What then? Shall we sin because we are not under the law but under grace? By no means!… But thanks be to God that, though you used to be slaves to sin, you have come to obey from your heart the pattern of teaching that has now claimed your allegiance. You have been set free from sin and have become slaves to righteousness. Romans 6:15-18

There’s an internet meme that says: I’m not a human being having a spiritual experience. I’m a spiritual being having a human experience. I’m not sure the origin of that was entirely Christian but it speaks to a truth that less mature Christians often miss.

In fact, less mature Christians nearly always get the matter of holiness wrong because (as I mentioned earlier in this series) we usually see maturity as something we do, rather than something that we are. So we can fake a lot of Christian behavior and often Christian teachers encourage this “behavior modification” approach to “Christian” living on young believers rather than the transformation from the inside that God wants for each of us.

Reading the entire chapter of today’s verses, might be helpful at this point, but to summarize Romans 6: Something definite and supernatural happens to our relationship with sin when we are crucified and resurrected with Jesus.

Paul said, “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” (Gal 2:20) And we know that without faith it is impossible to please God (Heb 11:6); so if we’re to please God at all, then this crucifixion thing (our crucifixion) is pretty important.

Numerous passages in the New Testament talk about our crucifixion as Christians. We who have accepted God’s grace are dead, but made alive supernaturally through the same resurrection power that raised Jesus from the dead (Rom 8:11). When we embrace this foundational concept of the Christian faith, and see ourselves as we really are: as actually living by means of the resurrection (In Him we live and move and have our being – Acts17:28), only then can we see ourselves as God sees us. We see our whole life as God sees it.

We also see sin as God sees it (both our own sin, past, present, future) and other people’s sin, as well. As we see sin as God sees it (through a crucified and resurrected viewpoint), we hate sin as He hates it. Hating sin is no longer a matter of our will. We never could accomplish that through human effort anyway; on some level we love and are drawn to our sin. Hating sin in ourselves is a result of seeing ourselves as resurrected beings.

So we hate sin as God hates it. And this is not an emotional hatred as we humans tend to think of hatred, but being able to see the “separateness” sin causes us, from the close walk with God who we treasure. That thing (that practice, attitude, or whatever the sin is) is separating me from God. And that, of course, is how God hates sin—it’s separating Him from that which He treasures which is each of us.

This is what it means to “hate my sin” (or to “hate someone else’s sin): to simply admit the fact that there is something in me that is incompatible with of who I am in Jesus. And who I am in Jesus is a “crucified with Christ”, resurrected child of God. That’s why anyone who is in Christ is a new creation. That’s why the old is gone and the new has come (2 Cor 5:17). That’s why you and I walk in freedom. Not because we can’t sin, but because we now CAN walk in holiness. Freedom is another way of saying we have been separated from (hate) our sin.

More on this next time.