If I’m Saved by Grace, Why Fight Sin?

Grace and Sin

Several years ago, I struck up a conversation with my taxi driver on the way home from the airport. He was a nice man and a committed Muslim. When he found out I was a pastor, he was eager to talk about our different faiths, and he shared one of his major objections to Christianity: “You believe God will forgive you no matter what you do,” he said, “and therefore, you’ll live however you want.” He was convinced that abundant grace must lead to abundant sin.

We know he was mistaken. We know that we cannot continue in sin so that grace may abound (Rom. 6:1–2). We know that God calls us to flee from evil and pursue righteousness (1 Tim. 6:11). Yet we also know this isn’t easy. And although we would not embrace my taxi driver’s logic, we might see how to prove his point in the way we live. For example, we might become apathetic about resisting temptation, growing far too content with certain sinful patterns, while declaring our dependence upon God’s grace. We might find ourselves acting as if freedom from condemnation means we are free to continue in sin.

But Martyn Lloyd-Jones says living this way demonstrates that we have “failed to understand . . . the whole object and purpose of grace.”¹ In his grace, God not only pardons us; he also transforms us. Having been justified, we are now being sanctified (1 Thess. 5:23). And God’s sanctifying grace makes continuing in sin—willfully and unrepentantly—illogical, inappropriate, and ultimately impossible.

Why? Because his grace has fundamentally changed our relationship to sin. We are now “dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus” (Rom. 6:11). Consider what this means.

Christians are dead to sin.

Throughout the Bible, we see that sin does not merely consist in our personal failures. Sin is also a powerful force that has reigned throughout history, causing chaos and destruction (Rom. 5:21). You can think of sin as a wicked tyrant seated on a terrible throne, looking out on this fallen world full of people dominated by his dark authority. But sin sees some who have escaped. They have left his dominion in the only way possible: They have died.

When we die, we leave one realm and enter another. Death does not send us into oblivion, ending our existence. Death is a departure that brings us to a new destination. And Christians have left sin’s dominion. We have “died to sin” (Rom. 6:2).

At funerals, you often hear people say, “We lost him,” or “She passed away.” Similarly, sin could say the same thing about every Christian. When God saved us, sin lost us. We passed away from the realm of sin’s power. God “has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son” (Col. 1:13).

In this kingdom, “we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins” (Col. 1:14). And as my taxi driver recognized, this means that there is no condemnation for us. But this also means that sin has lost its mastery over us. We have been set free from sin’s rule, and there’s no going back. We cannot live as if nothing has changed. We cannot go on willfully, unrepentantly living in sin.

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Christians are alive to God.

Saying Christians are dead to sin is only half of the good news. We are also alive to God. Having been born again and blessed with the indwelling presence of God’s Holy Spirit, we are now set apart for his good purposes in this world. And there is a biblical word for people like this: saints.

Are you comfortable calling yourself a saint? Many of us would say, “Paul was a saint. My grandmother was a saint. But me? Not so much.” The reason for our negative response is likely a faulty definition. A lot of people reserve the word saint for some special class of super-spiritual Christians. But that’s not what the word means. A saint is someone whose life has been set apart and dedicated to God. A saint is someone alive to God. A saint is simply a Christian.

We see this all over the New Testament. The word saint appears over forty times in Paul’s letters, and it always describes believers. Regular believers. Not some unique class of believer. For example, Paul begins his letter to the Romans by addressing “all those in Rome who are loved by God and called to be saints” (Rom. 1:7; cf. 1 Cor. 1:2; 2 Cor. 1:1; Eph. 1:1; Phil. 1:1; Col. 1:2).

Sinner is not our defining label anymore. We are saints. Saints who sin, but saints nonetheless.

This means that when God calls us to be holy, he is not commanding us to pursue an identity that we may or may not attain. He is calling us to live out the identity we already have. He is not calling us to become something we are not. He is calling us to be who we are in Christ.

On our own, we would be powerless to resist sin’s demands and pursue God’s commands. But we’re not on our own.

Christians are in Christ.

Christians are dead to sin and alive to God because we are “in Christ Jesus” (Rom. 6:11). The words “in Christ” or some variation of it—such as “in him” or “with him”—appear hundreds of times in the New Testament, and they often refer to the doctrine of union with Christ.

Union with Christ refers to the believer’s position in Christ established at conversion, experienced in all of life, and enjoyed forever. This union is the source of every spiritual blessing we enjoy, including the strength to fight sin and pursue holiness.

On our own, we would be powerless to resist sin’s demands and pursue God’s commands. But we’re not on our own. When God saved us he united us with Christ. And in this union with Christ, something remarkable happens: We become so identified with Christ that we can now say we died and rose with him. His story becomes our story.

We know Jesus’s story. He was crucified, died, and was buried. But did you know that when you came to believe in him, you were buried with him? Paul says, “We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death” (Rom. 6:4). We were crucified with him, and our old lives enslaved to sin ended (Rom. 6:6). But that’s not all.

“Just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too . . . walk in newness of life” (Rom. 6:4). In union with Christ, we live with Christ. God caused us, who once walked in spiritual death, to rise in spiritual life (Eph. 2:5–6). And like children learning to walk, we don’t take off running right away. We still stumble, trip, and fall. We still struggle with sin. But in Christ, we really do walk in newness of life. And our job is to embrace and enjoy this reality by striving after a life that honors our Savior.

Christians cannot continue in sin.

“Are we to continue in sin so that grace may abound? By no means! How can we who died to sin still live in it?” (Rom. 6:1–2). A Christian is someone whose fundamental relationship to sin has changed. We have died to sin. We live to God. We are united with Christ.

All of this is a gift of God’s grace. And like any good gift, it is meant to be enjoyed. Enjoying the gift of new life in Christ means resisting the sin that brings us pain, hurts others, and grieves God (Eph. 4:30). And enjoying the gift of new life in Christ means pursuing the kind of life Christ himself lives: delighting to do the will of the Father (John 4:34).

As Christians, we have been crucified with Christ. We are dead to sin. And we have been raised with Christ. We are alive to God. We are saints. Saints who sin, but saints nonetheless.

Believe that with all your heart, and then fight sin with all your might.

Brad Wetherell is the author of Saved to Sin No More: How Union with Christ Empowers a Life of Holiness.

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