This is the most important questions of our lives. It should be our focus in life and it should be our great priority. In John 3:3 Jesus speaks of a man to be born again and unless He is born again He cannot see the kingdom of God. You may belong to a church or be in church leadership, but you may not know God. First John shows us what it means to be born again, because it is focused on the issue of true belief and right living. We struggle in our Christian walk but we turn to God in repentance. The true belief of a Christian demonstrates our Christian walk with Jesus.
We ought not to habitually sin. 1 John 3:9 and 1 John 5:18 speaks of a born again person that does not sin. This refers to the soul being sinless; that is, the soul is justified or just. The soul does not sin but the body sins. We ought not to sin continually or habitually, but we should live right before God; however, we have an Advocate with the Father who forgives us for our sins through Jesus Christ our Redeemer and God. Have you been washed in His blood? We ought not to sin with our whole hearts or whole inclination. We did not think of our sins being wrong before God and we were not sorry over them. There was no battle over sin in our lives, but if we tried in and of ourselves we would fail. Before being born again, the sin and the sinner were friends in iniquity. After being born again, the situation changes and we are now in Christ. The true Christian hates sin; that is, we must flee from it. We are called to fight against it as our greatest plague. We ought to resent the burden it causes in its presence. We ought to mourn when we fall under its influence. We must long to be completely delivered from it. We are no longer pleased to be in and under sin. We realize that it has become a horrible thing that we hate. But we cannot take away its presence but we wait on God to take it away.
1 John 1:8 speaks of a sinning Christian and that we never would say “I am sinless” because all of us sin. We would be lying if we said we were sinless in our bodies. It is what Luther said about the Christian, “at the same time just and sinner.” The truth is we sin with our bodies but our soul remains clean. We can say that we hate sin. Can you? We should have it in our hearts that we ought not to commit sin. Do you? We cannot stop bad thoughts in entering our lives. Can we say that sin causes us grief and sorrow? Can we say that our whole nature does not want sin in his or her life? Would Jesus say you are born again? Have you been born from above?
