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A Tale of Two Natures

You are the best of you; you are the worst of you . . .

So begins the story most of us, as believers, carry of ourselves. This is the picture I had growing up: that while the good news of the Gospel had saved me, sin was still an active force in my life and would be a source of struggle for me until the end of my days. I was dead to sin but wrestling against my flesh. I lived with an inner war. I wanted to live faithfully for Jesus, but part of me resisted and required submission. It required dying to myself daily.

Sound familiar?

Here is the problem with this picture: It does not come from the Bible. Instead, it is something we project onto the Bible. This is a common error that can happen when we process Scripture.

There are two ways we can read the Bible:

In the second case, rather than letting Scripture speak for itself, we read into the text what we expect to hear. This happens because of the tension that comes from trying to reconcile our theology and our experience. We see that Scripture says we are dead to sin, but we know we struggle with temptation, failure and so on. Our theology and experience do not seem to line up, so what do we do about that?

When we come to a point of tension between theology and experience, we need to be careful how we navigate those waters. It is fair for us to require our theology to explain our experience. Truth should not deny reality, after all. But it is not okay to allow our experience to direct our theology. Once that happens, we have stepped squarely into the “not helpful” way to read Scripture, approaching the page with a bias of experience and letting that color our interpretation of what it says. Instead, we ought to keep pressing into Scripture, allowing it to form our theology until it does match up with our experience.

A Question of Death

In the matter of whether or not we are truly dead to sin, I am reminded of a humorous scene in the movie The Princess Bride. The main character, Westley, has died, and his two sidekicks, Inigo and Fezzik, take him to a local healer named Miracle Max to see if anything can be done. Inigo tells Max that Westley is dead, but the questionable healer says the man is only “mostly dead.” It is one of many ridiculous scenes in the movie, and a memorable one because of the obvious absurdity of the idea of someone being “mostly dead.”

Here’s the thing: When we say we are dead to sin but that we still struggle against a part of ourselves, we are essentially saying Paul has applied the same logic to us. Either we are dead to sin or we are not. Death is a final kind of metaphor. We cannot be “mostly dead.” To suggest Paul is painting that picture is to say he chose a wholly inaccurate metaphor when he said we are dead to sin.

I remember being confused by the logic of this dead-but-not-really-dead-to-sin idea in my younger years and asking what it meant. I was given the explanation that we are not completely free from sin—that its power has been broken, which makes it possible for us to live in freedom from it, but that it still hangs around and plays a significant part in our lives.

Now, I love the people who sought to explain this to me, and I do not want to dishonor their wholehearted following of Jesus. I know they searched the Scriptures and pursued a deep understanding of the truth. Many believers have pursued the truth and come to similar conclusions. However, on this point, I must say the logic does not make sense. It redefines the story to be not what Paul says numerous times in Scripture.

It is not just that, through Christ’s death, sin’s power has been broken. As Paul says, and as we saw in the last chapter, we are now dead to it. We no longer have sin living in us—not even a little bit. We experience growth and there is struggle, yes, but we are not struggling against a sinful nature anymore.

But what about hyperbole? you may wonder. It is true that Paul was at one point a Jewish teacher and that Jewish teachers often used hyperbole as a teaching technique. Could he have been using exaggerated language about our being dead to sin to make a point?

The problem with this idea is that if Paul was speaking in hyperbole, he chose a profoundly poor time to do so. If this is hyperbole, much of Paul’s other salvation logic is undermined and we are left with almost no Gospel.

Here is the conundrum: Paul is saying we are dead to sin because we died with Jesus. He links our death to sin with the death of Jesus. This, however, is not the only thing Paul links to the death of Jesus. Specifically, Jesus’ death accomplished three major things for us:

Each of these hangs on one element: the death of Jesus. It is the death of Jesus that results in the killing of the sinful nature inside of us. It is the death of Jesus that frees us from a performance relationship with God. It is the death of Jesus that stands as the single sacrifice for our sins. Contending that we still have a sinful nature means selectively breaking this argument of what Christ’s death did. If I was one with Him as He died on the cross (see Galatians 2:20) but my sinful nature is not dead, then Jesus did not fully die on the cross. If I say Paul is speaking hyperbolically and I am not, in fact, fully dead to sin, what I am really saying is Jesus did not fully die.

