. But I was sure that I had known him in the beginning. I was miserable. So I re-committed and things would go well for a short time until I fell right back into my old sinful patterns again. I joined a 12-step group, gathered accountability partners. Anything I thought would bring me to the place where I would begin making right choices with my life. This seemed to work for a while, but then when any adversity would come I would return to my sin as I had done before. Peter describes people in this situation like this: “For if, after they have escaped the defilements of the world through the knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, they are again entangled in them and overcome, the last state has become worse for them than the first.”(2 Peter 2:20 ESV) I felt that.

Scripture led me to understand that a believer should not be involved in continuing, ‘besetting sins’. Therefore I could reason two possibilities; I was not a Christian or I did not understand something about the process of dying to sin. Fortunately God came and ministered to me in my misery by showing me something very important that I had missed. There is a biblical principal called ‘The Law of Sin’ which brought me to an understanding of why I was doing the things I was doing. The problem wasn’t that I was choosing sin, but that I did not understand the choice I truly had to make.

The Law of Sin

At the end of Romans chapter 7, Paul identifies a human behavior that most of us are unaware of which he calls ‘the law of sin’: “So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand.” (Romans 7:21 ESV) The Christian understands that the Law of God is good and holy, and soon after the initial euphoria of grace wears off, he sets about the business of trying to keep that good and holy law. It seems perfectly logical to him that what God has done for him is to so change him that it has become possible for him to keep the law. In short order he discovers, as Paul did, that “…I delight in the law of God, in my inner being, but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members.”(Romans 7:22-23 ESV)

Most Christians recognize the symptoms of this but fail to understand the underlying principles at work. This stems from a lack of understanding about the true purpose of the law. The law is not meant to be used as a means of establishing righteousness before God. It was never intended to be kept by human effort. On the contrary, Paul says “…by works of the law no human being will be justified in his sight, since through the law comes knowledge of sin.”(Romans 3:20 ESV) In other words, the law can only show us what sin is but has no power to produce righteousness or counter sin in our lives.

Paul explains this back in Romans 7. The law helped him to realize covetousness as a sin, but did not have the effect of restraining it. “Yet if it had not been for the law, I would not have known sin. For I would not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said, ‘You shall not covet.’ But sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, produced in me all kinds of covetousness.”(Romans 7:7-8 ESV) In reality, the commandment had the effect of inciting the sin that lived within his flesh to all kinds of covetousness.

Wait a minute! Scripture appears to be saying that we cannot choose whether or not to sin because when we try to make right choices, the sin in our flesh will cause us to do what we know is not right! That is exactly the case. And Paul could not have given us a better description of what this is like than he does in Romans 7:15-20(ESV):

“For I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I agree with the law, that it is good. So now it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me. For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh. 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. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me.”

In other words, you do not have the choice of whether or not to sin. Try and do right by your own power and you will do wrong because there are underlying principles at work here that don’t even involve your will.

That makes no sense. I thought that when I became a Christian and the Holy Spirit came to dwell within me that I was invincible? That’s the way the Bible paints it: “I can do all things through him who strengthens me.” (Philippians 4:13 ESV) This is true, if we are indeed being strengthened by his righteousness and not our own.

Sin – A Symptom of a Deeper Issue

Suppose one day you are driving down a street in a town where there is no established speed limit. As you pass a school driving 85 miles an hour, a police officer sitting in his cruiser in the parking lot politely smiles and waves at you.  He has no problem with your excessive speed because there is no speed law, so you are not in violation of the law.

Six months later you pass through that town again, but they now have established speed limits throughout. You smile and wave to the same officer in the same parking lot as you drive past the school at the same speed, but this time he pulls you over and writes you a speeding ticket. Because there is a speeding law, and you violated it, you are a criminal.

