Friday DIVE – OVERCOMING in Christ | FD20260213

I was talking with a friend who had been a Christian for many years. The topic of his baptism came up.

“Why did you want to be baptized?” I asked him.

“Because I wanted to receive the power of the Holy Spirit so that I could overcome all my sins.”

“Did it work?”

He laughed. “No.”

His intentions were good, but his understanding was flawed. (No one understands perfectly, and we are saved by God’s mercy despite our misunderstandings.)

The Holy Spirit is not something we can “switch on” to achieve our overcoming goals, like some kind of supercharger for our willpower. We do not call the shots. The Spirit serves us, but he is not our servant.

The Holy Spirit is God, present with us and in us, giving us the love, assurance and fellowship that the Father has for us in Christ. Through Christ, the Father has made us his own children, and the Holy Spirit gives us the spiritual sense of knowing his love for us (Romans 8:16).

The Holy Spirit gives us fellowship with God through Christ, but he does not remove our ability to sin. We still have wrong desires, still have wrong motives, still have wrong thoughts, words and actions. Even though we may want to stop a particular habit, we find that we are still unable to do it. We know that it is God’s will for us to be freed from this problem, but for some reason we still seem to be powerless to shake its influence over us.

Can we believe that the Holy Spirit is at work in our lives—especially when it seems like nothing is really happening, because we are not being very “good” Christians? When we struggle with sin again and again, when it seems like we are not changing much at all, do we conclude that we are so messed up that not even God can fix the problem?

Babies and adolescents

When we come to faith in Christ, we are born again, regenerated, by the Holy Spirit. We are new creatures, new persons, babes in Christ. Babies are not powerful, not skilled, not self-cleaning. As they grow, they acquire some skills, and they also begin to realize that there is a lot they cannot do, and this sometimes leads to frustration. They fidget with the crayons and scissors and fret that they cannot do as well as an adult can. But the fits of frustration do not help — only time and practice will help.

This is true in our spiritual lives, too. Sometimes new Christians are given dramatic power to break a drug habit or a bad temper. Sometimes new Christians are instant “assets” to the church. But more often than not, new Christians struggle with the same sins they had before, have the same personalities they had before, have the same fears and frustrations. They are not spiritual giants.

Jesus conquered sin, but it seems like sin still has a grip on us. The sin nature within us has been defeated, but it still treats us like we are its prisoners. O wretched people that we are! Who will save us from the law of sin and death? Jesus, of course (Romans 7:24-25).  He has already won the victory—and he has made that victory ours.

Alas! We do not yet see the complete victory. We do not yet see his power over death, nor the complete end of sin in our lives. As Hebrews 2:8 says, we do not yet see all things under our feet. What we do is trust Jesus. We trust his word that he has won the victory, and we trust his word that in him we are also victorious, and we trust his word that the Holy Spirit will finish the work that Jesus began in our lives.

Still, even though we know we are clean and pure in Christ, we would also like to see progress in overcoming our sins. Such progress may seem excruciatingly slow at times, but we can trust God to do what he has promised—in us as well as in others. After all, it is his work, not ours. It is his power, not ours. It is his agenda, not ours. When we submit ourselves to God, we have to be willing to wait on him. We have to be willing to trust him to do his work in us in the way and at the speed he knows is right.

Adolescents often think they know more than Dad knows. They think they know what life is all about and that they can handle it all pretty well on their own. (Not all adolescents are like that, but the stereotype is based on some evidence.) We Christians can sometimes think in a way similar to adolescents. We may begin to think that “growing up” spiritually is based on right behavior, which leads us to start thinking of our standing with God in terms of how well we are behaving. When we are behaving well, we might tend to look down on people who don’t appear to have their act together so well. When we aren’t behaving so well, we might fall into despair and depression, believing God has left us.

But God does not ask us to make ourselves right with him; he asks us to trust him, the one who justifies the wicked (Romans 4:5), who loves us and saves us for the sake of Christ. As we mature in Christ, we rest more firmly in God’s love demonstrated supremely for us in Christ (1 John 4:9). As we rest in him, we look forward to the day described in Revelation 21:4: “He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.”

Perfection!

