Sometimes I am tempted to think or do something that I know is wrong. I must remember…
Although believers have been delivered from God’s wrath (cf. Rom. 5:9), they are subject to His chastening. Hebrews 12:5–6 reminds us not to forget “the exhortation which is addressed to you as sons, ‘My son, do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord, nor faint when you are reproved by Him; for those whom the Lord loves He disciplines, and He scourges every son whom He receives.’ ” God will react against sin. The unbeliever will experience His eternal wrath, and the believer His loving chastening. Either way, all who pursue sin will suffer the consequences.
and in them you also once walked, when you were living in them. (Col.3:7)
Paul gives a second reason for putting sin to death, saying in effect, “You know to some degree how it was to live in sin. You hated it and that is why you came to Christ—to be delivered from your manner of life.” Similarly, Paul said to the Ephesian believers,
You were dead in your trespasses and sins, in which you formerly walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, of the spirit that is now working in the sons of disobedience. Among them we too all formerly lived in the lusts of our flesh, indulging the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, even as the rest. But God, being rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in our transgressions, made us alive together with Christ (By grace you have been saved). (Eph. 2:1–5)
In light of that, Spurgeon asks,
Christian, what hast thou to do with sin? Hath it not cost thee enough already? Burnt child, wilt thou play with the fire? What! when thou hast already been between the jaws of the lion, wilt thou step a second time into his den? Hast thou not had enough of the old serpent? Did he not poison all thy veins once, and wilt thou play upon the hole of the asp, and put thy hand upon the cockatrice’s den a second time? Oh, be not so mad! so foolish! Did sin ever yield thee real pleasure? Didst thou find solid satisfaction in it? If so, go back to thine old drudgery, and wear the chain again, if it delight thee. But inasmuch as sin did never give thee what it promised to bestow, but deluded thee with lies, be not a second time snared by the old fowler—be free, and let the remembrance of thy ancient bondage forbid thee to enter the net again! (Evening by Evening [reprint, Grand Rapids: Baker, 1979], p. 151; italics in the original)
Why would anyone who has been made rich return to the slums to live in poverty? How can a new creature act like an old one (cf. 2 Cor. 5:17)? “What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace might increase? May it never be! How shall we who died to sin still live in it?” (Rom. 6:1–2).