Podcast: Hear What God Has Truly Done with Your Sin (Sam Storms)

January 17, 2022 by: Crossway

This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.

The Truth about God and Our Sin

In today’s episode, Sam Storms talks about how God deals with our sin, once and for all.

A Dozen Things God Did with Your Sin (And Three Things He'll Never Do)

A Dozen Things God Did with Your Sin (And Three Things He'll Never Do)

Sam Storms

Walking through the Bible’s teaching, Sam Storms helps believers find freedom, joy, and peace in knowing what God has done (and will never do) with their sin through the redemptive sacrifice of Jesus.

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Podcasts | RSS

Topics Addressed in This Interview:

00:57 - Why We Struggle to Grasp What God Has Done with Our Sin

Matt Tully
Sam, thank you so much for joining me again on The Crossway Podcast.

Sam Storms
I’m glad to be back. I’ve been looking forward to this.

Matt Tully
Definitely. When it comes to the biggest problems that we as humans face—that would be our own sinfulness in the face of a holy God—those of us who know God and love his grace and have been Christians for a long time, I think we know that we can’t take care of this problem on our own. We get what the Bible teaches about our own inability to take care of our sin. Scripture makes that very clear to us. Yet, I think that even for those of us who with our whole hearts believe that we need God’s grace and salvation, we can nevertheless still think simplistically about what it is that God has done for us and how he deals with our sin. As you reflect on all the years you’ve spent teaching, preaching, and shepherding people as a pastor and as a professor, have you noticed that maybe sometimes even solid Christians can struggle to fully appreciate the nuances and the beauty to what God has done for us?

Sam Storms
Absolutely. I think one thing I’ve noticed about Christians—and maybe this is true of human nature in general—is that we’re hard-wired for self-punishment. There is this instinctive reaction in our hearts and our souls when we fail, when we sin, when we don’t live up to whatever standard we have embraced for ourselves. For Christians, that standard is the biblical principles of right and wrong and what would please God. Our instinctive reaction is to basically fall into the pit of self-contempt, condemnation, despair, thinking God forgave me when I first became a Christian, but I’ve probably pushed him over the edge. I’ve out-sinned his grace. I’ve gone beyond the capacity that even a good and holy God has to put up with somebody like me. We just fail to grasp the magnitude of the extent to which God went in the death of Christ to deal with our sin. I think that’s one of the central problems. It may well be the single central problem that Christians face and struggle with in their Christian life—this idea that I just out-sinned God’s ability to have mercy and forgive me. They live in doubt, they question their salvation, they don’t have the joy of assurance. All of that is really due to one primary factor, and that is we have not wrestled with what Scripture says God has done with our sin. We focus on our having sinned and not so much on what God has done with our sin. That is what I think leads to so much despair and depression and shame and false guilt. That is what I have been trying to address in this book as best I can. I’ve largely seen this in the body of Christ over the years, and I just think it needed to be addressed.

Matt Tully
You say that a fundamental core of why this is happening is because we spend too much time focused on our own sin and less time focused on our Savior and what he has done with it. Do you ever get the sense that that is sometimes encouraged by the way we talk about sin and the way we talk about, within the church, what it means to be saved? There’s such an emphasis on, to put it bluntly, feeling bad about our sin. We know we need to repent, we need to turn from our sin, we need to feel a level of remorse over it. Do you think sometimes that teaching is a little bit out of whack and that contributes to this?

Sam Storms
I think it can be. Honestly, it differs from church to church and from Christian to Christian. There is no one size fits all when it comes to this. But I do think that the central problem is just the failure to grasp the significance of what is known as penal substitutionary atonement, which I address rather directly and extensively in the book, primarily because not only do good, Bible-believing Christians not know what it means, but because there’s so much push back on the part of progressives who think that it’s a horrific way of envisioning the relationship between the Father and the Son.

Matt Tully
Unpack that a little bit for us. First, define what penal substitutionary atonement is, for those who aren’t familiar with that term, which does sound a little bit harsh or cold or scary. Then, why is it that there are some Christians, or some people who claim to be Christians, who would raise a lot of concerns with that doctrine?

