Those of us who identify as “born again”–as Christians–know that when Jesus comes into our lives all of our sins go away, because we’re new creations.
Right?
No, that isn’t true at all. Not in the slightest.
Unlike angels, we are not pure spirit. But being spirits, we have souls, and live in bodies. As long as we are earthbound, we are tethered to the flesh, and the lines blur. In the words of C.S. Lewis, we are “hybrid creatures”–neither this, nor that, nor the other–yet somehow all three simultaneously.
And therein lies the root of our struggle:
“the spirit lusteth against the flesh, and the flesh against the spirit.” The two are contrary to one another. It is in this tension that every Christian walking the planet lives. It is a sort of “schizophrenic” existence, having these two natures. There is a constant push and pull–an internal tug of war–raging inside of us.
We are people of two worlds.
Some days, our baser nature wins; others, it seems we’ve never been closer to God. Yet still others, we go from victory to defeat in the span of a heartbeat… “O, wretched man am I! Who shall deliver me from this body of death?”
Knowing the price Jesus paid, we resolve to struggle on–to “work out our own salvation with fear and trembling.”
And still we fall back–in a thousand ways, both large and small.
But God gives more grace.
The fact remains: sin-free we will never be in our sojourn here, in this vale of tears. His blood, however, covers us.
How God will separate spirit from soul from body when we each shuffle off this mortal coil, I do not know.
What I do know is: there is only one sin that can keep us from Him:
Refusing the free gift of His Son.
