Sin is a Spiritual Condition

Sin is a spiritual condition, not what a person does. As such, sin will seek to express itself in various different ways. It is the sin nature in us that is unacceptable to God, much more than the way it chooses to manifest itself to the outside world.

Trying to cover our wrong nature by committing to certain rituals whilst doing those things which are unacceptable to God, is like putting a plaster on a festering sore. We need the blood of Jesus Christ to cleanse us from all unrighteousness, and then we do not need rituals to make us appear acceptable.

We do not need to rate one sin against another in an attempt to appear more sinless or more holy than the next person. God not only sees what we do – He also sees what we think and what we desire. God even sees those thoughts and feelings that we suppress and deny ourselves conscious awareness of.

Measuring Our Moral Muscle

In order to deal with the problem of sinful conduct, we need to deal with the problem of sin-nature. If we do not do this, we end-up, as The Message Bible puts it, measuring our own moral muscle but never exercising it.

¹ With the arrival of Jesus, the Messiah, that fateful dilemma is resolved. Those who enter into Christ's being-here-for-us no longer have to live under a continuous, low-lying black cloud. ² A new power is in operation. The Spirit of life in Christ, like a strong wind, has magnificently cleared the air, freeing you from a fated lifetime of brutal tyranny at the hands of sin and death. ³ God went for the jugular when he sent his own Son. He didn't deal with the problem as something remote and unimportant. In his Son, Jesus, he personally took on the human condition, entered the disordered mess of struggling humanity in order to set it right once and for all. The law code, weakened as it always was by fractured human nature, could never have done that. ⁴ And now what the law code asked for but we couldn't deliver is accomplished as we, instead of redoubling our own efforts, simply embrace what the Spirit is doing in us. ⁵ Those who think they can do it on their own end up obsessed with measuring their own moral muscle but never get around to exercising it in real life. Those who trust God's action in them find that God's Spirit is in them - living and breathing God! ⁶ Obsession with self in these matters is a dead end; attention to God leads us out into the open, into a spacious, free life. ⁷ Focusing on the self is the opposite of focusing on God. Anyone completely absorbed in self ignores God, ends up thinking more about self than God. That person ignores who God is and what he is doing. ⁸ And God isn't pleased at being ignored. ⁹ But if God himself has taken up residence in your life, you can hardly be thinking more of yourself than of him. Anyone, of course, who has not welcomed this invisible but clearly present God, the Spirit of Christ, won't know what we're talking about. ¹⁰ But for you who welcome him, in whom he dwells - even though you still experience all the limitations of sin - you yourself experience life on God's terms. ¹¹ It stands to reason, doesn't it, that if the alive-and-present God who raised Jesus from the dead moves into your life, he'll do the same thing in you that he did in Jesus, bringing you alive to himself? When God lives and breathes in you (and he does, as surely as he did in Jesus), you are delivered from that dead life. With his Spirit living in you, your body will be as alive as Christ's! ¹² So don't you see that we don't owe this old do-it-yourself life one red cent. ¹³ There's nothing in it for us, nothing at all. The best thing to do is give it a decent burial and get on with your new life. ¹⁴ God's Spirit beckons. There are things to do and places to go! ¹⁵ This resurrection life you received from God is not a timid, grave-tending life. It's adventurously expectant, greeting God with a childlike "What's next, Papa?" ¹⁶ God's Spirit touches our spirits and confirms who we really are. We know who he is, and we know who we are: Father and children. ¹⁷ And we know we are going to get what's coming to us - an unbelievable inheritance! We go through exactly what Christ goes through. If we go through the hard times with him, then we're certainly going to go through the good times with him!

Romans 8:1-17 MSG