Sam Storms
I actually talk about the glory of penal substitution in the book because it is a glorious, glorious truth, apart from which Christianity makes no sense whatsoever. I don’t think—this is my own conviction—I don’t think you can preach the gospel apart from penal substitution. I don’t think there is a gospel apart from that. What good news do I have to bring to a lost and dying world, who stand in jeopardy of eternal damnation, if I don’t have the solution that God has provided in the cross of Christ? The simple fact of the matter is God is infinitely holy and infinitely just, and his own nature requires him to punish violations of his will. It’s not because God is a bully. It’s not because he’s mean. It’s because he’s good and just and holy and true to his own character. What we have in the death of Christ is Jesus in our stead as our substitute—there’s the substitutionary element—enduring the penalty—there’s the penal element—the just desserts of our sin, and satisfying the demands of God’s holy justice and wrath so that we can be set free. If I don’t have that message, if I can’t go to a non-Christian world and say, Look, the greatest threat to your welfare, both now and in eternity, is the wrath of God, if I don’t have a solution to that, if I don’t have an answer to that, what good news do I have to proclaim? Those who push back on penal substitution say it’s barbaric, it’s the Father abusing the Son, it disrupts the harmony and the unity of the Trinity. I answer all of those objections in the book. The bottom line is that they say that God is merciful; he can just let bygones be bygones. Well, that reveals a horribly deficient view of God. If God somehow, in his justice and his holiness and his love for goodness and his hatred of evil, could just somehow push “delete” and suddenly all of the transgressions of our lives, all of the vile rebellion against the revelation of God in nature and in creation and in Scripture—if he could just somehow willy nilly cast it aside and it be swept under the carpet of God’s mercy, that’s demeaning to God. So, I think penal substitution is a glorious, wonderful expression of how much God loves us, that he and the Son would, as it were, enter into a covenant by which they would deal with the judgment that we so richly deserve.

Matt Tully
What would they describe then as the purpose of Jesus’s death, if it wasn’t to bear the wrath of God on our behalf?

Sam Storms
They can’t. The bottom line is they cannot. They would say things such as, Well, it was to show us how Jesus identified with the poor and the outcast, or It was designed to show us what real love is for others. Well, if I’m walking alongside a friend along the lake shore and I fall in, what is love? How does he demonstrate love for me? It’s by jumping in and, at risk to his own life, securing my safety and pulling me from the waters while he drowns. Just to stand on the shore and say, Hey, I just want you to know how much I love you as you die, that’s not love.

Matt Tully
Or just to jump in and die himself is not love.

Sam Storms
Exactly. If it doesn’t secure my safety and my freedom and release. So, that’s a great question: Why did Jesus have to die? They might say, Maybe he didn’t have to, but he chose to. But if he didn’t have to die, why would the Father, according to Romans 8, not spare his own Son but deliver him up for us all? So, they have no way to rationally and biblically explain the reality of Christ’s death. They say it’s to set an example, to break the power of Satan, or to restore the image of God in man—all of which, of course, Jesus did. All of these theories, explanations, or models of the atonement are true, but they’re only true because of the underlying foundational reality that in his dying in our place, he satisfied the wrath of God and endured the penalty that we deserve so that we now don’t have to suffer. That is out of which flows all of these other effects of his atoning death. That’s why he was able to defeat Satan. What is Satan’s grip on us? Unforgiven sin. How has the image of God been damaged? It’s been damaged by sin. We’re restored only because Christ has endured in our place and reconciled us to the Father and dealt with the issue of our cosmic treason against an infinite holy God.

10:54 - What Is Sin? Why Is It Bad? What’s the Big Deal?

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.

14:06 - What Is Forgiveness?

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.

21:38 - Does God Truly Forget Our Sin?

Matt Tully
I want to return back to that Etch A Sketch metaphor that you used a few minutes ago. I think it’s powerful because we know that with an Etch A Sketch, once you shake that thing and turn it upside down, it’s gone. There’s no undo button, unlike maybe a computer today where anything you do can be brought back with a quick shortcut. I wonder if people might be thinking, Does that metaphor work with God? This fits in with another one of the things you draw out in the book about God and how he relates to our sin. Isaiah 43:25 is a famous passage. God says, “I, I am he who blots out your transgressions for my own sake, and I will not remember your sins.” There’s a question in my mind and maybe in other Christian’s minds: How does that work with God? How could God not have an undo button? Could he truly forget something, in the sense that we can erase and completely remove like we can with an Etch A Sketch? How do we understand this verse? What is he trying to say there? Does God truly forget our sins?

