Matt Tully

That’s a good moment to take a big step back, and I want to talk about sin. I know it’s a very basic concept that probably all of the believers listening right now would think, I know what that is. I know how to define that. But I think it’s worth taking that step back and actually trying to understand those terms a little bit more comprehensively. I have three questions that I was wondering if you could answer. First, What is sin? How would you simply define that? Second, What makes it bad? Why is it something that we would theoretically want to avoid? And third, Why is it a problem for us as humans?

Sam Storms

The most basic definition is it’s any lack of obedience to, either my commission or omission, the revealed word of God. It’s a willful violation of the will and the character and the moral law of God as revealed in Scripture. It’s both in terms of what we do and what we don’t do. It’s defiance. I love the way R. C. Sproul used to define it. He called it cosmic treason against the God of the universe. That is the most fundamental definition of what it is. Again, it’s interesting because when you deal with Christians who are really struggling in this area, they don’t so much wrestle with what sin is. What they wrestle with is what I call a defiled conscience. They find themselves convinced that they are beyond the reach of God’s love. They find their hearts are deeply burdened, which, obviously, is the work of the Holy Spirit bringing conviction. It’s the function of our human conscience. But they find themselves convinced that there’s no hope that they can be of any value to the kingdom, that they are basically a wart on the face of the body of Christ, that they’re disqualified for ministry, that God is—deep down inside—really irked with them. He basically just tolerates them rather than enjoys them and sings over them as his children. That’s the reality of what sin does. That’s the effect it has on the human heart.

Again, I don’t think the issue for Christians is that they’re sitting there wondering, Have I lost my salvation? Have I finally pushed God beyond his limits? What they’re wrestling with is this feeling of being dirty inside. They don’t have the joy of being forgiven and cleansed and justified. They don’t experience what Peter says in 1 Peter 1:8: “joy inexpressible and full of glory.” They are living convinced that they are under this dark cloud of God’s disdain. Even though they may be his child, he just puts up with them. He tolerates me. He doesn’t delight in me. That just paralyzes Christians. I’m kind of answering all your questions at once and really the last one—Why does it matter? Why should we care? It’s because it cripples and paralyzes the human heart from entering into the joy and the peace and the freedom of knowing what it is to be a redeemed, adopted, and forgiven child of God.

Matt Tully

I want to explore some of those, specifically how you respond pastorally to some of those people who are feeling those things. We’ll come back to that at the end, but I think one of the main points you’re making in your book is that the core of the answer to how we actually move past those feelings and embrace the joy of our salvation fully is through meditating a little bit more intentionally about what the Bible does tell us about how God deals with our sin. As I was looking through your book and just as I’ve read through Scripture over the years, it is amazing, when you start to pay attention, the variety of ways that the Bible describes how God deals with our sin. There are many different metaphors and pictures that God uses in the Bible to try to convince us, it seems, that he really has taken care of our sin. I wanted to pick a couple of them out just to kind of dig into it a little bit more. Maybe the most foundational, basic idea is that of forgiveness (we’ve already referenced that). We all have a sense for what that means. It’s a seemingly simple word and concept that we even employ in our own relationships with other Christians and other people in our lives. I do wonder if we don’t fully understand what Scripture is actually telling us when it uses that word forgiveness. How would you define God’s forgiveness in light of the Bible?

Sam Storms

In the book I use a silly illustration from my childhood. Somebody told me this thing is still available—the Etch-a-Sketch. It’s a little screen with the two little knobs and you can sketch whatever you want. The good thing about it is, because I’m not very artistic, when I look at what I’ve done and it’s ugly and makes no sense, all you have to do is tip the screen and suddenly it goes blank. It’s cleansed. It’s gone forever. There is no remnant of what you have horribly tried to portray on that screen. In a strange sort of way, this is what forgiveness is. There is a record, a screen on which is inscribed every transgression we’ve ever committed—past, present, and future—all of the willful violations of God’s law, all of the sins of omission (the things we fail to do but should have done). It has portrayed a very horrible, ugly, repulsive picture on the screen of our souls. Because of what God has done in Christ—taking our guilt, laying it upon his Son, him enduring the punishment we should have suffered—God, as it were, tips the screen of our souls and it all disappears.

