Chinonso brought two notebooks to our first meeting and laid them side by side on my desk.
The first was a thin exercise book with a faded blue cover, the kind you buy from a bookseller’s table outside a secondary school. He had used it at the church he attended as a teenager. On the inside page, in careful capital letters, he had written the sentence his youth leader repeated every week: “WE ARE ALL SINNERS. WE WILL SIN EVERY DAY IN THOUGHT, WORD AND DEED UNTIL JESUS COMES.”
The second notebook was hardbacked and expensive, with a conference logo stamped in gold. He had bought it eight years later at a large gathering in Lagos where a visiting speaker had preached for three nights on the righteousness of God. On its first page, in the same careful capitals, Chinonso had written: “GOD DOES NOT SEE MY SIN. I HAVE NOTHING TO CONFESS. I AM RIGHTEOUS.”
Then he told me why he had come. For most of his adult life he had been a casual liar. Nothing dramatic. He told his manager he was stuck on Third Mainland Bridge when he was still at home in Yaba. He told his wife a client meeting had run late when he had stopped to watch the second half of a match at a viewing centre. He told the mechanic he would pay on Friday when he knew he would not. The lies came out of him so easily that he often did not notice them until later.
Under the first notebook, he had felt guilty about the lying and completely hopeless. “We all sin every day,” he would tell himself. “That is just who I am.” Under the second notebook, he had stopped feeling guilty at all. “God does not see it,” he told himself. “It is under the blood.”
What had brought him to my office was a sentence from his wife the previous Saturday. She had caught him in a small and pointless lie about where he had been that afternoon, and she had not shouted. She had simply said, very quietly, “Nonso, I no longer know when you are telling me the truth.”
He tapped the two notebooks. “Pastor, one of these told me I could never change. The other told me I did not need to. I believed both of them, one after the other. And I am still the same man.”
Two teachings, one result
PunchlineChinonso had been taught two errors that look like opposites. They sound different and they feel different, yet they leave a believer in exactly the same place.
The first error gives the believer a defeated identity. It says, in effect, that the Christian is a sinner in the same way he was before he was saved, only now he is a forgiven one. Sin is expected, constant and unbeatable. The best you can hope for is to feel sorry about it. This teaching usually comes from serious and sincere people who rightly want to keep believers humble and honest. But it sets the expectation of the Christian life so low that defeat becomes normal. It cannot explain why the New Testament keeps telling believers to stop sinning, as though they actually could.
The second error removes the believer’s honesty. It begins with a glorious truth, that the believer has been made righteous in Christ, and then draws a false conclusion from it: that nothing the believer does can really be called sin, and that confession is unnecessary or even a lack of faith. This teaching usually comes from people who have rightly seen the freedom of the gospel and want believers to stop living under condemnation. But it leaves a man telling his wife that his lies are under the blood while she wonders whether to believe anything he says.
The New Covenant perspective on sin is neither of these. It holds together two things that these errors pull apart: a settled freedom from sin’s dominion, and a serious, honest call to obedience. To see it, we need to read Romans 6 and the first letter of John together.
The believer is no longer under sin’s dominion, and the believer is still called to honest confession and real obedience. The New Covenant keeps both truths in one hand.
What Romans 6 says has happened
Paul opens Romans 6 by answering an objection. He has just written that “where sin abounded, grace did much more abound” (Romans 5:20), and he knows someone will ask, “Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound?” His answer is immediate: “God forbid. How shall we, that are dead to sin, live any longer therein?” (Romans 6:1-2).
Notice what Paul does not say. He does not say, “You must not continue in sin, because you might lose your salvation.” He does not say, “You will continue in sin, because you are only human.” He says that continuing in sin is out of character with something that has already happened. The believer is dead to sin. Paul then explains what he means by pointing to the believer’s union with Christ in baptism, and he says, “our old man is crucified with him, that the body of sin might be destroyed, that henceforth we should not serve sin” (Romans 6:6).
The goal of that crucifixion is stated plainly: “that henceforth we should not serve sin.” The old self, the person you were in Adam, has been put to death with Christ. Sin’s claim on you as your master has been broken. Then Paul describes the death and resurrection of Christ Himself, because what is true of Him is true of those joined to Him:
Now if we be dead with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with him: Knowing that Christ being raised from the dead dieth no more; death hath no more dominion over him. For in that he died, he died unto sin once: but in that he liveth, he liveth unto God.
“Death hath no more dominion over him.” The word dominion translates kurieuo, which means to rule as lord. Death once had a legal claim on Jesus because He had taken our sin upon Himself. When He died, He paid that claim in full, and when He rose, death had nothing left to hold Him with. Death’s lordship over Him simply ended.