When that day comes, we will be changed in the twinkling of an eye. We will be made immortal, imperishable, incorruptible (1 Corinthians 15:52-53). And God redeems the inner person, not just the outer. He changes our innermost being, from weak and corruptible, to glorious and (most important of all) sinless.

Instantly, at the last trump, we will be changed. Our bodies will be redeemed (Romans 8:23), but more than that, we will finally see ourselves as God has made us to be in Christ (1 John 3:2). We will then see plainly the as-yet-invisible reality that God has made true in Christ.

Through Christ, our old sin nature has been defeated and demolished. It is dead. “You have died,” Paul puts it, “and your life is hidden with Christ in God” (Colossians 3:3). The sin that “so easily entangles us” and which we strive to “throw off” (Hebrews 12:1) is not part of the new person God has made us to be in Christ. In Christ, we have new life.

At Christ’s appearing, we will at last see ourselves as our Father has made us in Christ. We will see ourselves as we really are, as perfect in Christ, who is our true life (Colossians 3:3-4). It is for this reason, because we have already died and been raised with Christ, that we work to “put to death” whatever in us is earthly (Colossians 3:5).

We overcome Satan (and sin and death) in only one way — by the blood of the Lamb (Revelation 12:11).   It is through the victory of Jesus Christ, won on the cross, that we have victory over sin and death, not through our struggles against sin. Our struggles against sin are expressions of the fact that we are in Christ, that we are no longer enemies of God, but his friends, in fellowship with him through the Holy Spirit, who works in us both to will and to do God’s good pleasure (Philippians 2:13).

Our struggle against sin is not the cause of our righteousness in Christ. It does not produce holiness. God’s own love and grace toward us in Christ is the cause, the only cause, of our righteousness. We are made righteous, redeemed from all sin and ungodliness, by God through Christ because God is full of love and grace, and for no other reason. Our struggle against sin is the product of the new and righteous self we have been given in Christ, not the cause of it. Christ died for us while we were still sinners (Romans 5:8).

We hate sin, we struggle against sin, we want to avoid the pain and sorrow for ourselves and others that sin produces, because God has made us alive in Christ and the Holy Spirit is at work in us. It is because we are in Christ that we fight the sin which “so easily entangles us” (Hebrews 12:1). But we gain the victory not through our own efforts, not even our own efforts as empowered by the Holy Spirit. We gain the victory through the blood of Christ, through his death and resurrection as the incarnate Son of God, God in the flesh.

God has already done in Christ everything that needed doing for our salvation, and he has already given us everything we need for life and godliness simply by calling us to know him in Christ. And he did this simply because he is so almighty good (2 Peter 1:2-3).

The book of Revelation tells us that there will come a time when there will be no more crying and no more tears, no more hurt and no more pain, and that means no more sin, for it is sin that causes pain. Suddenly, in the twinkling of an eye, the darkness will end and sin will no longer be able to deceive us into thinking we are still its prisoners. Our true freedom, our new life in Christ, will shine forever with him in all its glorious splendor. In the meantime, we trust the word of his promise.

Author: Joseph Tkach

 

---

Finding Righteousness

As Christians, we know that salvation comes by grace and not by works. It’s part of the bedrock of Christian faith. Yet we also know the Bible tells us we need to be overcoming sin and living right. It’s easy to get the idea that salvation is really based on our good works more than it is on grace. And since we all still find ourselves sinning, life can get pretty frustrating and depressing at times.

In Ephesians 2:8-9, the apostle Paul tells us, “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith — and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God — not by works, so that no one can boast.”  

And yet, other passages in the New Testament seem to indicate that we will only be saved if we are doing good works.  Take Revelation 20:13, for example: “And the sea gave up the dead which were in it; and death and hell delivered up the dead which were in them: and they were judged every man according to their works” (KJV).  

How do passages like this one fit with the passages that tell us we are saved by grace and not by works? The problem is, we can’t enter the kingdom of God unless we are righteous. That is a fact, and there is no way around it. Unless we’re righteous, we’re doomed. 

The further bad news is that we don’t have what it takes to be righteous. Paul reminds us in Romans 3:10, “There is no one who is righteous, not even one.”