Forgiveness means there is no record in the heart and mind of God of our transgressions that he will use against us, that he will throw back in our face, that he will someday say, Well, I’ve actually been recording all your transgressions after all, and here’s a list of them for which you now must suffer. Forgiveness is wiping clean the slate of our souls. It’s the cleansing element. It’s the release from any penal consequence of our transgressions. Now, having said that, I don’t want people to be misled. I’m not saying that our sin doesn’t affect our relationship with God, because I make a very important distinction in the book between what I call the eternal union we have with Christ and our experiential communion. In terms of our eternal union—our standing with God, our justification—all those sins (past, present, and future) have been forgiven. They have been wiped clean. They will never factor into that relationship with God as if it could somehow threaten us with eternal damnation. But our experiential communion—our daily capacity to enjoy God’s forgiveness, to walk in intimacy with the Lord—can be damaged by sin. That’s why we need to repent, we need to confess, we need to keep short accounts with the Lord. When Christians understand that distinction, they’ll understand why I can say that on one hand sin will never factor into our relationship with God in terms of our eternal salvation, but it has a major impact in terms of our experiential, daily capacity to feel God’s affection. When we’re living in unrepentant sin, it’s hard to feel the delight that God has in us. It cuts off communication. It clouds our minds. Our hearts are not being, as Paul says in Ephesians 1, enlightened to understand the hope that we have in Christ. So, sin has that effect on our experiential communion but not on our eternal union with God.

Matt Tully

That seems like a really crucial distinction that maybe sometimes we don’t make. We conflate our experience of our relationship with God—that communion side—with the eternal union that we do have and that is secured in Christ, before the foundation of the world even. Is that kind of what you’re saying?

Sam Storms

Exactly. I think what this does is there are two camps in the professing Christian world that are at the opposite end of the spectrum on this issue. There are some who say you do not have forgiveness for sins that you have not yet committed. Only for past sins and present ones that you’ve confessed do you have forgiveness; but the future sins, they’re still a threat to your life. Then, there are others who say, No, because you have complete forgiveness for past, present, and future sins, you never have to confess and you never have to repent because it’s all been dealt with once and for all. They’re both wrong. It has all been dealt with once and for all, in terms of establishing that eternal union. We are in Christ. Romans 8: Nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ, and he lists all the potential threats. But on the other hand, we need to understand that yes, there are sins that we will commit in the days ahead—or even today—that can disrupt and somehow hinder our capacity to walk in joy, peace, delight, and in a sense of freedom and God’s love on a daily experiential basis. So, I think both of those extremes are wrong, and I think if we could just understand this distinction between eternal union and experiential communion—something that is eternally true. It always has and always will be, as over and against, the fluctuations on a daily basis in our capacity to delight in God and feel his delight in us.

Matt Tully

It strikes me too that having a robust confidence in that eternal union is that fuel that we need to pursue the healthy communion with God.

Sam Storms

Precisely. It’s knowing that there’s nothing that can separate me from the love of God in Christ that impels and drives me to the pursuit of practical holiness. Contrary to what some say, and that Paul was even accused of: Let us sin all the more that grace may abound. No! Paul says, God forbid! If you truly understand as a born again child of God the reality of the extent to which Christ went to deal with the biggest problem and the greatest threat to your soul—namely, the wrath of God—that energizes the human heart. How could I not seek to obey a God who would love me to that extent? This idea that somehow the reality of our eternal union will release us to live a life of licentiousness and idolatry because we don’t have to worry about its effect on our relationship with God, that’s a horrible, horribly distortion of what the Scripture is teaching.