Sam Storms
Great question, and I am happy to answer it. I also just want to squeeze in on the front end of my answer that the book addresses twelve different ways in which God has dealt with our sin. He removes it as far as the east is from the west, he casts it in the depths of the sea, he tramples it underfoot, he turns his face away from it—all of these incredibly beautiful metaphors and analogies and illustrations, that’s what constitutes the bulk of the book. The one that you brought up is probably one of my favorites. It’s important to remember a distinction between forgetting and choosing not to remember. You and I cannot choose to forget. If we try to forget something, guess what? It’s going to be right in the forefront of our thinking. It races back into our minds. So, no, God cannot forget anything. God is omniscient. He knows everything exhaustively in minute detail. That’s what it means to say God is all-knowing. But when God says I will not remember, I think what he’s saying is, I will never bring up your sin to you and use it against you. I will never throw it back in your face. Think about how different this is for us. If somebody violates me or betrays my confidence, my tendency is to say, I will never let you forget this. I’m going to bring it up at every opportunity. I’m going to use it against you. I’m going to hold it over your head. When God says, I will not remember their sins anymore, he’s saying, I will never do that. I won’t bring it up. It’s not that I’ve pushed delete in my infinite mind and somehow I can’t remember your years of unbelief or rejection of Christ or your sexual immorality before you were born again. I simply will never bring that up. I will never use it against you. I will never throw it back in your face. It will never become a factor in how you and I relate one to another. That’s the glory of God’s promise not to remember. So, the idea that God forgets—no, but in a sense, yes, because he says, I won’t remember it. So, as far as we’re concerned, that’s basically what we mean by saying that God forgets it.

Matt Tully
It’s almost a more beautiful statement when you realize it and understand it that way. There’s a decision that God is making, not to hold our sin against us. That’s how much he loves us, that he would choose never to bring it up again.

Sam Storms
I think one of the great glorious things about life in the new heaven and the new earth after Christ returns is that we will remember our sins, but not in a way that will diminish our joy. We will remember them for the sake of delighting in the reality of forgiveness. We’ll think, My goodness! Look at what God has done for me! Let me worship him all the more passionately and sincerely. I strongly suspect that we will see, in eternity future, how God orchestrated our lives for our good in spite of our sin, how he made use of our transgressions to bring honor to his own name. But not for the purpose of bringing sadness to our souls, but incredible delight and joy and exhilaration in knowing that those failures, those sins, will never threaten our relationship with the Lord forever and ever.

Matt Tully
This is a bit of an aside, but this is an interesting example of a passage where we need to read Scripture in the light of all of Scripture. We know from the rest of Scripture that God is omniscient—he does know all things—and so we need to read this passage, where it says that he won’t remember our sin, in light of the broader knowledge that we have of who he is.

Sam Storms
Yes. And the good thing about this same metaphor that I address in the book is that there are a lot of things that God says, I will remember. He says he will remember his people, his covenant, his promises—

Matt Tully
That doesn’t just mean that he’s going to remember it like we would. It means more than that. It means he’s going to act upon it.

Sam Storms
Exactly. He has made a promise to us that is sealed with the blood of Christ that he will never break, and that is I will never again make reference to, mention, hold over your head, say to others, or in any way exploit your failures as a way of justifying my disdain for you or my rejection of you. Praise God for that.

27:25 - How Does God Cleanse Me from My Sin?

Matt Tully
Another idea that we encounter repeatedly in the Bible throughout both the Old and New Testaments is the idea of being cleansed from our sins—that metaphor of cleaning or washing. I wonder if you could flesh that out for us, especially as it relates to one of the most common ways that we respond to our own sin or feel about our sin, and that is a sense of defilement or dirtiness or shame because of our sin. Unpack that idea of cleansing in the Bible.

Sam Storms
Let’s be clear about one thing: we’re supposed to feel conviction. That’s what the conscience is in the human soul. It’s that capacity of the image of God in humans that registers either a discomfort and a pain for having failed, or a sense of joy for having succeeded. There’s a sense in which I want to feel the defiling effect of my sin, but not so that it cripples my life or leads me to doubt whether God really cares for me or has actually done enough to secure the salvation of my soul. The problem though with this whole idea is that Christians live in a constant state of defilement—of feeling dirty, of feeling disqualified, of feeling that I’ve just simply gone too far in my rebellion and my unbelief and my failures. This whole image of cleansing—David in Psalm 51 says, Cleanse me from my sin and purify me with hyssop. Hyssop is this funny looking little stalk. It looks like broccoli. They would dip the head of the hyssop in the blood that was shed and sprinkle it.

Matt Tully
That’s going back to Passover.