What we have just seen in action is what Paul describes in Romans 7:8: “…apart from the law, sin lies dead.” When you were not under any law, your speeding was not a crime. When you came under the law, you were condemned as a law-breaker for speeding. This is the counter-intuitive way in which God freed us from sin; by removing us from under the law. Our problem with sin is secondary to our problem with the law. We cannot meet the law of our own strength because as soon as we try, we come back under it and are exposed to sin, guilt and condemnation. In fact, the reason we cannot have a relationship with God outside of the atoning work of Christ is not that we sin (if that were so no Christian could have a relationship with God) but that we do not accept God’s remedy to sin. We are condemned not for our behavior, but for our insulting self-righteousness in trying to satisfy God apart from the savior. If we understand this we can understand why Jesus said: “Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God.”(John 3:18 ESV) He could have easily stated that humanity was condemned because of sin, but it is our stubborn refusal of the righteousness that can be found only in His son that truly leads to condemnation.
   

If we could satisfy God by our performance then why did Christ die? “I do not nullify the grace of God, for if righteousness were through the law, then Christ died for no purpose.”(Galatians 2:21 ESV) The point is that we want to fight sin, thinking that God is displeased with us for sinning, when in fact it is the fight that displeases Him. He wants us to rest in the freedom from the law (and hence ‘the law of sin’, sin, guilt, condemnation and death) that’s already been established through His tremendous sacrifice for us. He wants us to know that as believers, the law has power neither to condemn us nor give opportunity to the sin in our flesh. When we try to keep the law for the purpose of righteousness before God, it is a tremendous insult to Him who lived, suffered and died to free us from the law.

This is exactly why we are never told to fight sin head-on in scripture. We are told to flee it and die to it, but not to fight it. We are, however, told to fight our tendency to seek the familiar shelter of the law.

Hardwired to Fail

Human beings are hardwired for law. We like a comfortable boundary in which we can operate that makes it easy for us to see how we are performing. Out of bounds = bad, inbounds = good. It looks like a very simple process. The reason people are like this is that the law of God is actually part of us, as Paul says in Romans 2:15: “…the work of the law is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness, and their conflicting thoughts accuse or even excuse them.”

This being the case, legalism (religion) is our natural state and preference. Trying to keep the law satisfies our own sense of righteousness and makes us feel like we are ‘doing our part’. Though we may believe in God and have accepted Christ as our savior, left to ourselves we remain far more comfortable with Benjamin Franklin’s adage that ‘God helps those that help themselves’ than we are with Jesus’ statement  that “Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.”(Matthew 10:39 ESV) This is exactly what Jesus is calling for here – completely relinquishing our right to try to satisfy God by our performance by accepting his performance in our place. The Bible does not teach that God helps us to keep the law, but that we can only fulfill the law as we live by faith in that fact that it has already been kept by Jesus. The instant we try to step outside our identity before God in Christ and establish our own righteousness, sin overtakes us.

This is the problem that Paul faces head-on in the book of Galatians. The Galatians churches were evidently experiencing problems with sin. Paul lists a number of things that we can suspect were issues in those churches: “…sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, orgies, and things like these.” (Galatians 5:19-21 ESV) Paul calls these ‘the works of the flesh’. The word flesh implies not necessarily the sinful nature, but human effort. Paul indicates that these sins are evidence that the churches are living according to human effort and not according to the Spirit of grace which God has given them.

At the beginning of chapter 5, he states: “For freedom Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.”(ESV) We might naturally assume that he is talking about freedom from sin, but he is not. Reading on he says: “You are severed from Christ, you who would be justified by the law; you have fallen away from grace.”(Galatians 5:4 ESV) Christ has set us free from the law – from trying to please God by our performance. He has set us free from walking according to the flesh under the law. The absence of intentional sin in our lives is evidence that we are not walking in the flesh, but in the Spirit.

God has literally removed you from the dominance of sin by declaring you righteous through faith in Christ as if you had already fulfilled the law. “For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace.” (Romans 6:14 ESV) As long as you walk in the Spirit in the grace of the Father and not by the flesh, seeking to establish your own righteousness, sin will not dominate you.

The Law of the Spirit of Life

In Romans 8, Paul goes on contrast the law of sin with what he calls “the law of the Spirit of life”. What is that? It is the law of the New Covenant that Christ established. It is not primarily commandments, imperatives or rules, but an announcement of what God has accomplished on our behalf that we call the gospel. Fulfilling the commandments of the New Testament (and for that matter the law of Moses) depends upon our moment by moment understanding and living by faith according to this 'good news'.

