“Be killing sin, or it will be killing you.” — John Owen

As long as sin lives in you, you have to kill it. Here’s the problem: In this life, sin will always live in you. Don’t lie to yourself. Don’t try to get around this reality by playing word games with Scripture. Weaseling your way out of the fight won’t cut it. I’ve heard the arguments. I make them all the time. You are “dead” with Christ, you and your sin have been “crucified” with him. Yet you are commanded to daily “put to death the deeds of the body.” The Apostle Paul himself was committed to putting his sin to death on a daily basis, constantly bringing his body into submission. And you think you can get out of it?

I know there are some nut jobs out there that think they can be perfect in this life. They talk about themselves as though their sanctification was quantifiable: “I’m 95% sanctified.” Some are even crazy enough to think they’ve been completely perfect since they first became Christians.

Usually it’s more subtle, though. There are more sophisticated ways of killing our consciences: “There’s no place for discussion of sin or God’s Law in the lives of believers! That’s legalism. What we need is grace!” “I don’t sin every day in thought, word, and deed! I’m a good person! I love Jesus!”

The only way to convince yourself of such nonsense is to obliterate the Bible’s definition of sin. You have to make sin awfully small and non-invasive to entertain the conceit that you’re done with it. And you have to become pretty self-righteous to be that blind to the sin living in your own heart.

The way to get to that point is to make sin only something that you do. You can manage the things you do (sometimes). But that trivializes sin and it mocks the holiness of God. Sin is more than something you do:

Adultery is more than sex with a woman you haven’t married. “Every man that looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart.”

Murder is more than hacking someone down in cold blood. “Every man that is angry with his brother is a murderer.”

God’s Law still applies to us, and it goes beyond external commands. It “judges the thoughts and intentions of the heart.” And our hearts are “deceitful above all things and desperately wicked. Who can know [them]?”

Anyone that thinks that they are now or can be done with sin in this life doesn’t understand the first thing about sin. And anyone that thinks they can overcome sin without applying God’s law to their heart doesn’t understand their heart, know their Bible, or the way God’s Spirit works. They’re more spiritual than the Bible, and that is horrifically wicked.

We, on the other hand, must not be wiser than Scripture. “Whoever says he has no sin is a liar.” We’re to live “not as though [we] had already obtained it, as though [we] were already perfect,” but we’re to be “renewed in our inner man day by day.” We have a “body of death” and the only way we’re delivered from it is by the death of our bodies.

If, in battle, a man stops hacking at his enemy before his enemy stops living, he’s only done half his work. Since sin is always at work in us, and since we’re to always be fighting sin so long as it is within us, we’re to always be at work. Never stop hacking.