“For in that he died, he died unto sin once.” Christ never sinned, so He did not die to sin in the sense of stopping a sinful habit. He died to sin’s whole realm, its power and its penalty, once for all. “But in that he liveth, he liveth unto God.” His resurrection life is lived entirely toward the Father.
And Paul’s point is that this is now your story. You died with Him. You live with Him. Sin’s lordship has ended in you as death’s lordship ended in Him. That is the first truth Chinonso’s blue notebook had hidden from him. A believer is not simply a sinner with a better lawyer. He is a person who has changed realms.
Reckon, refuse and yield
Having said what has happened, Paul turns to what the believer must do. This is where the second notebook went wrong. The facts of Romans 6 make obedience possible, and so Paul commands it.
He begins: “Likewise reckon ye also yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord” (Romans 6:11). The word reckon is logizomai, an accountant’s word. It means to calculate, to count something as true and to act on it. Paul is asking you to do your sums correctly, without pretending and without waiting to feel dead to sin. The account says you died with Christ. Count it so.
That matters because feelings lag behind facts. Chinonso did not feel dead to lying. The lies still rose to his lips before he had thought about them. Reckoning means that when the old habit rises, you do not say, “This is who I am.” You say, “This is no longer who I am, and I will not obey it.”
Then come two commands. The first is a refusal: “Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, that ye should obey it in the lusts thereof” (Romans 6:12). Notice that Paul assumes sin will still try to reign. It still presents its demands through the desires of the body. The believer still hears sin’s voice. He no longer has to obey it. Sin has been dethroned, and Paul says, in effect, do not crown it again.
The second is a positive offering: “Neither yield ye your members as instruments of unrighteousness unto sin: but yield yourselves unto God, as those that are alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness unto God” (Romans 6:13). The word instruments is hopla, which often means weapons. Your tongue, your hands, your eyes and your mind are weapons, and they will be placed at someone’s disposal. Chinonso’s tongue had been a weapon on the wrong side for twenty years. Paul’s command went further than stopping the lies: hand that tongue over to God as a weapon of truth.
Then Paul gives the promise that stands under every command: “For sin shall not have dominion over you: for ye are not under the law, but under grace” (Romans 6:14). This is a statement of fact. Sin shall not have dominion. And the reason is surprising: because you are under grace. Grace is not the thing that keeps sin in power. Grace is the thing that breaks it.
So Romans 6 gives no support to a defeated identity. It also gives no support to careless living. It tells the believer what is true, tells him to count on it, and then tells him to act like it.
Walking in the light
If Romans 6 corrects the blue notebook, the first letter of John corrects the gold one. John writes as an old man to churches he loves, and he begins by explaining what fellowship with God involves:
This then is the message which we have heard of him, and declare unto you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all. If we say that we have fellowship with him, and walk in darkness, we lie, and do not the truth: But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship one with another, and the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin. If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.
“God is light, and in him is no darkness at all.” Light in John’s writing means truth, purity and openness. Darkness means falsehood, sin and concealment. You cannot walk with God and keep part of your life in the dark.
But look carefully at what walking in the light means. John does not say that those who walk in the light never sin. If that were his meaning, he would hardly add that “the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin.” People who never sin do not need cleansing. Walking in the light means living openly before God, hiding nothing from Him, letting His light expose whatever is there.
And the verb cleanseth is in the present tense. The blood of Jesus goes on cleansing those who walk in the light. The sacrifice is never repeated, for Christ died “once” (Romans 6:10). Its power is continually applied to those who keep coming into the light.
Then verse 8: “If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.” John has in mind people who claimed that sin was no longer an issue for them. Whether they meant that their bodies did not matter, or that their spiritual state put them beyond moral failure, the result was the same. They had stopped telling the truth about themselves.
Some sincere Bible teachers today hold that this chapter is addressed to unbelievers or to false teachers, and that John’s words about confession therefore do not apply to Christians. They are trying to protect believers from a constant sense of condemnation, and that is a worthy aim. But the text makes that reading difficult. John says “we,” including himself. He calls his readers “My little children” in the very next verse (1 John 2:1). He writes so that their “fellowship” may be full (1 John 1:3). The most natural reading is that John is writing to believers about how believers handle sin.
That does not put believers back under condemnation. It does mean that the gold notebook was wrong. A believer who says “I have nothing to confess” while lying to his wife every weekend is not walking in the light. He is deceiving himself, and, as Chinonso discovered, he is usually the last to know.