That, in itself, is enough for me to throw out the idea of “battling natures.” However, it gets worse.

If Jesus did not fully die on the cross, then I am not fully dead to the Law, either, and Jesus did not fully forgive my sins. This means I still have to obey the Law to keep my relationship with God in a good place. It also means my salvation is now by my works and I have to somehow obtain forgiveness for myself. This puts me in the position of saving myself, rather than trusting Jesus to save me.

As you can see, the whole Gospel falls apart. This is because it all hangs together as one piece. Either all these things are accomplished for us in Jesus’ death or they all are not. To say Paul is stretching his language in one aspect is to undermine them all.

Indeed, our sinful nature has been killed—and by that, I mean it is dead. Departed. Gone. Cut away from us fully. Set as far from us as the east is from the west. As believers, we need to “get over our bad self,” for that self has left, and we are not waiting for him or her to return.

A Question of Struggle

Given that we are not going to keep going down the road of believing dual natures live within us, the natural question is this: What is happening, then? If we are dead to sin completely, what is going on in us? Why do we feel so not dead to sin, and what can we do about it? These questions lead us to some practical answers.

The first element we need to understand is this: It is possible, through our own misunderstanding, to undermine the grace God is extending to us in the Gospel. Just like the Israelites in the wilderness, we can miss God’s grace if we hear it but do not respond in faith:

For good news came to us just as to them, but the message they heard did not benefit them, because they were not united by faith with those who listened.

Hebrews 4:2

This is a crazy thought! Essentially, the truth can be staring us in the face, but if it is not met with faith, its power will not be activated in our lives. The answer could be right in front of us but be rendered powerless because our faith is aimed in the wrong direction.

Many of us put ourselves in a similar position when we see ourselves as wrestling against a sinful nature. We have faith wrapped around an idea and a perspective—that we are in a battle against ourselves—but this is not how God sees it. God sees you as dead to sin. When we position ourselves as if we are not dead to sin and ask for His grace to come to us, we are planting our starting point outside truth. This, in turn, makes it harder for us to receive into our lives what God is doing. We are disagreeing with Him before He even has the chance to get to work!

The Holy Spirit is not going to empower us to fight our sin nature because Jesus has already killed it, and the Spirit is not going to empower us to undermine what Jesus has done. He wants to convict us of our righteousness, not empower us to shadowbox a sin nature that has already been dealt with.

If we reposition ourselves in alignment with His truth and ask for His empowering, God is more than ready to step in and assist. As Hebrews 4:16 says, we can boldly come before His throne of grace and we will find help in our time of need.

So, the first reason we may struggle to live the Christian life is that we try to do it on our own. We disagree with God about what Christ has done and exclude His empowering of us before we even ask for it.

But there is a second reason we struggle: We have an enemy. Even when we start from a point of faith and see ourselves the same way God does, experiencing His grace flowing to us and empowering us to live the way He designed, Satan is still a real player on the field, and he actively resists us. Paul tells us:

For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.

Ephesians 6:12

Notice Paul’s language here: We do not wrestle against flesh and blood.1 Our battle is not on the natural plane; it is on the spiritual plane. We are wrestling with the spiritual forces of evil. That is the struggle we should expect in our lives—a struggle against the enemy, not against ourselves. Many of us see ourselves as wrestling with our own flesh and blood, which is something Paul does not teach, and we do not even consider Satan’s role. Yet there is a real battle happening between the Kingdom of heaven and the kingdom of darkness. We are in a fight against Satan and his attempt to rule the earth.

Satan uses two tactics against believers. Either he tries to get too much attention, or he tries to avoid attention altogether. Getting hooked into either of these tactics is not wise. We do not need to glorify the devil, turning him into an exalted foe. He does not deserve that. At the same time, one of the first rules of engagement in combat is never to underestimate your enemy, even if you have strategic advantages.

Satan and his minions are real, and we, as believers, are soldiers in the opposite kingdom. This means we are at the top of their priority list. We should expect to experience pushback everywhere they think they can influence us—and one of their most fruitful tactics is to camouflage themselves and to suggest to us that we are struggling with some part of ourselves when, in reality, we are experiencing their siege tactics.

