This Spirit and the Flesh

If you are a Christian, how do you think about your sin? Does it disturb you? Discourage you? Defeat you? When you sin, how do you pray about it? Or when you are tempted to sin, how do you deal with that?

These are questions I have been pondering lately, and last night I had a long, weighty conversation with a Christian brother about them.

Who sins?

One important fact about sin is that it is no long a Christian's true self that sins. One of the first things a Christian learns is that his sin is no longer counted against him. When God looks at a Christian, He sees the righteousness of Christ--not as some kind of trick where the Christian hides his sin from God, but as a declaration from God that the believer is righteous. The theological terminology for this is imputed righteousness.

But here am I talking about something a little deeper than that: who, exactly, sins? This might seem like an odd question. Indeed, we find an apparently odd statement in Romans chapter 7, where Paul writes, if I do what I do not want [ie, sin], it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me (v20). What does this mean? How can I say, it is not I that just sinned, when it is clear to anyone watching that it was I who did?

The answer is that Paul is getting very technical here. He is drawing a distinction between the inner man and the outer man. He clarifies this distinction a couple verses down when he states, 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. Note, here, the distinction between the inner being versus his members, or outer being. Paul also makes this distinction in II Corinthians 4:16 when he declares, though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed day by day.

The Flesh Versus the Spirit

So here is an important point: when a believer sins, it is his outer nature that sins, not his inner nature which is being renewed day by day. This truth has its importance in how we Christians fight sin. When we commit some sin, we must know that it has not stained our new nature that will one day be glorified in heaven; it is only our outer nature, our flesh, which our physical bodies had obeyed momentarily. When we are tempted to some sin, we must recognize that it is a battle of the spirit against the flesh (Galatians 5). So when we pray against temptation, don't pray that the desire will go away (the flesh will never be holy), but pray for power against the flesh! I have made the mistake many times of trying to pray until the desire goes away, but it never will: just the source of the desire, the flesh, will get weaker and weaker.

Here is a silly but maybe helpful drawing my friend and I came up with to show the flesh v. the spirit. Both are part of me, but the spirit, my inner nature, is taking over more and more of my life. The outer nature is wasting away. To show this, I've identified areas of sin that the spirit has noticeably taken over—though I am still susceptible to any of them, which is why each one has at least a little text outside of the realm of the spirit.

Learning these truths lately has given me a great peace and more power over sin, and I hope you can experience this as well!

Too Many Similes, Not Enough Smiles: A Review of Atlas Shrugged

There are three overarching realms of philosophy among humans. There is secular humanism, the belief that humans have value in and of themselves; there is existentialism, the belief that everything is arbitrary and nothing has absolute value; and there is the religious (Christian) view that God has absolute value and therefore imparts some value to humanity ("made in the image of God").

For a long time, I have believed that secular humanism is closer to the truth than existentialism—humans do have value—but illogical since a product of chance cannot be a source of objective meaning. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand, however, is a book that revealed to me, for the first time, how secular humansim can make sense—even if incorrect.

Rand wrote her magnum opus to put forth her philosophy of Objectivism in a characteristically practical, not abstract, way—through a great novel. The novel is the story of a man who seeks to "stop the motor of the world" and a woman who loved human ability so much that she fights him nearly to the death. It is mysterious, engaging, intelligent, sharp, and vivid. I won't tell much more of the literary merit—it is surely worthwhile—but instead I will concentrate on Rand's fascinating ideas.

Rand's philosophy is, amazingly, both very close to Christianity in some ways and terribly far from it in others. She begins the book by presenting her characters and drawing the reader to sympathize with them. She extols the value of joyful, able work ("[he] faced a challenge and found joy in his capacity to meet it", see Colossians 3:23). She demands rationality and logic in morality ("man's reason is his moral faculty"). She regards man as higher than animals (she spurns the one who claims, "man is just a low-grade animal").

God holds all these to be true as well.

She unfortunately falls far short of the truth in the end. After a brilliant two-thirds of the book, she gets into her serious philosophy in the remaining third (culminating in a 70-page speech presenting Objectivism) and her philosophical mistakes are exaggerated to arrive at lunatic conclusions. For example, she claims that giving gifts is immoral (says John Galt); that mercy is incompatible with justice (says Hank Rearden); that love can only be given to those who deserve it (says John Galt); even that "Heaven" on Earth can be reached by having everyone act rationally all the time (spoiler not revealed).

She arrives at all these false conclusions because she is missing total depravity. We humans require undeserved gifts because "all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God" (Romans 3:23). God accomplished justice with mercy by sending Jesus to take our punishment for us. We give love even to those who do not deserve it because no one deserves it, and we can only love because "God first loved us" (I John 4:19). Heaven will never be accomplished on Earth because "no one is good, no, not one" (Romans 3:10).

In the end, Ayn Rand was a brilliant woman, far smarter than I am, with some fascinating ideas. I would have loved to meet her. But she was blinded by the god of this age. Oh, that she would have used her intellect in the service of the true God instead.

Expect a couple more blog posts inspired by this book.

I have more understanding than all my teachers, for your testimonies are my meditation. (Psalm 119:99)