An Advocate for children who sin
John continues with one of the most balanced statements on sin in the New Testament. “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9). Then: “My little children, these things write I unto you, that ye sin not. And if any man sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous: And he is the propitiation for our sins” (1 John 2:1-2).
Notice the order. John’s first aim is “that ye sin not.” He has no intention of making sin normal. He writes to stop it. The blue notebook expected believers to sin every day, and so it never really aimed at anything else. John aims higher.
But John is also realistic. “And if any man sin.” He does not say, “If any man sin, he was never really a believer,” or “If any man sin, he has fallen out of the family.” He says, “we have an advocate with the Father.” The relationship is a family one. The believer who sins is still a child speaking to his Father. He is not waiting in a dock for a judge to decide his case.
The word advocate is parakletos, one called alongside to help, used here of a counsel for the defence. Jesus stands beside the believer who has sinned. And His defence is Himself: He is “the propitiation for our sins,” the sacrifice that fully satisfied God’s justice. That is why John can call God “faithful and just” to forgive. When God forgives a confessing believer, He is honouring a payment already made.
So confession, in the New Covenant, is not a way of getting saved again. Your standing as a child of God does not rise and fall with each sin and each confession. Confession is the way a child keeps his fellowship with his Father open and honest. It is agreement with God about what you did, made from the security of what Christ has done.
NuggetThe gold notebook had told Chinonso that confession contradicted his righteousness. In fact his righteousness was what made confession safe.
What John means by doing righteousness
Later in the same letter, John says something that has frightened many sensitive believers and comforted many careless ones, often for the wrong reasons:
Whosoever committeth sin transgresseth also the law: for sin is the transgression of the law. And ye know that he was manifested to take away our sins; and in him is no sin. Whosoever abideth in him sinneth not: whosoever sinneth hath not seen him, neither known him. Little children, let no man deceive you: he that doeth righteousness is righteous, even as he is righteous. He that committeth sin is of the devil; for the devil sinneth from the beginning. For this purpose the Son of God was manifested, that he might destroy the works of the devil.
“Whosoever abideth in him sinneth not.” Read alone, that might seem to contradict what John said in chapter one. But John is not contradicting himself. The verbs here are in the present tense, which in Greek commonly describes ongoing, characteristic action. John is describing the settled direction of a life. A person who abides in Christ does not make sin his way of life. He may fall, and when he does he has an Advocate. But he does not settle into sin as his home and defend it as his right.
“Little children, let no man deceive you: he that doeth righteousness is righteous, even as he is righteous.” John expected some people to use clever teaching to separate a righteous standing from a righteous life. His warning is blunt: do not be deceived. The person who is righteous in Christ will begin to practise righteousness. Righteousness received becomes righteousness lived.
And John gives the reason for this confidence: “For this purpose the Son of God was manifested, that he might destroy the works of the devil.” Jesus came to undo the works of the devil in our lives, as well as to forgive them. That is why defeat is not the believer’s identity, and also why careless sin is not the believer’s freedom. Both deny the purpose for which Christ came.
This is where the two halves of the New Covenant perspective meet. Romans 6 says sin’s dominion is broken. First John says the one who abides in Christ does not live under sin as a pattern. They are saying the same thing from two directions. A believer may struggle, may fall, and may need to confess many times on the way. But he is not a slave, and he should not talk or live as if he were.
Debtors to the Spirit, not to the flesh
How, then, does a believer actually walk this out? Paul answers that question in Romans 8, after his great declaration that there is no condemnation for those in Christ:
Therefore, brethren, we are debtors, not to the flesh, to live after the flesh. For if ye live after the flesh, ye shall die: but if ye through the Spirit do mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall live.
“We are debtors, not to the flesh.” The flesh has no claim on you. You owe it nothing. For years Chinonso had treated his lying habit as though it had a right to his tongue. Paul says it has none.
“But if ye through the Spirit do mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall live.” To mortify means to put to death. This is active, deliberate and serious. The believer is not passive in the battle with sin. He puts its deeds to death. But notice the phrase “through the Spirit.” This is not the flesh trying to discipline the flesh. It is the believer, empowered by the Holy Spirit within him, refusing the old patterns one decision at a time.
Paul makes the same point to Titus, in a passage this series returns to more than once. The grace of God, he says, teaches us to deny ungodliness and to live soberly, righteously and godly. Then he tells us why Jesus died: “Who gave himself for us, that he might redeem us from all iniquity, and purify unto himself a peculiar people, zealous of good works” (Titus 2:14).