So if we have to be righteous to be saved, but none of us actually are righteous, how can anyone be saved? That’s where the gospel, the good news, comes in. Second Corinthians 5:21 tells us, “God made him who had no sin [that is, Jesus] to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”

That means we are saved by, and only by, God’s gracious acts of love on our behalf. In spite of our sinfulness, God loves us and wants us in his kingdom. First Timothy 2:3-4 says, “This is good, and pleases God our Savior, who wants all men to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth.”

Even though God wants all people to be saved, it seems that some aren’t. But contrary to what many Christians might think, it’s not because they aren’t righteous enough. It’s because they trust in their own so-called righteousness instead of in Jesus Christ, who actually is their righteousness.

Jesus told a parable about a man who tried to sit down at a king’s banquet table wearing his own garments instead of the banquet garments provided by the king. Let’s read the story in Matthew 22:1-14:

Jesus spoke to them again in parables, saying: ‘The kingdom of heaven is like a king who prepared a wedding banquet for his son. He sent his servants to those who had been invited to the banquet to tell them to come, but they refused to come.

‘Then he sent some more servants and said, “Tell those who have been invited that I have prepared my dinner: My oxen and fattened cattle have been butchered, and everything is ready. Come to the wedding banquet.”

‘But they paid no attention and went off—one to his field, another to his business. The rest seized his servants, mistreated them and killed them. The king was enraged. He sent his army and destroyed those murderers and burned their city.

‘Then he said to his servants, “The wedding banquet is ready, but those I invited did not deserve to come. Go to the street corners and invite to the banquet anyone you find.” So the servants went out into the streets and gathered all the people they could find, both good and bad, and the wedding hall was filled with guests.

‘But when the king came in to see the guests, he noticed a man there who was not wearing wedding clothes. “Friend,” he asked, “how did you get in here without wedding clothes?” The man was speechless.

‘Then the king told the attendants, “Tie him hand and foot, and throw him outside, into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”‘

Jesus’ point is that God wants us at his banquet table, so he’s made sure we can have, free of charge (because we haven’t got enough to pay for it), everything we need to be there.

So, when we read a passage like Galatians 5:24, which says, “Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the sinful nature with its passions and desires,” it doesn’t mean that if we crucify the sinful nature then we can belong to Christ. It means that we are righteous because we belong to Christ. We are not righteous of ourselves; we are righteous only in Christ.

We can believe it or not, but that is what God says he has done. If we believe it, we will welcome the free wedding garments. If we don’t believe it, that is, if we don’t accept God for who he is, the Father of Jesus Christ through whom he has saved the world, then we’ll keep on living like we always have, cutting ourselves off from the joy of real life that is waiting for us in God’s banquet hall.

Jesus is telling us that in the kingdom of God, people who think they have righteousness of their own aren’t welcome. It is sinners who are welcome, people who know they are sinners, and who trust God to forgive them and make them righteous in Christ. Those who think they are in some way more deserving, or more acceptable, or less dirty than the others, aren’t able to stay.

Ephesians 2:4-7 tells us:

But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions—it is by grace you have been saved. And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus, in order that in the coming ages he might show the incomparable riches of his grace, expressed in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus.

We can enjoy the glorious fruit of Jesus’ victory only by trusting him, not by improving our behavior. Paul wrote in Romans 3:27-28, “Where, then, is boasting? It is excluded. On what principle? On that of observing the law? No, but on that of faith. For we maintain that a man is justified by faith apart from observing the law.”

When God sent his Son to die for our sins and to be raised for our life, he made two things plain:

1) He loves us immeasurably and unconditionally, to the point of taking our burden as his own, even to the point of death, and

2) Our salvation was entirely his work; there is nothing we can do to save ourselves.

Imagine what would happen to, for example, a tomato plant if that plant suddenly declared independence from soil, water and light. Without resting in the elements that produce its life and growth, the plant would be doomed. It can never be what it is, a tomato plant, without soil, water and light. It can never do what tomato plants do—bear tomatoes—without soil, water and light. Yet our self-assured little tomato plant, if we can still call it a tomato plant, has decided it can be a better plant by its own hard work than it can by resting in its source of being.