Sam Storms
Right. The imagery that I have—and I talk about this in the book—is I’ve got this white shirt and I’ve left it in my closet, and there’s this huge brown spot on the left side right above the pocket. I took it to the cleaners multiple times. I pointed the spot out to them and said, Use whatever you can to get that stain out of there, and they never could. It would come back with a little note on it that said, Sorry, we couldn’t remove it. I would take it back and say, Try this, and they would try it without success. Finally I realized that sometimes is the way Christians feel about their sin. It’s like I’ve got this deep, dark, stain on my soul, and nothing can remove it. Nothing! I can’t do enough good works to make it go away. I can’t trick myself into thinking it’s not there, and the only way that that deep, dark stain on our souls can be removed is through the blood of Christ, which is an interesting irony, is it not? Blood stains, and yet it’s the blood that cleanses us from all stain. To be able to wake up in the morning and not feel dirty in the presence of God is a glorious reality, and it only comes when we reflect and meditate on the things that God has done with our sin, one of which is he’s blotted it out. He’s cleansed it. It’s just such a beautiful image that Scripture uses.

Matt Tully
What would you say to the Christian listening right now who says, I believe that. I believe what you’re saying about Christ’s work on my behalf and how I am cleansed. Intellectually I get that, but I just struggle with my feelings. I do wake up every morning and my mind just automatically goes to this thing in the past that I feel like defines me and it haunts me. Is that just something that they’re going to have to struggle with for the rest of their life?

Sam Storms
I think all of us do, to varying degrees. Let’s remember that we have a diabolical enemy who, according to Ephesians 6, is raining down these fiery darts on us—constantly accusing us, constantly reminding us of our failures yesterday and how unqualified we are and how much of an embarrassment to Jesus we are. I think the solution that the Scriptures give us is first of all, we’ve got to pray. Cry out to the Spirit of God: Spirit of God, help me! Open my eyes to the truth of what I see in Scripture. Meditate on God’s word—memorize it—so that when those convicting, piercing pangs of conscience hit us, we can quote Scripture back to them and we can declare that he who confesses his sin, the blood of Christ cleanses him from all unrighteousness. You have to fight the lie of the enemy with the truth of Scripture. You have to speak back to the enemy. And even if it’s not Satan doing it—I want to blame everything on the devil and he deserves a lot of it—it may just be the weakness of our conscience. Here’s the thing: I remember I remember Packer—I think in Knowing God—and he talked about how people have differing levels of sensitivity in their conscience. There are some people who have a very strong and robust conscience and they can quickly embrace the reality of God’s love and forgiveness in Christ and they don’t wallow in the mud and the murk of self-condemnation and contempt. There are other Christians who have a hyper-sensitive conscience, and they are the ones who the slightest misstep in their life just suddenly they’re living under this cloud of condemnation and rejection and contempt. So, it depends on the nature of your own conscience and the level of your own maturity in Christ. But I think the solution for all of us is that we have to take the truth of God’s word and speak it and believe it and trust it and cry out to the Spirit of God to open our eyes to the reality of what God has done with our sin in Christ—that’s the ultimate solution. There’s no button you can push in your soul and make all the feelings of guilt and condemnation go away. The answer is the truth of God’s revealed word, God saying to us, Listen, my child, here is what I’ve done with your sin. That issue in your life—maybe it’s something that happened ten years ago and you’ve been living with the regret and the pain of that action all these years and it’s kept you from worshiping me passionately. It’s kept you from coming to the throne of grace in prayer. Listen to me: I cast it behind my back. I turn my face away from it. I put it in the depths of the sea. I blotted it out. I’ve cleansed it. I’ve laid it on my Son in your place. Listen to what I have done. When we do that, the promise of God is that the Holy Spirit will make that a living, life-changing reality in our souls.

34:41 - Struggling to Believe

Matt Tully
You’re a pastor and you’ve taught as a professor, and yet have there been times in your life where you feel like you have struggled to believe these things about your own sin and how God has dealt with it?

Sam Storms
Daily. I hate to say that. Daily. I tend to be on the spectrum of conscience, as Packer would lay it out, on the overly sensitive side. I don’t remember this, but my parents said that when I was growing up they had to be very careful when saying no to me because once they did it, I would never do that thing again. Not that I was an obedient child—

Matt Tully
Some parents are like, How did that work out?

Sam Storms
I was a messed up little sinner as much as anybody else. I think the nature of sinful, fallen humanity—

Matt Tully
So, you say that over sensitivity can actually be a function of our sinfulness.