A Question of Growth

The previous two struggles we discussed are external ones. We can struggle because we lack the grace and empowerment of the Spirit, and we can struggle because we have a real enemy who is trying to subdue us. But additionally, we can struggle through the process of our own internal growth. However, that growth is not a struggle against our flesh. It is actually something quite different. And examining how it works leads us to an understanding of how we can better cooperate with God in our journey toward maturity in our faith.

The reason we interpret our current struggles as wrestling with a not-fully-dead sin nature is because somewhere in the back of our minds, we have a faulty model for how the different aspects of our humanity—our nature, our desires and our actions—fit together. Namely, we know that our desires spring from somewhere, and we believe they come from our nature, which is the deepest core of who we are. What we are inclined toward flows from our being, we think, and those desires tend to play themselves out in our actions. Since our desires are sometimes sinful, we conclude that our nature is partially sinful, too. Such a belief model might look like this:

fig106

This is the picture we project onto Scripture. When we read passages like Romans 8 or Galatians 5, where Paul talks about walking according to the Spirit and not the flesh, we see ourselves in a struggle with our flesh—the unredeemed part of ourselves that is poking its head out through our sinful inclinations. It feels like it fits, so we internalize this picture. But even though it seems to describe our experience, it does not sit well with the logic of Scripture. In this picture, we use Romans 8 to undermine what Paul says in Romans 6—that we are dead to sin—and Galatians 5 to invalidate Galatians 2, where Paul says that although we were dead in our sins, now we are alive in Christ.

What if the problem is that the model above is too simple? What if there is another option? In fact, we know it is too simple. Just because we have a desire to sin at any given moment, we know that does not guarantee we will sin. God has given us a will, and we can use our will to resist temptation. In that scenario, we find another element interfering with and overriding our desire:

fig107

However, even this model has its shortcomings. If this is the way you see and experience yourself, then your journey to Christian maturity is going to be one of primarily exercising the will. You are still stuck with a partially sinful nature, so the road toward being more Christlike is one of getting better and better at using your will to check your nature when necessary. The focus is on managing behavior. Unfortunately, as discussed earlier, you do this without God’s empowering grace because you are trying to fight a battle God has not called you to fight. No wonder it feels exhausting and like you will never get ahead!

What if there is a missing piece from both of these pictures? And what if that missing piece is something that could modify our desires? If such a piece exists, it would be possible for us to be fully righteous—100 percent dead to sin—but still have sinful desires.

Believe it or not, a crystal-clear example of this exists in Scripture. We find it way back at the beginning:

So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate.

Genesis 3:6, emphasis mine

When Eve sinned by eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, she desired it before she ate it. Here was Eve, the co-pinnacle of creation, made in the image of God. She had no sin nature. Sin had never happened in human history. Yet here she was, desiring something forbidden.

What happened to bring about that desire? Eve did not desire the fruit at all before she started having a conversation with the serpent. But as she listened to the serpent, her perspective of the truth changed. That perspective shift changed her desire, even though she did not have a sinful nature.

This means our desires are not simply a reflection of our nature. They are influenced by our nature, yes, but also by the way we see the world. The way we see the world—what we assume to be true about it—might be called our mindset.

It was Eve’s mindset that changed when she talked with Satan. Before that conversation, she had implicit trust in God and did not see any reason to head in a direction other than where He led. But after the conversation, she believed there was some benefit to choosing differently. That belief, or mindset, changed her desire.

Now, here is the kicker. When we are saved, we are made new. Our nature is changed. We become 100 percent dead to sin, just like Eve was. But our mind is not completely regenerated at the moment of salvation. We still live with a mindset formed by our life experiences and various influences. While God gives us a new heart and a new spirit, our mind is still in the process of being renewed. Remember what Paul says:

Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.

Romans 12:2

How are we not conformed to this world—by warring against a sinful nature? No. By renewing our mind! This is what transforms us.2

We are not split with a righteous part and a sinful part. We are righteous, period—but we are learning how to live that out. Our journey is one of discovering what it means to be a new creation and how to live in alignment with that truth. A more complete picture of what is happening inside of each of us is this:

fig109

From this drawing, we can see that when our mindset is aligned with our righteous nature, we can expect to experience godly desires. The fruit of these godly desires will be godly actions. This is the way God designed us to live. This is what the Christian walk is meant to look like.

