As iron sharpens iron,
one person sharpens another. (Proverbs 27:17)
“We should recognize and live in accordance with our redeemed identity in Christ…. Yes, we are covered by the righteousness of Christ. We are His saints, His holy ones. But there are three tenses of salvation” - Randy Alcorn
“That misunderstanding of Isaiah 64:6 has caused many Christians to believe that it is impossible for a Christian to please God. If their best works are filthy rags, there’s nothing they can do to please him. This is a profoundly unbiblical notion through and through.” - John Piper
“The assumptions embedded throughout redemptive history make clear that some sins are worse than others. Consider several examples.” - Kevin DeYoung
There is no shortage of passages exhorting Christians not to sin.1 So it is no surprise that John also acknowledges in his first letter that Christians can sin.2 It might be surprising, then to discover that John says that “All those who are born of God sin they do not do.”3 John adds that they do not, “because His seed abides in him.”4
“Christians can be guilty of making pithy statements of a theological nature that require a lot of explanation for the phrase to be accurate. If an explanation is not offered, we are sometimes demanding a lot of the reader to put all the pieces together.” - Ref21
Read Part 1.
Not only did God’s curse upon humanity entail a spiritual death; it also resulted in physical death or the dissolution of the body. You may recall God’s judicial pronouncement on Adam:
The Bible portrays death as the consequence of human sin. Death was the sanction that God tied to the Garden of Eden stipulation: “Of every tree of the garden you may freely eat; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die” (Gen. 2:16-17). And God’s expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden on account of their covenant breach and treason demonstrated that His threats were not empty. Death became the lot of Adam and his posterity.
There are a lot of sins in the Bible. We don’t feel the same way about all of them, though, do we? Some sins trigger strong righteous indignation or an intense “ick” response. Others we barely notice.
We’re not entirely wrong to feel that way. Though there are not really any small sins, some are bigger than others. (See Bob Gonzales’ excellent study on that topic: The Greater Sin: Are There Degrees of Sin?).
But this range of reactions to different sins should prompt us to ask some questions.
“There are Christians who live in mortal fear that they might at some point commit that sin that would cause them to lose their salvation and to lose the hope of heaven.” - RC Sproul
Discussion