Sam Storms
Yes. Here’s the good news. I know this sounds strange and almost contradictory, but we have this idea that the more we grow up in Christ the less painful our sin will be to our souls. I think it’s just the opposite. When we’re first born again, we still sin a lot, but we don’t feel the pain of it very much. As we grow up in Christ, we sin less, but we feel it’s pain more. The reason is because maturity is becoming more like Jesus. It’s growing closer and closer to the Son of God in relational intimacy. Even though now, by God’s grace, I sin less than I did twenty years ago, when I do sin, it hurts more than it did twenty years ago because I know Jesus better now. I want to please him more intensely now. When I say daily I feel that, I think that’s a good sign. I think that’s an indication, hopefully by God’s grace, that I’m actually growing up in Jesus and being more and more conformed into his image. So, as we are more conformed to the image of Christ, the sin we commit, even though it’s fewer and far between, it’s going to feel more painful. I think that’s a good sign. It’s a good indication we’re actually making progress in the Christian life.

Matt Tully
How does that fit with the idea that as we grow in Christ our appreciation for the gospel, our trust for the gospel and what God has done for us to take care of our sin should be greater and stronger? Shouldn’t we also then feel more consoled and more confident in his grace?

Sam Storms
Yes. It’s a both/and. I not only feel a deeper, more intense anguish when I sin, but I also feel a greater joy and exhilaration and delight when I reflect on the fact that God has forgiven me of that sin, he’s wiped the slate clean, and he will not bring it up and throw it back in my face. It’s a both/and. Both of those things have to function. Unfortunately, here’s the problem: some Christians embrace one to the exclusion of the other. Some live under the lingering condemnation of a sensitive conscience, not aware of what God has done for them in Christ, whereas others are so embracing of the reality of grace that they feel like it releases them to sin all the more and they don’t have to worry about the consequences. Again, both of those extremes—either antinomianism or legalism and hyper-grace—are the two extremes that we need to avoid.

38:21 - When Sin Causes Us to Doubt

Matt Tully
Maybe there’s a Christian listening right now who has his/her theology straight and buttoned down and would affirm with you the idea of the perseverance of the saints—the idea that once we’re saved by trusting in Christ for salvation, God has forgiven our sins and he will not lose us. Nothing will jeopardize our salvation. We have that eternal union. But they maybe look at their own lives—their continuing struggle with sin—and they’re not wondering if they’ve lost their salvation; they’re wondering, Was I actually ever saved to begin with? How could I actually be a Christian with the way that I’m sinning and struggling with this persistent thing that I just can’t seem to get over? What would you say to that person?

Sam Storms
In some cases, that’s not a bad thing. Paul says, Examine yourselves to see if you are in the faith. Second Peter 1 talks about this same reality: making your calling and election sure. I don’t want Christians to live in doubt. I think we’re supposed to live in the confident assurance that we’re in a saved and eternal relationship with the Lord. But if we’re living in unrepentant sin, if we’re constantly—with a high hand—defying the God who we trust has saved us, then maybe sometimes a person needs to stop and take stock of their soul and say, I read in 1 John that there are certain indications that I’m truly born again. Do I live in love toward my fellow brethren? Am I seeking to obey the will of God? I do think that some people presume upon God’s grace, and the fact of the matter is they aren’t truly born again. Maybe this conviction and this doubt is the work of the Spirit of God in awakening them to the need for a Savior. Others are truly saved and they just simply haven’t been able to process and have registered deep down in their souls the reality of what forgiveness really means, and cleansing of sin and justification. So, there’s no one size fits all. Every Christian wrestles to differing degrees with this issue. On the one hand, it’s not always bad to kind of wonder and ask, Am I really born again? Would I have done, and continue to do what I’m now doing, if I were truly a child of God? On the other hand, I want you to live in the confident joy of knowing that you really are justified in the sight of God and that the righteousness of Christ has been imputed to you through faith in him. There is a lot of room between those two extremes that we have to work with, and it all depends on each individual. If I’m sitting with somebody, as I have in the past, and let’s just take an issue that is so much in the forefront of the world today: pornography. When I man says, I know I’m a Christian. I walked an aisle, raised a hand, signed a card twenty-five years ago; but I’m addicted to pornography and I kinda enjoy it and I don’t want to break from it. I’m not going to give that guy assurance of salvation. I’m not going to say, Don’t worry about it. You signed a decision card and had that experience when you were nine-years-old. You’re saved. I’m not going to do that. I may not have the authority to tell him he’s not born again, but I’m certainly not going to give him the assurance that he is. So, that’s different from a man that’s sitting there who is shattered in his soul with his sin. He is broken; he is weeping. He’s saying, I want to be free. Help me! Pray for me! I know I’m violating and bringing grief to the Holy Spirit by my repeated failure in this regard. What can I do to overcome this addiction? That’s the kind of man I’m going to say, The first thing you need to know is God really loves you. He’s delighted in you as his child. I see the evidence of repentance and the fruit of the Spirit in your life in the way you reacted to your sin. Let’s deal with this issue together.

