Mortifying Sin

Your sin must die. But sin doesn’t die all on its own. There’s only one way for sin to be dealt a death blow. God must kill it.

Gritting your teeth and wishing that you weren’t tempted to some particular sin won’t deliver you from it. Complaining about it to an accountability group won’t kill it. Making excuses for it won’t disable it’s stranglehold. Redefining it certainly will only empower it, not destroy it. Faith in Christ’s death is the only thing potent enough to sterilize the toxin of sin, to break its neck, to rip out its heart.

This is why we’re exhorted to mortify our sinful lusts not by waiting for our sin to die off, but by reckoning as true what God declares to be true of us in our baptism. In Christ, God counts you as dead indeed unto sin and alive to God. This is what your baptism means. Mortifying your sin begins & ends with looking to Christ. When He died, your sin died in Him. 

When you face the itch of temptation your first step of mortifying the flesh isn’t to look at your flesh. Rather, your first instinct must become to look at the objective fact of what God says about you & your sin. The Christian life is learning to confess about yourself what God has declared about you in your baptism.

This is Paul’s argument in Romans 6. If you’ve been baptized, then in God’s accounting you are dead to sin. Your job is to get with the program. Growth in grace is learning to say “amen” to the account statements which God the Father has prepared. Your debts are all paid. Your account is full of Christ’s righteousness. Kill your sin, because God tells you that through Christ, it’s already dead.

We must go to God for forgiveness for equivocating and dithering on about how hard our particular temptations are. You don’t mortify your sin by making all manner of evasions in order to preserve your pet sins, in order to justify them to yourself, in order to get other people to try to agree with you that this or that sin isn’t so foul. God is holy and just, and His eyes are too pure to look lovingly upon sin. May God give us eyes to see the glory of what was transacted in our justification, in our baptism into Christ. By Christ, our old man is crucified, and we are raised us up as new men. Paul insists that mortifying sin begins by reckoning all this as so, and this means we need to stop making any lame excuses otherwise.