Redeemed from all iniquity. That is not the language of a defeated people. Purified unto Himself, a people who belong to Him in a special way. And zealous of good works, eager for them, passionate about them. That is the New Covenant goal. Christ did not die so that we could go on lying and feel sorry about it, or go on lying and feel nothing. He died to make us a people who love the truth.
Laying aside the sin that clings
The writer to the Hebrews gives a picture that brings all of this into everyday life:
Wherefore seeing we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us , and let us run with patience the race that is set before us, Looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith; who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is set down at the right hand of the throne of God.
“Let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us.” The picture is of a runner stripping off anything that would slow him down. Notice that the writer speaks of sin as something that besets believers, that clings closely to them like a long garment wrapping around the legs. He is honest about the struggle. But he does not tell the runner to accept being tangled. He tells him to lay it aside.
And the power to do so comes from where the runner looks: “Looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith.” He began our faith, and He will finish it. We do not run looking at our failures, as the blue notebook taught, or looking away from them, as the gold notebook taught. We run looking at Jesus.
PunchlineFor Chinonso, laying aside the sin that clung to him involved some very practical steps, and they may help you too.
He began by telling the truth to God, plainly, without decorating it. Not “Lord, forgive my shortcomings,” but “Lord, I lied to my wife on Saturday, and to my manager on Monday, and I have been lying for years.”
He then told the truth to the people he had lied to, where that was wise and possible. He sat down with his wife and told her he had a habit of lying and that he was asking God to break it. He did not ask her to trust him immediately. He asked her to let him earn it.
He decided that when he caught himself in a lie, even halfway through a sentence, he would stop and correct it on the spot. “Sorry, that is not true. I am still at home.” It was humiliating at first, and it did more to break the habit than anything else.
He asked a friend from church to check in with him every week, and he gave that friend permission to ask him directly whether he had been telling the truth.
There was no legalism in any of this, only the ordinary obedience of a man who had finally understood that he was free, and that freedom is meant to be used.
Some months later Chinonso came back to see me, and he brought a third notebook. It was an ordinary one, nothing special about it. On the first page he had written two verses, one above the other. The first was Romans 6:14: “For sin shall not have dominion over you.” The second was 1 John 2:1: “My little children, these things write I unto you, that ye sin not. And if any man sin, we have an advocate with the Father.”
“The first one tells me I am free,” he said. “The second one tells me what to do on the days I forget. I needed both. I had been given one at a time.”
He told me that the lies had not stopped all at once. But they had become rare, and when they came he caught them quickly. Then he smiled and said the thing I had been hoping to hear. “Last week my wife asked where I had been on Saturday afternoon. I told her the truth. And she believed me without checking.”
That is the New Covenant perspective on sin. It does not leave you with a defeated identity, because sin’s dominion has been broken. It does not leave you pretending, because walking in the light means telling the truth. It leaves you free, honest and growing, with an Advocate beside you and your eyes on Jesus. Righteousness without confusion. Holiness without fear.
Teaching Companion
For Reflection
- Which of the two “notebooks” has shaped your own thinking more: the belief that you can never change, or the belief that you have no need to? How has it affected the way you live?
- Paul tells you to “reckon” yourself dead to sin and alive to God. What would it look like to do that the next time an old habit rises?
- What is the difference between walking in the light and living without ever sinning? Why does that difference matter?
- How does knowing that Jesus is your Advocate change the way you approach God after you have sinned?
- Is there a sin that “so easily besets” you? What practical step of laying it aside could you take this week?
This Week
Read Romans 6:1-14 and 1 John 1:5-2:2 together each day this week. On a single page, write the first passage’s main truth at the top (“Sin shall not have dominion over you”) and the second passage’s main instruction at the bottom (“If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just”). Each evening, look back over the day. Thank God specifically for any moment when you refused an old pattern. Confess plainly anything you did wrong, in the words God would use. If it involved another person, decide what you will do to put it right. End each day by reading Hebrews 12:2 aloud and looking to Jesus.
A Prayer
Father, thank You that I have died with Christ and been raised with Him, and that sin no longer has dominion over me. Thank You that I am under grace, and that grace is the power that sets me free. Forgive me for the times I have accepted defeat as my identity, and for the times I have hidden from the truth about what I have done. Teach me to reckon myself dead to sin and alive to You, and to yield every part of me as an instrument of righteousness. When I sin, let me come to You honestly, trusting Jesus my Advocate. Make me zealous for what is good, and keep my eyes on Jesus, the author and finisher of my faith. In His name, Amen.
Truth received brings freedom. Truth believed establishes the heart.
Scripture quotations are from the King James Version. · Illustrations using first names only are composites unless stated otherwise.