Are you dealing with sin in your life? The angel told Joseph that he was to name the baby JESUS, “for He will save His people from their sins” (Matthew 1:21).
So, are you dealing with sin? Are you increasingly getting the victory over your sins?
Let’s back up and take a look at this thing called salvation.
Jesus died for the whole world, not just Christians, 1 John 2:2 says. It doesn’t mean that they are all saved and forgiven, though. John 3:16 is clear that the benefits of Christ’s death, such as forgiveness of sins, is dependent on faith in Jesus: “whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have everlasting life.”
Jesus took the punishment for all sins, today and tomorrow. We see that in Hebrews 10:12, in which Christ “offered one sacrifice for sins forever.” He does not need to keep offering Himself again and again for new generations. His death on the cross was sufficient for all sins, for all time. As we saw earlier, people still need to confess their sins to get the benefit of His death, burial, and resurrection.
Now let’s step back and see what’s going on behind the scenes. When Adam sinned and disobeyed God, he passed that sinful rebellion on to all of us, so we have the built-in tendency to disregard God and go our own way (Romans 3:11-12). When we were born, we had that Adamic nature in us, called the “old man” in Romans 6:6. “Old man” refers to the person you were before you believed in Christ. After believing in Christ, you became a “new creation” (2 Corinthians 5:17). What happened to the old man?
When Jesus died on the cross, the old man was crucified with Him. When He was buried, the old man was buried with Him. It is out of commission. What is still active is the “body of sin” in Romans 6:6. It used to use the Adamic nature to make itself known and act itself out in the body. Now it acts itself out only wherever faith and surrender to Christ is absent.
We can’t serve two masters. We will serve the body of sin, or Christ (Romans 6:16). And so the remedy of overcoming sin in a believer’s life is surrendering to Jesus as Lord when or way before temptation comes. Where surrender is active, sin is overcome. Where we are not surrendered, there’s a chance sin will corrupt us. For instance, if our temper is not surrendered to Christ, then the body of sin may rouse our temper to something out of control, so we say and do things we should not. But when we through the Holy Spirit detect our temper rising too much, we can surrender it and the situation and ourselves to Jesus and the temptation to sin goes away. We are then slaves of God instead of slaves of sin. If we are slaves of Jesus, we cannot be slaves of sin. See Romans 6 for the full version of this teaching. (The temptation may go away temporarily. If so, we yield to Christ as often as it reappears.)
Throughout the rest of our lives we are learning to turn all that we are and all that we have over to the rule of Jesus Christ, in full surrender. This is a life-long process. The Bible shows us where we are not surrendered so we’ll repent and give it to God. When we choose to believe God and serve Him, then we are acting out the new creation. We are living the life of the resurrected Christ (Romans 6:11-14).
We have our Adamic nature dead and buried. Not until we surrender to Christ do we get the benefit of living Christ’s life, for Christ’s life is characterized by surrender to the will of His Father. If you read Jesus’ statements in the gospel of John carefully (such as John 5:30), you should be able to pick this up.
A man, Adam, brought all this grief on us. It is therefore the responsibility of man to undo it, not a lamb or goat or bull, and not an angel. And it had to be a perfect man. Jesus came as that perfect man who could die for the sins of others (1 Corinthians 15:21-22). We die because of sin; Jesus never sinned, so He had to lay down His life deliberately. He never sinned; so He could not stay buried, so He rose from the dead. Rising from the dead, we rise with Him and identify with His resurrected life (Romans 6:8-11).
We have a specific way to deal with sin. Count ourselves dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ by surrendering to Him throughout the day (Romans 6:11-14). Sin is a spiritual problem. Surrender to Jesus is the spiritual solution.
There is no other way. That’s how we deal with sin.
