Why Do I Still Sin as a Christian? Romans 7 and the Sin That Remains

You became a Christian and you felt like a new person, finally felt free from the sin that once held you, and then a year later, or five, or twenty, you are still fighting the same thing you were fighting before. Your sinful nature.

And somewhere in this fight with your sinful nature, I am sure you, just like me, started to ask: If I am actually saved, why is this still here?

Paul had similar thoughts. Even he continued to struggle against his sinful nature, doing the things he hated.

For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing.

Romans 7:19

When he wrote this he was an apostle. He had the Spirit. He had walked with Christ for years, and yet he still struggled.

So whatever is wrong with you was also wrong with Paul and is also wrong with me and everyone else.

A working principle

He does not call this a weakness, or a bad habit, or a rough season.

So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand.

Romans 7:21

A law. A working principle. Something with consistency, that turns up on schedule.

And look at when it turns up. When I want to do right. Not when Paul is careless or distracted. When he is trying. The pull is strongest at exactly the moment he moves toward obedience.

Anyone who has seriously tried to kill a sin knows how this feels.

There are no terms of peace

John Owen spent years reading his own heart and writing down what he had found:

It is not only an enemy, for so possibly some reconciliation of it unto God might be made, but it is enmity itself, and not capable of accepting any terms of peace.

An enemy is something you might eventually come to terms with. Owen says this is not an enemy. It is enmity itself.

There is no arrangement available. No point at which the thing in you that pulls against God becomes neutral about Him. It does not get tired, and it does not mellow with age.

Why twenty years of fighting is not failure

Then Owen explains that the power of the sinful nature can be weakened but its nature will never change:

Mortification abates of its force, but does not change its nature. Grace changes the nature of man, but nothing can change the nature of sin.

Grace changes what a man is. It does not change what sin is.

So you can be genuinely new, genuinely born again, genuinely indwelt by the Spirit, and still be fighting the same sin at fifty that you fought at twenty. Weaker. Less often. Less in charge of you. But the same sin, with the same nature, because its nature was never the thing grace was going to change.

You were the thing grace changed, and you are still in the fight with your sinful nature.

In the house, not on the throne

Sin indwells the believer. It does not reign over the believer.

For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace.

Romans 6:14

It has no dominion over you. Sin is in the house but it is not on the throne.

An occupying army that has already lost the war can still do damage on the way out. It is still dangerous, and it is still worth fighting. But it is not running the country any more, and it is not going to win.

This is also why managing the surface never works. The problem did not move out of the heart when you were converted. It only lost its authority.

Wretched man

Paul ends the chapter with a cry I am sure we can all relate to.

Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?

Romans 7:24

That is an apostle. Calling himself a wretched man, just like you and me.

But we have hope and confidence in God, who saves us through our Lord Jesus Christ.

Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!

Romans 7:25

He does not resolve the tension by pretending the fight is finished. He resolves it by naming who already won.

So if you are still fighting, you are not failing. You are standing exactly where Paul was standing, and the condition you were born into is not the condition you will die in.

All glory be to God!

Next time, how this thing actually operates.