Sinners or Saints?

It wasn’t the first time someone rebuked me for referring to myself as a sinner. In fact, it’s happened more times than I can count. But this last instance made me pause and reflect. My comment had been innocuous—a prayer of thanks for God’s grace to such sinners as us. But I clearly struck a nerve, for an elderly lady sought me out afterwards to let me know in no uncertain terms that her preferred self-designation wasn’t “sinner,” but “saint.”

Of course, she’s right. Through Christ, sinners have become saints. It’s a wondrous miracle of God’s grace. When Paul wrote his letters to the “saints” in various locales, he wasn’t singling out super-Christians. He wrote to the baptized believers who gathered locally as the body of Christ. He wrote to people just like me, and assuming, dear reader, that you are also in Christ, people just like you, too. We are now “saints”—holy ones—not because we’ve radically reformed our behavior, but because Christ has given us a new status in himself.

But, of course, Paul’s new status as a saint did not negate the reality that he was also a sinner: “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the foremost” (1 Tim 1:15). Similarly, John writes to saints, “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us” (1 John 1:8). How do we reconcile these two opposite truths without affirming a contradiction? Are we sinners or are we saints?

Here’s the truth that I think my friend wanted to emphasize in her rebuke: In Christ, our primary identity has radically changed. Because of Christ’s righteousness, we are righteous. We are not sinners in the same way we were before Christ. In fact, from one extremely important vantage point, we are not sinners at all. When we think of ourselves in Christ, we “must consider [ourselves] dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus” (Rom 6:11). As saints, we are no longer enslaved to sin (Rom 6:6). Sin does not reign over us. Essentially, we are saints rather than sinners.

However, because of our essential identity as saints in Christ who are no longer enslaved to sin, we must put sin to death (Col 3:5). John Piper puts it this way, “The fight against our ongoing sinning is the evidence that we are in Christ—and in him without sin in our inmost, essential identity.” Because we are essentially saints and not sinners, we put indwelling sin to death as we await the future day when every remnant of sin is removed completely. Our daily battle to defeat sin and cultivate righteousness arises out of our status as saints. If we weren’t saints, we wouldn’t put sin to death. We wouldn’t want to. We wouldn’t be able to.

If we forget we’re saints, we will lose our battle against sin. This battle is extremely difficult, humanly impossible. Without confidence that Christ has graciously and supernaturally changed our essential identity, we will lack the resources to fight. We defeat sin by saying, “That’s not who I am anymore. In Christ, I’m a holy person. Sin doesn’t have dominion over me. I’m going to live according to my new status as a saint.”

However, if we forget we’re sinners, we will grow lax in living out our status as saints in battle against a powerful internal enemy that wants to destroy our souls. When Paul reminds us that we’re saints, he’s not calling us to ignore our shortcomings. Instead, he’s strengthening us for the battle against those shortcomings. We need to know we’re saints so that we can defeat the sin that indwells us. We need to know about sin’s continued presence so that we don’t obliviously give it a foothold in our lives.

My friend has a point. In terms of identity, we are saints and not sinners. However, practically, we continue to sin in violation of who we are in Christ. We must remember that essentially we’re saints and practically we sin. However, there’s coming a day when “saint” will be all there is to say.