Reckoning with Personal Failure
00:00:00.000 | [Music]
00:00:04.000 | "If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation," says Paul in 2 Corinthians 5:17.
00:00:11.000 | It's an amazing statement.
00:00:12.000 | In Christ, we participate in the new creation now.
00:00:17.000 | We are new creatures. We are regenerated.
00:00:20.000 | We have been born a second time.
00:00:22.000 | My inner man is raised from the dead by the Spirit of Christ himself.
00:00:27.000 | My sins are forgiven. I've been crucified with Christ.
00:00:29.000 | It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives within me.
00:00:32.000 | That's Galatians 2.
00:00:34.000 | There are so many glorious pictures of the victorious Christian life.
00:00:38.000 | And yet, despite all these glorious new life realities, we still sin.
00:00:43.000 | We're still duped by the world, by the devil, and by our own remaining evil within.
00:00:49.000 | Some of the very same false promises that captured our attention as unbelievers
00:00:52.000 | continue to catch our eyes as believers.
00:00:56.000 | This is one of the great disappointments of the Christian life,
00:00:59.000 | to be so deeply different, and yet so easily suckered into the same sins.
00:01:05.000 | On Friday, we looked at whether our repentance is genuine if we keep confessing the same sin.
00:01:10.000 | That was APJ 1623.
00:01:12.000 | Today, we address how do we reckon with our sin failures as redeemed Christians.
00:01:16.000 | This is the key theme taken up in the following clip from a 2001 sermon by John Piper.
00:01:21.000 | The clip was sent in to us from a listener named Lucy in Woking, England.
00:01:26.000 | Here's Pastor John preaching on Romans chapter 7.
00:01:30.000 | Two verses. Verse 17.
00:01:33.000 | So now, no longer am I the one doing it, but sin which dwells in me.
00:01:42.000 | That's where I get the phrase, and others get the phrase, "indwelling sin."
00:01:48.000 | See the phrase, "dwell in me"?
00:01:52.000 | It's like a resident.
00:01:55.000 | An ugly, seditious, warring against my soul resident.
00:02:01.000 | Verse 20.
00:02:03.000 | But if I am doing the very thing I do not want, I am no longer the one doing it,
00:02:09.000 | but sin which dwells in me.
00:02:12.000 | There it is again. Two texts talk about this reality called "indwelling sin."
00:02:19.000 | So his second front, the first one is to defend the law and to show that the problem is not that I have made the law to be sin.
00:02:27.000 | Rather, on the second front, he's defending the reality that there is such a thing as indwelling sin rooted down deep in my life.
00:02:38.000 | And I need to put it to death. I need to make war on it. But it's there and it's real.
00:02:44.000 | He's a Christian. He wants to defend the fact that he's a Christian.
00:02:49.000 | I have a new nature. I have been born again. I have a taste for the things of God.
00:02:55.000 | Verse 22 would be one of several verses we could look at for this point.
00:03:01.000 | "I joyfully concur with the law of God in the inner man."
00:03:08.000 | "I love the law of God," he says. "I rejoice in the law, but I see a different law in my members, the members of my body."
00:03:20.000 | I have been changed. I'm alive to God. I'm alive to the law. I have a spiritual taste now.
00:03:26.000 | There's a nature in me that's not just carnal.
00:03:29.000 | Now that brings us to the most controversial matter that I pointed out three weeks ago and said I would come back to in order to argue the point that I made there.
00:03:40.000 | And the point was this. Is Romans 7, 14 to 25 the pre-Christian Paul?
00:03:50.000 | Is he describing his experience before he got saved?
00:03:54.000 | Or is it the Christian Paul describing his experience in part as he experiences it now?
00:04:03.000 | That's the big issue. And scholars line up on both of those sides.
00:04:09.000 | Godly scholars, evangelical scholars, my friends line up on those two sides.
00:04:16.000 | And I told you which side I stand on and said I would be back to give you reasons. And here I am.
00:04:24.000 | The side where I stand is I believe he's talking about Christian experience.
00:04:30.000 | And I want to defend that, but first let me tell you why it matters to me.
00:04:36.000 | Because you might be sitting there saying, "That's about as uninteresting to me as anything I can imagine."
00:04:42.000 | Here's the reason I think it should be very interesting to you and crucial to you.
00:04:49.000 | As I've watched why people don't come to Christ for their eternal joy and rather choose everlasting destruction and misery, there are several kinds of reasons.
00:05:05.000 | The one that I have in mind here is a hopelessness that settles in on the soul that doesn't say the gospel is false.
00:05:17.000 | It just says there's no hope for me. That's all.
00:05:23.000 | You can argue until you're blue in the face on the intellectual level with such an objection and say, "Look, you're probably right."
00:05:31.000 | It's a frightening thing, isn't it?
00:05:35.000 | One of the sources, not the only one, of this hopelessness is an unbiblical perfectionism
00:05:46.000 | that does not provide people with categories to understand their own failure as a Christian.
00:05:57.000 | And therefore, when they stumble and fall into a sin or some repeated sinning,
00:06:05.000 | they don't have any way to explain what's going on in their lives and they despair that they are a Christian.