Remember back to the time when you first obeyed the gospel call. Remember how you felt and thought about what God had done for you. For some period of time in your early Christian life you probably felt that knowing what God had done for you was enough. It satisfied you and allowed you to live with more freedom than you had known before. That is the purpose of the gospel, to announce freedom to those in bondage to the law (and therefore sin).

Because we think the gospel is mostly for outsiders - a tool of evangelism -  we fail to remind ourselves of  what Christ has done for us as Christians. We are trained to think that once we are saved God moves us on to greater truths than the gospel, which we consider to be the basics of Christianity. But look at what Jesus says: “If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” (John 8:31-32 ESV) What is his word? What is the truth? The gospel. The good news that Christ has done for you what you could never do for yourself by setting you free from your slavish attempts at appeasing God's wrath. When we fail to abide (remain) saturated in the glorious truth of the gospel, we will inevitably slip back into bondage to the law. We, like Adam and Eve in Eden, suddenly recognize our nakedness again and will seek to hide ourselves from God.

If sin is truly our primary offense against God, why did Jesus spend his time with tax collectors, prostitutes and sinners as the scripture tells us? He must not have been offended by sin in those who recognized that they were sinners. But the religion of the Pharisees was a great offense to him. The worst sin that a man could commit was to try to please God by his outward behavior, his performance of the law. “You blind Pharisee! First clean the inside of the cup and the plate, that the outside also may be clean.” (Matthew 23:26 ESV) It was humanity’s pathetic and pretentious attempts to satisfy God by their performance which invariably offended the Son of God. He said, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. I came not to call the righteous, but sinners.”(Mark 2:17 ESV) Christian, that sickness is still in you, and you still need a physician. Don’t kid yourself.

Though it is often taught that we cannot have a relationship to God because of our sin, Paul uses very plain language to describe what truly separates us from God. "Now before faith came, we were held captive under the law, imprisoned until the coming faith would be revealed. So then, the law was our guardian until Christ came, in order that we might be justified by faith. But now that faith has come, we are no longer under a guardian, for in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith." (Galatians 3:23-26 ESV) This is exactly why Paul could claim to be an Apostle, called of God, and the chief of sinners at the same time; because even though sin still dwelt in his flesh, he was free from the law which allowed dominance of sin. He no longer related to God as a guardian, but as a father.  It also explains the apparent contradiction in 1 John between "No one who abides in him keeps on sinning; no one who keeps on sinning has either seen him or known him" (3:6 ESV) and "If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us." (1:8 ESV) Sin still resides in our flesh, but apart from the law "there is...now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus."(Romans 8:1 ESV) We have become sons who have no need of a guardian.

Keeping the law, when attempted in the flesh, can have no other effect than to arouse our self-righteousness. That is why we are trying to keep the law, to prove our own ‘godliness’ and ‘holiness’. If we succeed then we will really have something to boast about, but not before God because God is not impressed (Romans 4:2). He has ordained only one way in which mankind can be declared righteous – through faith in the sacrifice of his son on Calvary. When we turn from grace to our performance in an effort to please God, we are denying Christ and offending God. We need to know that God is satisfied only by the life and death of his son, and without faith in the son, it is impossible to even know the Father let alone please Him. “You know neither me nor my Father. If you knew me, you would know my Father also.” (John 8:19 ESV)

While we cannot fight sin in our lives, we can fight the root cause of sin by standing firm in our resolution not to try to satisfy God by our performance. That is what Paul tells the Galatian churches in Galatians 5:1: “For freedom Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery [to the law].”

That’s Easy Believism

Jesus said “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.” (John 14:15 ESV) You could take that two ways. You might hear him saying “If you want to prove your love for me, do what I say”, or as “When you come to the place of deep love and appreciation for me, you will be able to keep my commandments.” Do you see a huge difference between the two? The first is really all about us and how well we perform the things he gave us to do. The second is really all about his performance on our behalf, which enables us to keep his commandments. When we truly love him, we will bear much fruit for him because he becomes the source of that fruit. “I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing.” (John 15:5 ESV)

So much of the church today is under the subtle spell of the ‘us’ mentality. It’s all about what we can do for God. We need to be doing his commandments. We need to be doing the things that please him. We think we are doing a great service for God. Faith without works is dead, we quote. (James 2:17) The problem is that works without faith is not only dead, but leads to death. Before we can be of any use to God, we need to do the one work that he demands:  “This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent.”(John 6:29 ESV) Effectively, that is the one work we can do – to believe on Christ every day. To hear the gospel anew every day. That is standing firm. All the fruit of our lives that is pleasing to God flows from that one work. In the same way that the works of the flesh (self-righteousness) are sin, the fruit of the Spirit (Christ-righteousness) are works which issue forth from grace.