Paul ties all of this together and explains this process in Ephesians 4 (with my clarifying notes in brackets):

They [unbelievers] have become callous and have given themselves up to sensuality, greedy to practice every kind of impurity. [Note the context here: sinful actions.] But that is not the way you learned Christ!—assuming that you have heard about him and were taught in him, as the truth is in Jesus, to put off your old self [putting off the old self means not “wearing” an old self of sinful actions over the new self underneath; the word he chooses here is the word for taking off a coat], which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires [our desires leading to sin are deceitful—they are based on a deception in our mindset], and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds [these desires are dealt with by allowing the Spirit to renew our minds and to bring us out of a mindset of deception into truth], and to put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness [this allows us to “wear” the new self, instead of the old self, resulting in the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness, as revealed in our outer actions].

Ephesians 4:19–24

Our journey is meant to be one of allowing the Holy Spirit to renew our minds and bring us into a mindset of truth. The problem is that we are spending time and energy battling “ourselves,” which renders us stagnant and unproductive, since that is not what God would have us do. In reality, the Holy Spirit is trying to speak to us and grow us up. But we are focused on ourselves instead of what God is saying.

It is a sad reality that many of us spend more time shadowboxing an old, dead nature than hearing the living God as He is working to grow us up in Christ. Paul described the correct pursuit we ought to have in Philippians 3:

Not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect, but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. Brothers, I do not consider that I have made it my own. But one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. Let those of us who are mature think this way, and if in anything you think otherwise, God will reveal that also to you. Only let us hold true to what we have attained.

Philippians 3:12–16, emphasis mine

Paul saw himself growing into the ability to be true to what had already been given him. God had already made him a new creation. To live that out, he made a pursuit of forgetting the way he used to see things in order to grow into a new way of thinking, which he says God reveals as we need it.

A Question of Renewal

The next natural question is this: How, then, do we renew our mind? Are we supposed to spend every moment of every day monitoring our every thought and trying to correct each one? Should we confess Scripture all day, every day?

It is a good idea to pay attention to your thoughts and to confess Scripture, but the basic fact of the matter is that you cannot renew your own mind. The Spirit has to do it. You cannot bring yourself into truth. The Spirit is here to do that for you:

For who knows a person’s thoughts except the spirit of that person, which is in him? So also no one comprehends the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might understand the things freely given us by God.

1 Corinthians 2:11–12

Did you catch what Paul said here? He said we have the Holy Spirit and that the Holy Spirit knows God’s thoughts. The Holy Spirit knows God’s mindset, and He teaches us to think the way God thinks. Why? So we may comprehend the things God has already given us.

The Holy Spirit is here to unpack our understanding of the new creation God has made us to be. It is a reality that has already occurred, but we do not understand everything it means, nor do we know how to live it out. The Spirit knows all these things, and He loves to change the way we see. He loves to take the things of the Father and the Son and make them known to us. He is the Spirit of truth, who is here to guide us into all truth.

We cannot grow ourselves as believers. We can only learn to cooperate with the Spirit to allow Him to grow us. We can get in the way and shut down what God is doing, but we cannot pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps.

As a result of all this, our heart posture is critical. Are we prayerfully in submission and openness, expecting the Spirit of God to guide us into truth more and more every day? Are we willing to let God edit what we think is true about the world?

I have discovered that I do not always know what truth I am living. Much of my life is the result of thoughts I do not remember having or choices I do not remember making many years ago. Experiences have shaped me far more than I see and in ways I do not understand. I do not even know where I need to experience my mind being renewed.

As a result, I want to take the posture that God is free to adjust anything in me. I want to give God an open canvas with my life and allow Him to choose what to do. Whenever I notice thoughts or emotions surfacing—usually through experiences I know we are supposed to live above, such as fear, hurt, anger or otherwise—I ask the Spirit to speak to me and adjust my thinking. I am okay if He does not tell me what He is doing, as long as He is doing it. I do not have to understand what is happening in order for God to change me. I just want to be more and more aligned with Him.

Again, it is not something we can create or coerce to happen. It is the by-product of our relationship with the Spirit, which we invest in. At any given time, we are either in sync or out of sync with that relationship. Either we have our heart inclined toward the Spirit, with an open ear to Him, or we are distracted and preoccupied with our own life.

