Can an entirely sanctified person sin?

Hi, from the Salvation Army, you're listening to Words of Life. May we live a life that reflects who you are to the world around us. In Jesus' name, amen.

Welcome back. This is Bill and Diane and Ken and I talking again about holiness. And we have a wonderful question for our discussion this week. Can an entirely sanctified person sin? Now, I would guess that's a question any Christian has asked, probably many times. We want to begin by giving a definition of sin and then we'll kind of launch out from there. Sin can be defined as whatever breaks man's relationship with God and causes separation between God and mankind. And I would just say right up front, yes, of course, an entirely sanctified person can sin.

We believe that also an entirely sanctified person is able not to sin. Let me throw that at you and see where you want to take it from there. Thanks, Vern, for the easy question.

I love that. I'll let Diane start. No, you start. Let me go back a bit.

I'm sorry for this. To me, that question borders on how you view reality. And I've been intrigued since the Reformation began that we seem to focus on God's grace as this sovereign sort of determinative reality that I must have to be saved. So it removes me because I'm such a sinner where we hear over and over again that I can never respond to him. So he's got to determine that I'm saved and keeps me saved. And my question is, when did I stop becoming a person?

All we're talking about here is all personal. Sin is personal. It's a person choosing to refuse the love of God. I don't want your law. I don't want your way.

It's a person. I wasn't made to do that. I wasn't formed to do that. It's my choice to do that. So when he saves me, it's, of course, all of his grace, but I respond.

And so there's got to be at least the illogical allowance that a person who responds can stop responding if you're going to retain personhood. If I become a block or a brick, well, then I'm just going to be saved. But biblically, I see there always are persons growing in love or not growing in love. So there's a dynamic in this whole thing called salvation. Yes, he's the Savior. Without him, I am lost.

But he wants me to be engaged personally. So that's where I go. Sin is unlove. Salvation is holy love between persons.

And so that's kind of my groundwork. And, of course, I don't want to argue that somebody can sin or they're going to lose their salvation. That seems to be the way we go to stop the discussion. My point is, no, sin is. I've chosen to curve in on myself rather than to let his self-giving love flow through my life. Yes, I've heard it identified as choosing the absence of God. Well, there you go. I don't need him.

I don't want him. As opposed to his presence in our lives continually. Dennis Kinlaw defines sin, like when you read in your Bible and you see sinful nature, or the flesh, carnal nature, depending on your translation. This was so helpful to me that sin is not a substance that's added, that like this virus that creeped in and like this thing that's in there that we have to get it out. Kinlaw, and he's a Hebrew scholar, he says, no, sin is what you just said. It's the absence of the loving presence of God. That's what sin is. And so when you choose not to be dependent upon God, you choose not to walk with him. I know a lot of people who think, well, when I was eight, I went to an altar. Or when I was at youth camp or whatever, I went to an altar. I was saved.

I'm good to go. And God has to forgive me, because by his grace, he has to when I ask him to. And I'm just going to do my own thing, though. I'm just going to live my own way, and I'm going to expect to go to heaven. And yet I'm going to say to God, get your hands off my life. How dare you tell me what to do, how to live. So that's a false way of viewing reality. You're creating an absence of God in your life if you're just saying, hey, God, I got this.

I don't really need you. It's that corrupt nature that you're talking about that's still there that we can... We can always do that. We can easily do that, where we say, oh, wow, I was just running my whole ministry without you. And we understand sin to be intentional and willful in our tradition, and I think that's thoroughly biblical. It seems to me, if I'm hearing what my culture around me says is, evangelical culture, the only hope you have in life is to be a sinful person. So the Lord has to, by his grace, cover you over with his righteousness.

I've even heard people say this. The Father doesn't see you because you're covered by Jesus and his blood. So you're never going to be changed. Your sin is always there. You're a sinner saved by grace. You're covered with the blood of Jesus. So the Father doesn't look at you.

He looks at this son. I'm thinking, well, wait a second. That's not personal. It's not real, and I don't think it's biblical. When salvation comes, he changes the essence of who we are by his essence, his grace, his life.

So it's not just a covering over, and I kind of wobble through life. I can live, as he gives his grace, holy, sanctified, heart filled with perfect love, and my essence can be changed, the nature of who I am. I don't have to always be a sinful being.