Here’s how Paul sums it up: “Likewise, my brothers, you also have died to the law through the body of Christ, so that you may belong to another, to him who has been raised from the dead, in order that we may bear fruit for God.” (Romans 7:4 ESV) We can do “many wonderful works” in his name (Matthew 7:22) but we can bear no fruit until we are dead to works-righteousness.

Lawlessness

Of course Paul was charged by many with preaching lawlessness when he expounded the radical freedom that is ours in Christ. He was accused of teaching that the more we sin, the greater grace will abound in our lives. If analyzed in totality, the New Testament proves that this is a circular, self-defeating argument.

We recoil at the thought of absolute freedom from guilt, shame, sin and most of all self. So we automatically start to our fall-back position of “Without any law, people will take license”. That’s easy to think if you have forgotten what Paul said back in Romans chapter 7; that apart from the law, sin lies dead. Anyone who abandons themselves to the grace of God is dead to the law and to sin. Will they never sin then? No. We can still curse sometimes when we hit our thumb with a hammer. But the point is that the person living under grace is not under the dominion of sin, and is under no obligation to sin. The one who lives according to the flesh (and there is no magic spell that happens at salvation – believers can live in the flesh as much as unbelievers) is under obligation to sin. Speaking to believers, Paul says:  “For to set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace. For the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God's law; indeed, it cannot. Those who are in the flesh cannot please God.” (Romans 8:6-8 ESV). The only way to defeat hostility toward God and submit to God's law is to set our minds upon His grace. When we do that, we may freely come out of hiding and admit to God and others what we truly are. We can let the fig leaves drop, so to speak, and stand naked before God once more without shame. 

The idea that grace is dangerous is the doctrine of demons. There is no doubt we hate this kind of freedom because a freedom that someone else purchased has nothing to do with us. We like our merit badges and we hate to give them up.

We might erroneously think that introducing a little law along with grace is not going to hurt. But, as Paul warns the Galatians, “A little leaven leavens the whole lump.”(Galatians 5:9 ESV) Jesus compared the self-righteousness of the Pharisees to yeast (Matthew 16:11). Even the tiniest amount of yeast added to a dough will eventually work through the whole lump. My wife the baker tells me that left alone, eventually the yeast will consume all of the other ingredients in the dough. Dabbling with trying to keep the 'weak and worthless elementary principles of this world' (Galatians 4:8-11) is like introducing a tiny amount of yeast (self-righteousness) into the dough of your life. Sooner or later, it will completely consume the grace that God has imparted to you.

Lawlessness is not something to fear. If someone lives under grace they will not continue in obligation nor make a habit of sinning. The ones who are consumed with sin are those who do not live under grace, and they will not only make a habit of sinning, but indeed are obliged to do so. They do not have the freedom of choice they think they do.

Gospel, Gospel and More Gospel

Want to start making right choices now that you know what the choices are? Try an experiment for one week. Before your feet hit the floor in the morning every day, think about what Christ has accomplished for you. Don’t think this way – “I hope when I lay my head back on this pillow tonight I have had the kind of day that pleases God.” Think this way – “Because of what Christ secured for me by his life and death, nothing that happens today will affect my relationship with God. He has secured my place with God.”

Preach it to yourself. Because Christ was perfect, I can be imperfect. Because Christ fulfilled the law, I need not struggle to do so myself. Because Christ has victory, I can embrace defeat. Because Christ is faithful, my unfaithfulness is of little consequence. Because Christ won, I can lose.

There is nothing that the world can throw at you that will cause you to second-guess your God when you live knowing that it is his performance only that matters.