Sin amounts to a state of declared “independence” from God. It’s a denial of who we really are, of who we were created to be. It’s like that tomato plant saying it has a better idea of what tomato plants ought to be. This denial of who we really are is the very condition of our lives. Each individual sin we might commit is just the natural fruit of a corrupt heart that doesn’t know the true source of its own life.

No matter how much we overcome, no matter how many sins we shed, no matter how many bad habits we replace with good ones, no matter how much better we are today than we used to be, it is still fourth down and a thousand yards to go. It’s not enough. We’re not going to make it.

That’s why we have to get our minds off ourselves and onto our Lord and Savior. We need to give up on ourselves and put our trust in Jesus. He fixes us from the inside out. We need to quit looking at the evidence we see in our lives and start trusting Jesus to be for us and do for us what he says he will be for us and do for us. We need to quit worrying that he will not be faithful on account of our being sinners, and start trusting him to forgive us and clean us up like he said he would.

It works like this: our unfaithfulness does not keep God from being faithful. He will be faithful because that is the way he is—faithful. We can stick out our tongues at him all day long, and he will still be faithful. We will have sore tongues and we will miss out on all the fun he wants us to have, but in spite of our wooden-headedness he will still be faithful.

God will not stop loving us and he will not stop knocking on our door, urging us to let him come in. He is, and always will be, faithful, even when we are not. We are free even to deny him. We are free to give up on him. We are free not to believe him, even to hate him. We have that choice, the choice to love our own so-called lives and turn down his gift of real life. We don’t have to enjoy his kingdom. He will let us be miserable if we insist on it.

Even so, he will always remain faithful, always love us, never forcing us to accept his love, but always urging us to. As Paul wrote: “The saying is sure: If we have died with him, we will also live with him; if we endure, we will also reign with him; if we deny him, he will also deny us; if we are faithless, he remains faithful—for he cannot deny himself” (2 Timothy 2:11-13).

We can get ourselves into all the trouble we want, and God will still be faithful. He will hurt for us and grieve for us, because he loves us, but he will not force us to trust him. If love is forced, it’s not real love.

“Wait a minute!” you might be thinking. “Are you saying I can sin and still be saved?” All I can say to that is that you are a sinner and God saves sinners, so there can be no other answer but yes.

Does that mean I’m encouraging you to sin? Of course not. I’m encouraging you to trust God to love you and forgive you and save you in spite of your sins, because that is what he promises to do.

But how can a person can have true faith in Christ and still keep sinning? Well, it would be nice if we believers would quit sinning, but nobody, ever, in all history has quit sinning this side of death. Only Jesus was without sin.

We are all sinners, and God saves us anyway, because saving sinners is what he does. That is not an invitation to sin; it is simply a fact. God remains faithful to us even when we are unfaithful to him. If we put our trust in him and admit we are sinners, he is faithful and just to forgive us.

Someone might ask, “But God won’t save us unless we change, will he?” Change how much? Change a little, change a medium amount, change a lot? How much is enough? God saves sinners. He heals the sick, not the healthy. In Mark 2:17 Jesus says, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.”

But don’t we have to change at least some before God will save us? God doesn’t save on the basis of human changes. He saves on the basis of his own righteousness. Romans 3:21-28 says,

But now a righteousness from God, apart from law, has been made known, to which the Law and the Prophets testify. This righteousness from God comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. There is no difference, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus. God presented him as a sacrifice of atonement, through faith in his blood. He did this to demonstrate his justice, because in his forbearance he had left the sins committed beforehand unpunished— he did it to demonstrate his justice at the present time, so as to be just and the one who justifies those who have faith in Jesus.

Where, then, is boasting? It is excluded. On what principle? On that of observing the law? No, but on that of faith. For we maintain that a man is justified by faith apart from observing the law.

Salvation isn’t about how much sin we put out of our lives. God wants us to trust him to make us righteous in Christ. We are saved by Christ’s righteousness, not ours. We don’t have any. But Christ has taken all humans, including you and me, into himself, and he stands in for us before the Father. He has brought all humanity, including you and me, into his intimate, loving relationship with the Father. So when we sin, as we all do, we can trust God’s word that we are already forgiven in Christ.