This is the dynamic Paul is referencing in Romans 8, where he says:

For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit. For to set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace.

Romans 8:5–6

These are Paul’s instructions for living out the reality he described in Romans 6, where he says:

We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.

Romans 6:4

Paul is saying that if we want to live “plugged in” to the natural world—the flesh—that lifestyle is supported by a focus on the flesh. When our predominant attention is given to the things on this natural plane, like our concerns, worries, problems, relationships, finances, health and even our sin habits, we have our mind set here. And because this world is fallen, to focus here is to further entrench the problem. It is to further cement the world’s perspective in our mindset, which results in “death,” or the manifestation of the brokenness in our mindset.

If, however, we want to live connected to the Spirit, allowing Him to be the predominant factor in the way we live our lives, we need to direct our attention to the realities of the spirit realm—namely, who we are in Christ, what God has done for us, God’s redemptive plan for this world, and the attributes of His heart toward us and the world. As we fixate on those realities, keeping the posture of our heart open to the direction and leading of the Spirit, we provide plenty of space for the life and peace of God to flow into us. We live with a mindset in alignment with our righteous nature.

I want you to see that Paul continually instructs us to live in this kind of moment-by-moment relationship with the Holy Spirit, walking relationally with Him and allowing Him to empower who Christ has made us to be. He does it even beyond the pages of Romans. Let’s take a look at what he says in Galatians 5 (again with my clarifying notes in brackets):

But I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh. [If we walk relationally with the Spirit, we will not live out the desires of the world.] For the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh, for these are opposed to each other, to keep you from doing the things you want to do. [The desires the world creates in you are the opposite of the desires the Spirit creates in you.] But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law. [You do not need to worry about monitoring your behavior if you are in step with the Spirit, as what will come out will be good, not sin.] Now the works of the flesh are evident: sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, orgies, and things like these. I warn you, as I warned you before, that those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God. [This is what the world without God looks like. If the world becomes our focus, this is the life we will live out. Sinful actions hinder the releasing of the rule of God through our lives.] But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law. [These are the qualities the Spirit cultivates in you as you relationally walk with Him.] And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. [You have already died to the natural world and are now alive because the Spirit has born you again in Christ.]

If we live by the Spirit, let us also keep in step with the Spirit. [Since the Spirit is the reason you’re alive, live in step with Him now.]

Galatians 5:16–25

Here, Paul is not at all discussing an inner conflict of us warring against “our flesh.” In fact, he never indicates ownership of the flesh at all; he always uses the term “the flesh.” When did “the flesh” become “our flesh”? At some point, we internalized the process he describes for living out our righteous nature. We turned it into an inner conflict that reinforces what he warns us against. By focusing on a duel between two natures, our focus remains on the flesh. When we focus on the sins we are still committing and the fallen nature we are still allegedly wrestling with, we shove out of focus what Christ has done and do not live in submission to the Spirit’s empowerment. Therefore, we reap the exact things Paul warns will creep into our lives.

This mindset is pervasive in and dangerous to the body of Christ. We mean well, but we undermine our ability to live inside the grace God provides. I have seen the fruit of this thinking bear out in many lives. But as we move into alignment with God’s truth about who we are, we are empowered and freed to live as He calls us to live.

Clay Harrington is a pastor at our church whom God is using to bring scores into the Kingdom of God. His journey has been one of learning to leave behind a false picture of himself and embrace who God says he is. Here is how he describes his journey:

“I’m just a sinner saved by grace . . .”

This was a phrase I heard a lot throughout my life, and even more so when I decided to live for Jesus. For me, this phrase unconsciously helped me form an understanding that I was a sinner, even after giving my life to Christ.

When I identified with being a sinner rather than a saint, I would constantly struggle with sin. I read books about the doctrine of “indwelling sin,” and passages such as Romans 7 and Jeremiah 17:9 would further solidify my understanding of my struggle with sin and how it’s impossible to live free from it.

One day, I remember reading Romans 6:11 as though I was reading it for the first time. I had read the whole Bible at least three or four times by then, but this time was different. This time I felt as if Jesus was saying to me, “Clay, you’re DEAD to sin!” This was a startling revelation!