Matt Tully
That just underscores even in my mind the value of someone struggling to discern where they are at on that front. Going to a pastor, going to another Christian that they trust and talking about that with them could be a really helpful, eye-opening thing for those who maybe doubt their own ability to assess their hearts.

Sam Storms
Not long ago I had a precious young lady in our church who has been married a couple of times and divorced and she had been sexually promiscuous in her past. She was living with this constant cloud of doubt over her. She just woke up and it was there smothering her, suffocating her confidence in Christ, causing her to say, I just can’t believe that God would love me. I can’t believe that he has really saved me. Even though she had repented and she’s walking in holiness, the dark stain of her past was almost more than she could bear. That’s the kind of person that I like to look at with a smile and say, Listen, you have no idea how loudly God is singing over you in joy and delight. He loves you. He sees the brokenness in your heart. He sees the desire for you to live in purity, and it just pleases him beyond words. That’s the kind of individual who, obviously, needs to read my book and say, I need to have reinforced in my heart all the many things God has done with my sin. By the way, isn’t it interesting—we haven’t talked about this—that God would repeatedly use so many different images and illustrations and language to reinforce this point. It’s like God says, I know what you all are like. I know the struggle you’re going to have. I know you need me to hammer this home over and over again in a variety of different ways to try and finally drive home to your soul the truth of what I’ve done with your sin in Jesus.

Matt Tully
So often we can reduce them down and read them as interchangeable. They are all getting at the same fundamental reality, but they all have their own flavor to them; they all have their own glories to them that I think it’s worth us slowing down and pondering a little bit.

Sam Storms
Yes. Absolutely.

44:36 - The Ultimate Goal of Salvation

Matt Tully
In the last chapter of your book you write something that really hit me. It might sound like it’s at odds with what we’ve been talking about today, but you write, “What ultimately makes the gospel good news isn’t that we get forgiven, saved, delivered, healed, renewed, justified, and adopted, as good and glorious as these experiences are.” Why would you say that? What are you getting at there? How is that true?

Sam Storms
Well, I can blame my friend John Piper for that. In John’s book God is the Gospel he makes the point very clear: yes, these are glorious blessings. Who would not want them all, and as God’s children we have them all. Why do we have them? Why did God do that? He did it so that we could get him. In other words, stand in his presence. I think of that doxology in Jude with which I close the book: We stand with joy before the glory of God and get to behold his beauty and get to set our gaze and our thoughts and our eyes upon the majesty of who he is. How is that possible? It’s only possible because God forgave us and justified us and redeemed us and adopted us and cleansed us—all the things that he has done to make us fit for his presence, fit to experience the deep delight of knowing him and seeing him and enjoying him. The goal of God in the work of Christ for us, and Peter says it, the just for unjust; he died that we might come to God, that we might get God, that we might, as Revelation tells us, stand in his presence and behold his face. That’s the pinnacle of salvation. The pinnacle of salvation isn’t that my soul feels clean. My soul feels clean because otherwise, it didn’t and I couldn’t stand in the presence of the infinitely righteous God of the universe. So, all of these blessings of salvation are wonderful, but they are secondary to the ultimate goal which is that we might stand in God’s presence and enjoy him forever.

Matt Tully
Sam, thank you so much for taking some time today to walk us through just some of what the Bible tells us about what God does with our sin. You cover many, many more things in your book. We appreciate it.

Sam Storms
It’s my pleasure.

Popular Articles in This Series

View All

Podcast: Help! I Hate My Job (Jim Hamilton)

January 06, 2020

Jim Hamilton discusses what to do when you hate your job, offering encouragement for those frustrated in their work and explaining the difference between a job and a vocation.

Crossway is a not-for-profit Christian ministry that exists solely for the purpose of proclaiming the gospel through publishing gospel-centered, Bible-centered content. Learn more or donate today at crossway.org/about.