One of the harder things to rationalize is that we still sin after pledging our Allegiance to the King. We ask ourselves, “Why am I still Sinning if I am a follower of Christ?”  But why do we view this sin the same as the sin that originally separated us from God. This is where it hits home: if you’re a Christian and you still feel the crushing weight of sin the same way you did before you knew Christ, we need to talk. We’ve managed to take the simple, beautiful truth of salvation and somehow wrap it in so many layers of religious guilt that it’s become suffocating.

If you’ve read my prior article, “We Overcomplicate Sin,” you know I’m all about stripping away those layers and getting back to what Scripture actually says. And what it says about the nature of sin after conversion is profoundly and wonderfully different from what it meant before.

Before: The Death Sentence

Think about your life before you knew Jesus (that may be hard for some of you). Your sin was a Judicial matter. It wasn’t just a mistake or a bad day; it was your entire standing before a Holy God.

You were guilty. The wages of sin is death, and you were standing in the courtroom awaiting execution. Every action, every thought, every failure only confirmed that verdict. The Greek word for this state of sin is often hamartia, which literally means “to miss the mark,” but in this context, it wasn’t just missing one small target—it was a deep, foundational principle of separation that reigned in you, making you an enemy of God.

But then came the Gospel. When you Repented (metanoia) and placed your identity in the Christ, that judicial verdict was overturned. You were justified. You were declared perfectly righteous, not because of anything you did, but because of His finished work on the cross. The separation is gone. The death sentence is paid in full.

After: The Grief of the Spirit

So, if the judicial problem is fixed, why do you still sin? Why do you, with a new heart and a sincere desire to follow Christ, still struggle? Why are we still tempted to snap at our spouse, get lost in pointless distractions, or nurture a little resentment?

It’s because your flesh is still around, and it hasn’t received the memo yet.

This is the major shift we need to grasp. For the believer, sin is no longer an issue of eternal separation; it’s now a relational issue of grief. The specific acts of sin we commit now don’t magically put us back under the death penalty. They grieve the Holy Spirit who lives inside us (Ephesians 4:30). The foundational sin-state that defined you has been dealt with; now we’re struggling against the remnants of a fallen nature.

The person who truly wants to be righteous but continually fails is actually the person indwelt by the Holy Spirit. The person who is still truely separated from God doesn’t lose sleep over their failures. They don’t grieve their sin—they simply accept it as “part of this life.”

The Apostle Paul knew this struggle better than anyone. He laid out the agonizing truth in Romans 7:15, and this should be a massive source of confidence for you: “For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.”

The Apostle Paul, the one who penned most of the New Testament, did the very thing he hated. This conflict—this war between the spirit and the flesh—is proof that the Spirit is alive and working in you.

Why One Word

It gets confusing for us when we have the same three letter word describing two different things. But in the original Greek, you had two different things going on. You had a Present Continuous Tense (or continual state of) sin hamartanō (ἁμαρτάνω) as talked about in 1 John3:4-9. You also had the Aorist Tense (or momentary single act) of sin hamartia (ἁμαρτία) that John described in 1 John 2:1.  This means that we can not be in the state of sin (continual) if we are in the pursuit of righteousness but we can still do dumb things while we still struggle with our flesh (past identity).

The Call to Continual Forward Motion

Now, here’s the critical pivot: Does this reality give us an excuse to throw up our hands and quit trying? Absolutely not.

Paul’s honesty about his struggle wasn’t a license for spiritual laziness; it was the framework for a call to relentless pursuit. Your faith must be a continual, moving-forward act. It’s the process of sanctification—the daily practice of living like the righteous person Christ has already declared you to be.

We are athletes in a spiritual race. We aren’t called to perfection, but to direction. We must constantly press on toward the goal. Paul clarifies this posture in Philippians 3:13-14: “But one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.”

When you stumble and when you sin, you don’t run away from God in shame. You run to Him in repentance. As I’ve written before, it’s not the feeling-bad kind of repentance (see: “Repentance: It’s Not About Feeling Bad”), but the realignment kind. You turn your will and your heart back toward Christ and simply keep running the race.

Hope in the Resurrection

This struggle—this wearisome fight between the new spirit and the old flesh—is temporary. It is not your eternal reality.

The ultimate hope of the Gospel is not just the forgiveness of sins, but the resurrection of the body. When Christ returns and gives us a new, created body, we will finally be free from this nagging flesh that drives us toward sin.

In that glorious day, the function of the Holy Spirit inside us will change. Right now, He’s often a conviction-based persona—constantly nudging, correcting, and grieving as we struggle. But in the age to come, the Spirit will simply be a channel for unhindered communion with God, just as He was in Jesus, empowering Him to walk without sin and commune perfectly with the Father.

That is the goal. That is the future. And that is the absolute confidence we have in the promises of God. In the end, we begin again—but this time, with a resurrected body, where sin is not just forgiven, but is finally and completely obsolete.