Are Christians Sinners, or are they not Sinners?
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Is A Christian A Sinner?
We know that Christians continue to sin. That is not a controversial assertion. We are comfortable with that first pole that Christians are sinners. In Romans 7, after spending 30 years in his Apostleship and much near the end of his Christian life than the beginning, Paul strikingly, startlingly describes himself still as a bond slave to sin. By this description, he means his continuing to do the very things he knows he shouldn't do; and failing to do the very things he knows he ought to do. Isn't that what sin is: a failure to do the will of God, morning, afternoon and evening, day after day?
And of course, all through the Bible, we see believers sinning. We see Abraham lying, Job whining, Moses disobeying, David committing adultery, Peter denying the Lord, and the list goes on and on and on... We see many godly men, believing men, but sinful men.
We have Psalms and other prayers in the Bible that are the earnest confessions of sins committed against God and man by devout and believing men. The Corinthian Christians were committing so many sins that the Apostle Paul had to write his longest letter to deal with the sinful problems in that church.
John reminds us in his first letter of what we knew already when he says in 1 John 1:8 that "If any Christian claims to have no sin, he is a liar." But we don't need all those biblical testimonial, we know very well, how much we remain sinners, no matter how long we have been Christians.
William Law, the Anglican mystic, once said that he would rather be hanged, and his body thrown in a swamp; rather than that anybody should be allowed to look in his heart.
Samuel Rutherford once wrote that "If only Scotland could see what was going on inside of Samuel Rutherford, nobody would care any longer, anything about him! You and I know that we wouldn't probably have even four friends left in the world, if they only knew the things we have said about them behind their back.
Here is the best, the most searching admission of this fact that I have ever read. This statement is again from John or Rabbi Duncan, the 19th Century Scottish Presbyterian, a missionary to the Jews, Professor of Hebrew and a very insightful Christian Theologian. Here is what he says: "I have never done a sinless action during the 70 years of my life. By God's grace, there may have been some holy action done, but never a sinless action in all those 70 years."
What an awful thing it is to the life and what a solemn consideration it should be to us to reckon with the fact that we have never done a sinless action all our lives; and that throughout our lifetime, we have never done one act that did not need to be pardoned. Duncan is reminding us that even the very best thing we do, we don't do it with perfect motives, you don't do it as well as it ought to have been done, and of course, wherever we look, we see this: Christians sinning.
No wonder the church often remains weak. No wonder we have to spend so much of our time and energy dealing with problems in the church and very often problems in our own lives created by the sins we have committed: the sins of speech or the sins of action. We as Christians continue to be selfish and foolish and mean spirited and thoughtless of others and lazy and proud and worldly and so on.
Page 1 ⇦ Previous | Next ⇨ Page 3
Is A Christian A Sinner?
We know that Christians continue to sin. That is not a controversial assertion. We are comfortable with that first pole that Christians are sinners. In Romans 7, after spending 30 years in his Apostleship and much near the end of his Christian life than the beginning, Paul strikingly, startlingly describes himself still as a bond slave to sin. By this description, he means his continuing to do the very things he knows he shouldn't do; and failing to do the very things he knows he ought to do. Isn't that what sin is: a failure to do the will of God, morning, afternoon and evening, day after day?
And of course, all through the Bible, we see believers sinning. We see Abraham lying, Job whining, Moses disobeying, David committing adultery, Peter denying the Lord, and the list goes on and on and on... We see many godly men, believing men, but sinful men.
We have Psalms and other prayers in the Bible that are the earnest confessions of sins committed against God and man by devout and believing men. The Corinthian Christians were committing so many sins that the Apostle Paul had to write his longest letter to deal with the sinful problems in that church.
John reminds us in his first letter of what we knew already when he says in 1 John 1:8 that "If any Christian claims to have no sin, he is a liar." But we don't need all those biblical testimonial, we know very well, how much we remain sinners, no matter how long we have been Christians.
William Law, the Anglican mystic, once said that he would rather be hanged, and his body thrown in a swamp; rather than that anybody should be allowed to look in his heart.
Samuel Rutherford once wrote that "If only Scotland could see what was going on inside of Samuel Rutherford, nobody would care any longer, anything about him! You and I know that we wouldn't probably have even four friends left in the world, if they only knew the things we have said about them behind their back.
Here is the best, the most searching admission of this fact that I have ever read. This statement is again from John or Rabbi Duncan, the 19th Century Scottish Presbyterian, a missionary to the Jews, Professor of Hebrew and a very insightful Christian Theologian. Here is what he says: "I have never done a sinless action during the 70 years of my life. By God's grace, there may have been some holy action done, but never a sinless action in all those 70 years."
What an awful thing it is to the life and what a solemn consideration it should be to us to reckon with the fact that we have never done a sinless action all our lives; and that throughout our lifetime, we have never done one act that did not need to be pardoned. Duncan is reminding us that even the very best thing we do, we don't do it with perfect motives, you don't do it as well as it ought to have been done, and of course, wherever we look, we see this: Christians sinning.
No wonder the church often remains weak. No wonder we have to spend so much of our time and energy dealing with problems in the church and very often problems in our own lives created by the sins we have committed: the sins of speech or the sins of action. We as Christians continue to be selfish and foolish and mean spirited and thoughtless of others and lazy and proud and worldly and so on.
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