As we discussed last week, the grace of God is not just the forgiveness of repeated sins in our lives—it is the power to live a new life as a new creation that does not continue to be subject to the old nature. However, the battle is long and hard against our old nature, and the grace of God certainly does forgive us for our repeated failures while we are fighting. The deception of many is that they do not have to fight—that they can continue to live in sin and God will still forgive them and bless them. This is a dangerous fallacy made clear in Hebrews 6:4-12:
who have tasted the goodness of the word of God and the powers of the coming age,
if they fall away, to be brought back to repentance, because to their loss they are crucifying the Son of God all over again and subjecting him to public disgrace.
Land that drinks in the rain often falling on it and that produces a crop useful to those for whom it is farmed receives the blessing of God.
But land that produces thorns and thistles is worthless and is in danger of being cursed. In the end it will be burned.
Even though we speak like this, dear friends, we are confident of better things in your case things—that accompany salvation.
God is not unjust; he will not forget your work and the love you have shown him as you have helped his people and continue to help them.
We want each of you to show this same diligence to the very end, in order to make your hope sure.
We do not want you to become lazy, but to imitate those who through faith and patience inherit what has been promised.
As we are warned in this text from Hebrews, it is a dangerous thing to embrace the cross, give our lives to follow Jesus, and then fall away, determining to serve ourselves and the devil again. However, it is possible to be renewed again if we have not “tasted the heavenly gift . . . shared in the Holy Spirit . . . tasted the goodness of the word of God and the powers of the coming age.” To have done all of this is to have come to a level of maturity and revelation of God and His ways and if we fall from this we are incorrigible.
We might also deduce by this that to the degree we have matured, have had the revelation of God, and experienced His power, to fall away would make it increasingly difficult to be renewed again.
Certainly it is a terrible thing to have beheld the love of God as demonstrated by the cross and then turn away from Him. To do so certainly reveals a bigger flaw in our basic character and our callousness toward the truth. Even so, the more mature we are in Christ, the more devastating the consequences of our sins can be, especially the turning away from God to serve sin. We see this demonstrated in the fall of Satan, who had such a high position that when he fell, he did not just fall a little bit.
The answer is that turning from God is not an option for us. We may trip up and stumble at times, but as we are told in Proverbs 24:16, “For a righteous man falls seven times, and rises again….” The “righteous” can fall too, but they keep getting back up. They do not stay down.
We are also told in Hebrews that Jesus became like us so that He could be a High Priest who knew our weaknesses, and He does have grace and mercy toward us. Though He never fell to sin, He knows the struggle and does have compassion for us.
The struggle itself is part of His grace and mercy because the struggle we have against sin, against our old nature, both matures and strengthens us. As we have covered before, this is how we are transformed according to Romans 12. The Greek word for “transformed” (see Romans 12:2) in that text is where we get our English word “metamorphosis” from. This word describes the transformation of a caterpillar into a butterfly. Probably the greatest struggle a butterfly will ever know is breaking out of its cocoon, but it is this struggle that strengthens the butterfly so that it can flap those huge wings. It is likewise the struggle that we go through warring against our old nature that prepares us to soar in the heavenly places.
Don’t ever quit fighting, and one day you will be able to fly!