I can be one who walks with him in love. I think that's an important discussion to have, especially in the modern church. There seems to be a lot of confusion about sin and what it is and how it's dealt with. That doesn't mean I can't ever sin, but it means I can also be changed to not have to sin every time. In terms of being an entirely sanctified person and sin, I am actually just still learning this, trying to work it through, but when I define what holiness living is, I define that as being a person who knows they're desperate for God. They know they are, and they know that what pleases God most is when we realize we're completely dependent upon him. And we cannot live as we ought. We can't do it unless we are living in this continuous, mutual intimacy with him. And so as a sanctified person, that's how we live. We know we're pleasing him just because we say, I need you. And then what I have noticed in my own life, the more intimately I walk with him and in entire sanctification, he has more access to me to whisper in my heart, Diane, what was that? What did you just say?

What is that resentment in your heart? I think an entirely sanctified person is one who lives so intimately with Jesus that the Spirit has even more access to reveal, and he names it sin when he's talking to me. And I love that with him. I love my relationship with him when he can speak and say, you're not treating Bill correctly. And I say, oh, you're right.

Thank you for telling me. And he cleanses my heart. He changes me. So I think there's more growth and more ability. Once you're entirely sanctified, the growth is just huge. And that includes being able to admit when he sees sin. And it may be not like committing adultery. It's different kinds of stuff.

It's your attitude, your heart. I think you're telling the rest of the story. The part of the story that everyone seems to understand is that our sins are forgiven when we receive Christ.

But that's only half the story. People fall into the habit of confessing their sin, getting up sinning, confessing their sin again, and it becomes almost normal. And they're missing what you just described, and that is that the Holy Spirit gives us the power not to sin. That close communion.

Absolutely. And that's the part of the story when we start talking about sin that I always want to focus on. We can live by grace and resist sin, but it's by the power of God's Holy Spirit. You know, there are involuntary transgressions. There are mistakes, but there's not the willful transgression.

Exactly. When you're talking about sin, that's not a subject that's talked about anymore. We soft pedal the idea of sin in Scripture and how it's taught and defined in this modern culture.

We do. I had an officer, a pastor, look at me a couple weeks ago and say, why do you emphasize sin so much? We focus on grace.

We focus on Jesus. And I was so taken aback, I didn't know quite how to respond. And I did respond, but since then I've looked every day in my devotions and thought, well, sin is on every page of the Bible, for crying out loud, and so is grace on every page. So it's a reality we have to look at.

Let me go back. I wasn't clear earlier. If we look at ourselves as essentially sinful, then really no salvation is really possible except what God does to impose himself on us, which I feel like many people talk like and live like. I think we're talking here about a much more relational and dynamic reality where he can have access to all of me and any place where my heart is curved away from him, he can reorient that to be a heart that is curved out, outward in love. And this is daily. It's daily.

It's continuous and it's love. We don't sin willfully because we love him. We don't sin willfully because he loves us and he's pouring himself, which is love, into us. I don't know if we've mentioned Pentecost yet, but I feel like that's also a key here is that I remember the day it shocked me when I realized that Jesus rose from the dead and his disciples were with him 40 days and they weren't changed. They were still afraid. They didn't lead one person to Christ. There was no outreach, no response to his commands.

He was with them 40 days and they're still not changed. He says, unless I go, I can't send the Holy Spirit to you. He's not with you. When I leave, he will be in you. And when that occurred, then this constant sinning, this constant self-curvature was dealt with in a fundamental way, at least in some of the folks in that upper room.

And that is the reason why we're here talking like we're talking, because they said, no, this is a real life. A holy life is possible because the Holy Spirit is in me. He's the one who's convicting, loving, cleansing, keeping my heart filled with perfect love. That's a dynamic which many of, I think, the church has somehow missed, not had a real true heart Pentecost. And that's the key to all this, I think, in terms of not sinning in that volitional way we're talking about. Well, thank you. We do know that sin is a very important part of a Christian's attention. And the answer to our question is that an entirely sanctified person need not sin by the power of the Holy Spirit. Thank you.

We will be back next week, and we're going to ask the question, as I remember it, how can I be entirely sanctified? God bless you. The Salvation Army's mission, Doing the Most Good, means helping people with material and spiritual needs. You become a part of this mission every time you give to the Salvation Army. Visit salvationarmyusa.org to offer your support. You can subscribe to Words of Life on your favorite podcast store or visit salvationarmysoundcast.org. Join us next time for the Salvation Army's Words of Life.