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!