00:06:13.000 | And you remember three weeks ago I pointed to J.I. Packer who argued and was so thankful for the book on indwelling sin by John Owen written 350 years ago.
00:06:31.000 | He said that he was saved back in the 40s and immediately ushered into a kind of perfectionistic Christianity
00:06:38.000 | that believed in a kind of higher life, a second experience Christianity after which you had this experience,
00:06:46.000 | you were above the struggle, walking in triumph, walking in victory, no more battles.
00:06:53.000 | And he said, "I almost committed suicide, but then I read Owen and Ryle
00:07:01.000 | who helped me understand a more balanced biblical understanding of sin in the believer's life."
00:07:11.000 | Some of you asked me where you could get that book and it's in the sixth volume of the works of John Owen,
00:07:20.000 | 150 pages in the middle of that book.
00:07:23.000 | And I went online yesterday and found 10 stores where you can get it, all kinds of prices.
00:07:32.000 | The problem is you have to be desperate to read it because it's written in almost unintelligible 17th century English.
00:07:44.000 | Sorry, the best things have to be dug for. If you rake, you get leaves. If you dig, you get diamonds.
00:07:56.000 | And if you got a raking mind, you'll settle for leaves. If you got a digging mind, you get diamonds.
00:08:03.000 | I commend Owen as a good mind.
00:08:07.000 | Now, to further put you off, here's the title.
00:08:13.000 | "The Nature, Power, Deceit and Prevalency of the Remainders of Indwelling Sin in Believers,
00:08:18.000 | Together with the Ways of its Working and Means of Prevention,
00:08:22.000 | Opened, Evinced and Applied with a Resolution of Sundry Cases of Conscience Thereunto, Appertaining."
00:08:31.000 | I don't expect anybody to go looking for this book, no.
00:08:35.000 | But I promise you that if you read those 150 pages, you probably will not shoot yourself because of your remaining imperfection.
00:08:47.000 | You will be set on a course to know how to do battle with sin and understand your failures that saved J.I. Packer's life and I believe will save many.
00:08:59.000 | So my aim this morning is to argue that this passage is about that.
00:09:07.000 | Namely, Christian experience in its moments of failure.
00:09:12.000 | That's what I want to argue. This text is about that and providing you with categories for understanding it.
00:09:19.000 | Now, one more qualification before I get into my five arguments.
00:09:26.000 | Please, please, please don't misunderstand me as saying this text teaches make peace with sin.
00:09:35.000 | Pastor John said, "Everybody's gonna sin and so relax, make peace with sin. It's no big deal."
00:09:44.000 | That's not what I'm saying. In fact, I would say exactly the opposite.
00:09:48.000 | This text is teaching make war with sin.
00:09:53.000 | Make war with sin. What you read here is about a man who is on the war path against his sin.
00:10:00.000 | And now he's got a spiritual nature that enables him to identify for what it really is as horrid as it is.
00:10:07.000 | And he hates it.
00:10:10.000 | The evidence of being a Christian is not that there are no tactical defeats in the war.
00:10:19.000 | But that you keep fighting till the promised victory is given.
00:10:25.000 | That's the evidence of being a Christian.
00:10:28.000 | Powerful. Thank you, Lucy, for this clip.
00:10:30.000 | A decade after the sermon, the Banner of Truth published a Puritan paperback version of the John Owen book here mentioned.
00:10:37.000 | It was abridged. It was made easier to read.
00:10:39.000 | And it was given the simpler and much, much less amusing title of Indwelling Sin in Believers.
00:10:45.000 | The book is available online, Indwelling Sin in Believers by John Owen.
00:10:50.000 | Lucy sent the clip. She writes, "Hi, Tony. Many thanks to you and John Piper for the EPJ podcast. I love it.
00:10:55.000 | I was first introduced to John Piper's teaching when I was at a university in Edinburgh.
00:10:59.000 | By a devout Christian friend, I began listening to Piper's work and was amazed to find a seven-part series on Romans 7,
00:11:05.000 | a passage about the ongoing battle with sin, and later discovered John Piper had spent eight years expounding Romans.
00:11:13.000 | I loved discovering the debate about whether Paul was talking about his pre-Christian or his Christian experience in this passage
00:11:19.000 | because I had never heard teaching like this before."
00:11:22.000 | Thank you, Lucy. This clip comes from that series, Who is This Divided Man? Part 3, preached on June 24, 2001.
00:11:30.000 | And it's available along with the whole Roman series at DesiringGod.org.
00:11:37.000 | Well, we are called to love our neighbors as ourselves.
00:11:40.000 | How do we love our neighbors when they don't really need us?
00:11:43.000 | Even worse, how do we love our neighbors when they mostly ignore us?
00:11:48.000 | It's a question from a disheartened listener to the podcast, and it's up next time.
00:11:52.000 | I'm your host, Tony Reinke. We're rejoined in studio with Pastor John next time for that on Friday.
00:11:57.000 | And we'll see you then.
00:11:59.000 | [END]
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