God’s children want to obey him. The Spirit of God in us leads us to obey him. Our consciences, appropriately, plague us when we know we are disobeying him. Still, there are two things we need to remember: 1) We have been forgiven already, and 2) We keep sinning no matter how much we overcome.

The person who thinks he stands is the very one who needs to take heed. Why? Because nobody stands except in Christ. Even with all the apostles urging to do what is right, not one of us actually walks a perfectly pure and holy life—except as we are held in Jesus.

Unless our righteousness exceeds that of the Pharisees, Jesus said, we have no part in the kingdom. The Pharisees were the most careful and devoted law abiders around! They took the word of God seriously, and they devoted themselves scrupulously to observing it. But Jesus said that anyone who will be in his kingdom must have even greater righteousness.

Do you have such a level of righteousness? I sure don’t.

That’s just the point. Salvation doesn’t come by what we do, no matter how good we are—or think we are. Our righteousness is the righteousness of Jesus, as we’re told in 1 Corinthians 1:30-31: “It is because of him that you are in Christ Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God—that is, our righteousness, holiness and redemption. Therefore, as it is written: ‘Let him who boasts boast in the Lord.’”

So how do we stand? By trusting Christ who raises the dead.

How do we stand? By trusting our Father who justifies the ungodly.

How do we stand? By trusting the Holy Spirit who leads us continually back to Christ.

We do have a choice. We can try to make life worthwhile on our own steam, or we can die to all the things we thought were worth clawing for in this world, and trust God to give us the real life we don’t yet see, the one that is hidden in Christ with God, as Colossians 3 tells us.

Yes, it’s good to “get serious” about overcoming sin. We can avoid a lot a pain and heartache by not sinning. But we need to do so in the complete assurance that we are already God’s forgiven and beloved righteous children for Christ’s sake.

The reason God wants us not to sin is that sin hurts us. It hurts us and it hurts others. It’s like what Proverbs 6:27 says about adultery, “Can a man take fire in his bosom and his clothes not be burned?” Sin hurts us, and it also makes us think God doesn’t love us.

So even while we seek to live a godly life and stop sinning, we can quit worrying that our failures, setbacks and dry periods cut us off from God. They don’t. God is absolutely true to his covenant promise; he will never leave us nor forsake us, and we can count on that no matter how deep in the miry pit of sin we have wallowed.

In our heavenly Father’s eyes, even while we still work to turn away from our sins, we are already new and righteous with him in Christ. He sees us for what he has made us to be in Christ, not for what we have made ourselves to be by a lifetime of wrong turns, bad decisions, weak moments, failures and sins.

That’s why we can find comfort, peace and rest in Jesus Christ. And that’s why the gospel is called good news!

Author: J. Michael Feazell

---

Believing the Gospel 

Many Christians are afraid of the gospel.  We are afraid of the gospel because it is too good.  Many of us are more comfortable with religion than we are with the gospel. We prefer to read the Bible as a divine rulebook that guards the entrance to the kingdom than to read it as God’s witness to his redemption of the whole cosmos through his Son.

We prefer to think that when God breathed the life of his Word into the Bible, he was merely creating a religion—a divine formula to show humans what things to do and not to do in order to get on God’s good side and stay there.

But the gospel is not a new and improved religion. The gospel is an affront to religion. It is the end of religion, the end of all systems of works designed to make us acceptable to God. The gospel, by contrast, tells us that God himself has already, through Jesus Christ, made us acceptable. The gospel is good news; religion is bad news; and the gospel wins. Christ is victorious. Sin is vanquished.

We are overcomers only in Christ, not in our overcoming anything. We are sinners, always have been and will continue to be to the day we die. Whatever we may have overcome is like removing a spoonful of sand from the beach. Unless and until we are found in Christ, we remain dead in our sins. And we are found in Christ only by trusting him to be for us who he says he is and to do for us what he says he does. Only when we trust him will we accept his gift of mercy and life, and only when we wake up to our sinfulness will we trust him.

As long as we think we are “doing OK,” or that we “aren’t all that bad” or that we are “making progress” or even that we will never be “good enough,” we will not trust him. All such thinking is trusting not him, but ourselves. It is thinking that his acceptance of us is based on how well we behave. It is thinking that if we do better, then he will accept us, or conversely, that he accepts us because we have been overcoming.

