"If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation," says Paul in 2 Corinthians 5:17. It's an amazing statement. In Christ, we participate in the new creation now. We are new creatures. We are regenerated. We have been born a second time. My inner man is raised from the dead by the Spirit of Christ himself.

My sins are forgiven. I've been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives within me. That's Galatians 2. There are so many glorious pictures of the victorious Christian life. And yet, despite all these glorious new life realities, we still sin. We're still duped by the world, by the devil, and by our own remaining evil within.

Some of the very same false promises that captured our attention as unbelievers continue to catch our eyes as believers. This is one of the great disappointments of the Christian life, to be so deeply different, and yet so easily suckered into the same sins. On Friday, we looked at whether our repentance is genuine if we keep confessing the same sin.

That was APJ 1623. Today, we address how do we reckon with our sin failures as redeemed Christians. This is the key theme taken up in the following clip from a 2001 sermon by John Piper. The clip was sent in to us from a listener named Lucy in Woking, England.

Here's Pastor John preaching on Romans chapter 7. Two verses. Verse 17. So now, no longer am I the one doing it, but sin which dwells in me. That's where I get the phrase, and others get the phrase, "indwelling sin." See the phrase, "dwell in me"? It's like a resident.

An ugly, seditious, warring against my soul resident. Verse 20. But if I am doing the very thing I do not want, I am no longer the one doing it, but sin which dwells in me. There it is again. Two texts talk about this reality called "indwelling sin." 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.

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. And I need to put it to death. I need to make war on it. But it's there and it's real. He's a Christian. He wants to defend the fact that he's a Christian.

I have a new nature. I have been born again. I have a taste for the things of God. Verse 22 would be one of several verses we could look at for this point. "I joyfully concur with the law of God in the inner man." "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." I have been changed. I'm alive to God. I'm alive to the law. I have a spiritual taste now. There's a nature in me that's not just carnal. 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.

And the point was this. Is Romans 7, 14 to 25 the pre-Christian Paul? Is he describing his experience before he got saved? Or is it the Christian Paul describing his experience in part as he experiences it now? That's the big issue. And scholars line up on both of those sides.

Godly scholars, evangelical scholars, my friends line up on those two sides. And I told you which side I stand on and said I would be back to give you reasons. And here I am. The side where I stand is I believe he's talking about Christian experience. And I want to defend that, but first let me tell you why it matters to me.

Because you might be sitting there saying, "That's about as uninteresting to me as anything I can imagine." Here's the reason I think it should be very interesting to you and crucial to you. 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.

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. It just says there's no hope for me. That's all. 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." It's a frightening thing, isn't it?

One of the sources, not the only one, of this hopelessness is an unbiblical perfectionism that does not provide people with categories to understand their own failure as a Christian. And therefore, when they stumble and fall into a sin or some repeated sinning, they don't have any way to explain what's going on in their lives and they despair that they are a Christian.

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. He said that he was saved back in the 40s and immediately ushered into a kind of perfectionistic Christianity that believed in a kind of higher life, a second experience Christianity after which you had this experience, you were above the struggle, walking in triumph, walking in victory, no more battles.

And he said, "I almost committed suicide, but then I read Owen and Ryle who helped me understand a more balanced biblical understanding of sin in the believer's life." Some of you asked me where you could get that book and it's in the sixth volume of the works of John Owen, 150 pages in the middle of that book.

And I went online yesterday and found 10 stores where you can get it, all kinds of prices. The problem is you have to be desperate to read it because it's written in almost unintelligible 17th century English. Sorry, the best things have to be dug for. If you rake, you get leaves.

If you dig, you get diamonds. And if you got a raking mind, you'll settle for leaves. If you got a digging mind, you get diamonds. I commend Owen as a good mind. Now, to further put you off, here's the title. "The Nature, Power, Deceit and Prevalency of the Remainders of Indwelling Sin in Believers, Together with the Ways of its Working and Means of Prevention, Opened, Evinced and Applied with a Resolution of Sundry Cases of Conscience Thereunto, Appertaining." I don't expect anybody to go looking for this book, no.

But I promise you that if you read those 150 pages, you probably will not shoot yourself because of your remaining imperfection. 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.

So my aim this morning is to argue that this passage is about that. Namely, Christian experience in its moments of failure. That's what I want to argue. This text is about that and providing you with categories for understanding it. Now, one more qualification before I get into my five arguments.

Please, please, please don't misunderstand me as saying this text teaches make peace with sin. Pastor John said, "Everybody's gonna sin and so relax, make peace with sin. It's no big deal." That's not what I'm saying. In fact, I would say exactly the opposite. This text is teaching make war with sin.

Make war with sin. What you read here is about a man who is on the war path against his sin. And now he's got a spiritual nature that enables him to identify for what it really is as horrid as it is. And he hates it. The evidence of being a Christian is not that there are no tactical defeats in the war.

But that you keep fighting till the promised victory is given. That's the evidence of being a Christian. Powerful. Thank you, Lucy, for this clip. A decade after the sermon, the Banner of Truth published a Puritan paperback version of the John Owen book here mentioned. It was abridged. It was made easier to read.

And it was given the simpler and much, much less amusing title of Indwelling Sin in Believers. The book is available online, Indwelling Sin in Believers by John Owen. Lucy sent the clip. She writes, "Hi, Tony. Many thanks to you and John Piper for the EPJ podcast. I love it.

I was first introduced to John Piper's teaching when I was at a university in Edinburgh. By a devout Christian friend, I began listening to Piper's work and was amazed to find a seven-part series on Romans 7, a passage about the ongoing battle with sin, and later discovered John Piper had spent eight years expounding Romans.

I loved discovering the debate about whether Paul was talking about his pre-Christian or his Christian experience in this passage because I had never heard teaching like this before." Thank you, Lucy. This clip comes from that series, Who is This Divided Man? Part 3, preached on June 24, 2001. And it's available along with the whole Roman series at DesiringGod.org.

Well, we are called to love our neighbors as ourselves. How do we love our neighbors when they don't really need us? Even worse, how do we love our neighbors when they mostly ignore us? It's a question from a disheartened listener to the podcast, and it's up next time. I'm your host, Tony Reinke.

We're rejoined in studio with Pastor John next time for that on Friday. And we'll see you then.