As I pressed into what I felt Jesus telling me, I began to study the letters of Paul from this new lens and found myself continually amazed. Teachings from Graham Cooke, Dan Mohler and even my bro Putty Putman, as I went through the School of Kingdom Ministry, would help solidify the truth that I am a new creation who isn’t mastered by sin any longer.

This new revelation, Scripture study and teachings on being dead to sin all coalesced to bear remarkable fruit in my life. I found a new power to actually deny the impulse to lust after women and the urge to gamble. Fits of rage that had a stronghold on me for years seemed to lose their grip. No longer did offense, gossip or pride consume me, because I had embraced a new identity. Instead of believing the phrase “I’m a sinner saved by grace . . . ,” I now believe that I was a sinner who was saved by grace; now I’m a saint!

Paul passionately advises, “If we are indeed in Christ . . . then we must consider ourselves dead to sin and alive to God.” Now that I don’t consider myself mastered by sin, I’ve found I’m able to live in a new level of freedom from it.

A Question of Letting Go

I was raised to carry the picture I described earlier in this chapter. I saw myself as wrestling with a sin nature, and this description seemed to describe my experience. Then, as God began to give me a new picture, I found it difficult to let go of my old one. Looking back, I am surprised how strongly I was attached to that previous picture of myself! Somehow, I wanted to believe there was something in me that still needed to be killed.

We may struggle to change our perspective on this because it increases the level of responsibility we have to take for our lives. We find ourselves no longer wrestling with something that renders us powerless, like our sin nature. Instead, we start struggling with our mindset or deceptions—and this means there is no excuse for our misbehavior. We cannot pass the buck on to a sin nature. We are responsible for what we choose to do. Even if we struggle with sinful desires, it is our responsibility to bring them before God and allow the Spirit to minister His truth and freedom to us. We are now meant to partner with God to form every bit of our life experience, both inward and outward.

The previous way of living internalizes our failures into an identity (“I am still a sinner”), and this is profoundly shaming and detrimental to living a life that looks like Jesus. Believing we are still broken limits the way we see ourselves. We do not see ourselves the same way God sees us because we disagree with His starting point. Thus, it is difficult for us to accept God’s love because we cannot fully love ourselves. There are parts of ourselves we love and other parts we hate. We wonder, How could God feel any different toward us?

The result is that we do not live a life that looks like the one to which Scripture calls us. We are a house divided against ourselves, and we experience exactly what Jesus said: We cannot stand. Our walk with Christ becomes frustrating and disappointing. Sin plays as big a part in our experience as our relationship with God does.

It has been a long journey for me to learn how to let go of the image of “dueling Puttys”—years, to be honest. I do not think it needs to take that long for everyone, but I was fearful I might be turning into a heretic as the Lord began to reveal this truth to me through Scripture.

Is it possible I have gotten this teaching wrong? Absolutely. I must concede that. I am a human being, after all. I do not have perfect knowledge any more than anyone else does.

However, the way we know the quality of a message is by the quality of its fruit. When people ask me why they should take this idea I am presenting seriously, especially since it is not the “orthodox view,” I turn to Jesus. Jesus makes it clear that fruit is the standard by which we must measure these things:

“Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves. You will recognize them by their fruits. Are grapes gathered from thornbushes, or figs from thistles? So, every healthy tree bears good fruit, but the diseased tree bears bad fruit. A healthy tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a diseased tree bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. Thus you will recognize them by their fruits.”

Matthew 7:15–20

When it comes to the fruit of living by this teaching, it turns out the fruit in my own life—and the fruit I have seen multiplied in others’ lives—has been exactly the kind of fruit Jesus talks about. It is the same fruit Paul talks about in Galatians 5, too.

I have felt a profound change in my faith. I feel closer to God, and my relationship with Him has profoundly grown. I love others more effectively. I am a better husband and parent. I wrestle less with temptation, and it is easier to overcome it. Even though growth is uncomfortable, when I hit a growth point in my Christian walk, it is more of a joyful partnership with the Holy Spirit than a painful struggle. The Gospel continues to become more and more significant to me. It has transformed the lens through which I see myself and the rest of the world.

I love my journey with Jesus. It is the best part of my life. And I want this same journey for you. I urge you to leave behind the picture of yourself as “mostly dead” to sin and to pick up a new mentality—one I am convinced is more biblical—that says you are now completely dead to sin and learning how to be a new creation.

THINKING LIKE JESUS