God accepts us because he wants to accept us, and not because we have measured up. God dealt with our sin by the blood of Christ, not by giving us a new and improved law code. We are justified because God justified us himself, personally, through his Son. God did for us in Christ what we could not do for ourselves, and he calls on us to trust him to be our righteousness (1 Corinthians 1:30).

That means we do not have righteousness. It is not just a matter that we “have got some problems.” It is not just a matter that we have “a few things to overcome.” It is not even a matter of “putting sin out of our lives.” It is a matter of understanding that we are hopeless losers, sinners through and through, and that even our “good” deeds are thoroughly laced with selfish impurity. Until we see that, until we see ourselves for what we really are, we will not trust him who alone saves sinners.

Fear of the gospel

Many Christians are afraid of the gospel because it puts everybody on the same level—”All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). That means we, being sinners ourselves, have no ground to feel spiritually superior to people who do things that disgust and offend us. Others are afraid of the gospel because the gospel requires them to believe that God will save them in spite of their sins. We have a hard time trusting God to do exactly what he promised to do—forgive us our sins.

We want to prove to him we can “do it.” We want to show him we’ll be faithful, that we will be obedient, that we will be “good Christians.” But the truth is, we won’t be. We will sin, and we will sin again, and again. And until we believe the gospel, instead of some fairy tale about having to please God before he will accept us, we will not enter God’s rest. God saves us; changes in our behavior do not.

We can live in misery, struggling to be found worthy by perfect obedience and constantly failing and fearing that God is waiting to squash us like flies, or we can trust his Word. (Or even worse, we can live in appalling arrogance, actually believing that we are worthily obeying God and trusting him to accept us for our “holy deeds.”)

God is our salvation; our improved behavior is not. To repent is to turn to God and away from ourselves. It is to concede that we are sinners and that we need God’s mercy. It is to trust God to be faithful to his word of grace spoken in his Son before the world began. It is to remove our little homemade crown and hand it over to our Maker, the author of eternal salvation.

God is our righteousness; our illusion of good behavior is not. When we come to see our righteousness as filthy rags, as indeed it is, then we can begin to see our need for God’s grace and mercy. When we believe his word of salvation in his Son, then we can begin to trust him to forgive all our sins and save us.

Trusting God

Why is it so hard to trust God to forgive us and to make us his perfectly righteous children in Christ? Perhaps one reason is because we can’t stand to think of ourselves as, or to think that others might think of us as, bald-faced sinners. We prefer the façade of pretending to be good, decent folks. But we are not good, decent folks. Nobody is good, decent folks. At best, we are less destructive and wicked than we could be if we let ourselves go entirely.

Have you ever noticed that if you behave decently for a day or two, you begin to feel like you are a pretty good person after all? And conversely, if your natural self gets loose for few minutes and you behave like the ratbag you are, then you feel depressed, disappointed and frustrated that you are not as grand as you had been imagining?

But what is there to be disappointed about? Why, given what you are, were you expecting not to behave accordingly from time to time? Our disappointment ought to be in our failure to honor the God of our salvation, not in our failure to look impeccable to ourselves and others. If it were, then we would be free to see more clearly that in spite of our sin, we can rest in the atonement of Christ, for our sins are forgiven in him. The reason we need a Savior is because we need saving. The gospel declares that God has indeed saved us through Christ. In fact, Christ died for us ungodly people while we were still sinners (Romans 5:8).

Now please don’t tell me that we “were” sinners, but now we are not to be sinners anymore. Please drop the rhetoric. We are sinners. We do still sin after conversion. Every Christian who ever lived continues to sin after conversion. That doesn’t make sin OK. It doesn’t condone sin. It is simply a fact, and one we would all do much better to just admit and quit pretending that if we try hard enough we will become sinless.

There is one way, of course, in which we are not sinners. As believers we are in Christ, and as such we are not sinners in the sense that God does not count our sins against us (Romans 4:8). In other words, when we do not pretend that we are not sinners, but instead put our trust in Jesus Christ who saves sinners, God does not count our sins against us (compare 1 Timothy 1:15).

