Soon after my father died, I realized how fragile family memory can be. Once a generation is gone, the stories they carry often disappear with them. So when my aunt came from Arizona to visit my uncle in Cypress, I asked if I could record an interview with them. I wanted to capture whatever they remembered about our family before those memories slipped away.
One story from that interview has stayed with me. Their father—my grandfather—had once been a preacher in America, Oklahoma, a small community in the southeastern corner of the state near the Red River. My aunt remembered riding beside him in a wagon as he gathered people for Sunday morning services. She also remembered watching him baptize her mother in the river and becoming frightened because, in her child’s mind, it looked as if he were drowning her.
But the part of his story that troubles me most is not the wagon or the river. It is the burden he carried in his own soul. He was, by all accounts, a hell-fire-and-brimstone preacher. He believed in “once saved, always saved,” but he also believed that a person who was truly saved would never sin again. That second belief became a spiritual trap.
Because he continued to struggle with sin after professing faith in Christ, he concluded that something must be wrong. Perhaps he had not been sincere enough. Perhaps he had not repented deeply enough. Perhaps salvation had never truly taken hold. Again, and again, he went back to God, seeking salvation, only to find himself facing the same human weakness. Eventually, he stopped trying. In his mind, the only honest conclusion was that he must not be one of the elect—that God had not predestined him to be saved.
Refusing to live as a hypocrite, he left the ministry.
What would you have said to him? How would you have counseled a man who loved God enough to preach, but feared that his continuing struggle with sin proved he had never truly belonged to Christ?
I ask because his struggle was not entirely foreign to me. I went through something similar after I first accepted Christ. I went forward to put my trust in Christ in a small church in Anaheim when I was nine years old. I did not expect to become sinless, but over the next several years I still wondered whether I had been sincere enough, whether I had lost my salvation, or whether something essential had failed to happen. So, I went forward several more times until, around age fourteen, 1 John 5:11–13 finally settled my heart: “These things I have written to you that believe on the name of the Son of God; that you may know that you have eternal life.”
The irony is that the very same letter that gave me assurance may have contributed to my grandfather’s despair. First John assures believers that they may know they have eternal life, but it also contains some of the strongest statements in the New Testament about sin and the believer. At first glance, John seems to say both that Christians do sin and that Christians cannot sin. Was John contradicting himself?
The Passage That May Have Troubled Him
I suspect my grandfather drew his doctrine from 1 John 3:4–10. Reading the King James Version, he would have encountered words that sound absolute: “Whosoever abideth in him sinneth not” and “Whosoever is born of God doth not commit sin.” If he read those lines to mean that a true Christian never commits another sin, then every failure would have seemed like evidence against his salvation.
The Tension Within 1 John
The tension is real. On one hand, John says, “If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves” and “If we say that we have not sinned, we make him a liar” (1 John 1:8, 10 ESV). He even writes, “if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous.” (1 John 2:1 ESV). In other words, John plainly acknowledges that believers still need confession, cleansing, and an Advocate.
On the other hand, John says that no one who abides in Christ “keeps on sinning,” and that no one born of God “makes a practice of sinning.” Modern translations such as the NIV, ESV, and NET make this distinction clearer by emphasizing ongoing practice rather than isolated failure. The NET, for example, renders 1 John 3:9 as “Everyone who has been fathered by God does not practice sin,” highlighting identity and relationship as much as behavior.
So How Can a Christian Still Sin?
The first thing to notice is that John never tells believers to make peace with sin. He writes, “My little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin.” (1 John 2:1 ESV). The goal of the Christian life is not managed sin, excused sin, or renamed sin. Christ came to take away sins, not to give them a safer religious label.
But John immediately adds the words every tender conscience needs to hear: “And if any man sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous.” That sentence is not written to unbelievers pretending to be Christians. It is written to “little children”—to believers. John assumes that a Christian may still commit sin, and he does not say that such a failure proves the person was never saved. He says that when a believer sins, Christ remains the believer’s Advocate.
This is the difference between falling into sin and living under sin’s rule. A Christian may stumble, grieve the Spirit, confess, be corrected, and be restored. What a Christian cannot do is settle comfortably into sin as a way of life while claiming that it does not matter. John is not describing sinless perfection; he is describing a new birth that makes unrepentant lawlessness incompatible with belonging to God.
That is why the wording of 1 John 3 is so important. The King James phrase “doth not commit sin” can sound, to modern ears, as though John means a Christian never commits another act of sin. But the surrounding letter will not allow that interpretation. John has already said that claiming to have no sin is self-deception, and he has already provided a remedy for believers who do sin. Therefore, 1 John 3 must be read as a warning against practicing sin—continuing in it, defending it, and refusing the light of God’s correction.
Modern translations make this clearer. The NIV says no one born of God “will continue to sin.” The ESV says no one born of God “makes a practice of sinning.” The NET says, “Everyone who has been fathered by God does not practice sin because God’s seed resides in him.” These translations are not lowering John’s moral standard; they are helping modern readers hear the distinction John is making between the believer who sins and confesses, and the person who treats sin as normal, harmless, or irrelevant.
The gospel does not teach that Christians become incapable of sinning. It teaches that sin is no longer their master. Paul says much the same thing in Romans 6: believers have died to sin, not in the sense that temptation disappears, but in the sense that sin’s old dominion has been broken. A believer may still disobey, but disobedience no longer defines who he is. His identity is no longer “slave of sin,” but child of God.
That new identity matters. John says the one born of God has God’s “seed” abiding in him. However, we understand the image—God’s life, God’s word, the Spirit’s work, or the family resemblance created by the new birth—the point is plain: God has placed something in His children that wars against sin. A Christian can sin, but he cannot be at home in sin. He may fall into the mud, but he cannot build his house there without contradiction.
This is also why confession is not the behavior of an unbeliever trying to get saved again and again. Confession is the family language of a child returning to the Father. “If we confess our sins,” John writes, “he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9 ESV). The verse does not say God is reluctant, uncertain, or waiting for us to achieve a perfect record. It says He is faithful and just. Our forgiveness rests on Christ’s righteous advocacy and atoning sacrifice, not on our ability to prove we will never fall again.
What I Wish My Grandfather Had Heard
If I could speak to my grandfather now, I would not tell him to take sin lightly. John certainly does not. But I would tell him that his grief over sin was not proof that he was lost. In many cases, the very anguish he felt was evidence that God’s seed was at work in him. Dead consciences do not mourn sin. Children of God do.
I would tell him that assurance is not found by looking inward until we discover sinless perfection. Assurance is found by looking to Christ: the righteous Advocate, the atoning sacrifice, and the Son of God who came to destroy the works of the devil. The Christian’s hope is not, “I know I am saved because I never sin.” It is, “I know I am saved because Christ has died for sinners, risen for sinners, intercedes for sinners, and is changing His children so that sin can no longer reign over them.”
That is the biblical balance. Sin is serious enough that Christ had to die for it. Grace is strong enough that Christ can save sinners who still struggle with it. And the new birth is powerful enough that those who belong to God cannot finally make peace with what Christ came to destroy.
Note: I used Microsoft Copilot (AI) to assist in preparing this.