Overcomers

What must we do about sin? We must trust God to forgive our sins. We must trust him! He is our only hope. We are sinners, and unless God forgives our sins, we come under the condemnation all sinners deserve. We are not going to stop being sinners. I’m sure you have tried, like I have, and discovered that despite occasional bouts of improvement, sin is still alive and well in your life. But God says that if we trust him he will take care of our sins and he will count us righteous in Christ who, for our sakes, became the perfect human.

The Bible is not a rulebook for new and improved religion. It is the Word of God, God’s chosen revelation of himself to us, declaring to us that in Jesus Christ he has dealt with the sins of the world so that whoever trusts him will be saved. That is good news. It is the gospel. It is not religion. Don’t be afraid of it.

I know. You’re still waiting for me to say something about the importance of behaving right. But I’m not going to. At least not in the way you are probably used to. We are overcomers in Christ alone; when it comes to godly overcoming, there is no other way to be an overcomer.

When you trust Christ to be your righteousness, your behavior will be set by the Holy Spirit on the road to improvement, regardless of whether you constantly set “overcoming goals” for yourself. But if you try to improve your behavior without trusting Christ to be your only righteousness, you may or may not be successful, and whether or not you are won’t make a hill of beans of difference in terms of your standing with God.

In other words, salvation is not based on what you do; it is based on what God has already done. When you trust God, you are in Christ, and when you are in Christ, God does not count your sins against you. If you do not trust God, you are still in your sins, because you are not in Christ.

Priorities

Here’s a gospel tip: don’t make behaving better your main goal in life. If you do, you’ll always be frustrated, disappointed in yourself and miserable, not to mention a judgmental and obnoxious prig. You’re welcome to it if you want it, of course. But will-powering yourself into a better you is a no-win life goal. Will-power goodness is the root of religion; it has no place in the gospel.

Instead, make your main goal in life knowing and trusting in the Lord your God for absolutely everything, including your behavior. When you do that, your preoccupation with yourself and how good you are will fade, and your eyes will begin to open to the righteousness of God and the joy and peace of his kingdom. The Holy Spirit will reorder your priorities, and the pain your sins naturally cause in your life will more readily drive you to God for mercy and help to overcome.

Let me say it another way: Work on yourself and make every effort to change for the better—but not because you think it will make you less a sinner and get you in good with God. Take overcoming seriously. Do it because God wants you to, because Jesus Christ gave you a new life, because it is right, because everybody who loves you wants you to, and because it will make your life much more blessed, rewarding, peaceful and pleasant. But don’t do it because you think that’s how you will get into the kingdom of God. It isn’t.

Regardless of how much you improve (and you need a lot of improvement—I know you; you’re just like me), you are still a sinner, and the only hope of salvation you’ve got is the mercy of God along with his word that in Christ he extends it to you. Trust him, not your good life, when it comes to salvation. When it comes to salvation, trust the word of God that in Christ it is a fait accompli; when it comes to behavior, trust yourself to the supervision of the Holy Spirit and put your heart into overcoming.

Don’t think that good behavior results in salvation; but know that salvation results in good behavior. But don’t let that make you think that poor behavior equals unsaved and good behavior equals saved. It simply does not work that way; don’t forget that we all still sin. Sin involves not merely acts but attitudes, and God knows even the deepest secrets of our hearts.

Rest in this: God loves you; he’s proven it in Christ, and he will make you into what he wants you to be. You can trust him to do it. Get to know him. Spend time with him. Put your confidence in him. Make him the priority in your life, and you will begin to find his love influencing the way you live in the world and the way you interact with others.

Whether we experience hardship or ease, prosperity or poverty, bad times or good times (and Christians experience them all), our ability to cope with what comes our way will depend on our trust in God. But all the while, because we are in Christ, our salvation is not in question. We are saved by God’s grace through faith, and even our faith is God’s gracious gift to us.

Remember, the gospel is good news. It is “the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes” (Romans 1:16).  Therefore, as Hebrews 10:23 encourages us, “Let us hold unswervingly to the hope we profess, for he who promised is faithful.”

Author: J. Michael Feazell