Why Struggling with Habitual Sin Is Not a Sign of Failure
Orientation
The feeling that God should simply remove your struggle with sin can lead to confusion and doubt about your salvation.
- The religious system often sells sanctification as behavioral improvement, which becomes a recipe for torture.
- Your ongoing struggle is not evidence that God's plan has failed, but that His plan is deeper.
- The silence after praying for removal can feel like condemnation, but it is an invitation to a deeper truth.
O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death? (Romans 7:24)
— Romans 7:24
Clarification
Sanctification is not about diminishing your desire for sin, but about discovering where your true life and strength are found.
- Growing in Christ does not mean your natural inclination to sin decreases; that idea is a deadly myth.
- God's solution was not to reform your old self but to terminate it through union with Christ's death.
- The struggle persists because we often try to solve a 'power' problem with 'guilt' solutions like seeking forgiveness without embracing our death with Christ.
Knowing this, that our old man is crucified with him, that the body of sin might be destroyed, that henceforth we should not serve sin. (Romans 6:6)
— Romans 6:6
Structure
Biblical logic reveals a two-fold work: the blood deals with sin's guilt, and the cross deals with sin's power through our death with Christ.
- The blood of Jesus deals with the guilt of sin—your standing before God is forever settled.
- The cross of Jesus deals with the power of sin—your old self was crucified, breaking sin's dominion.
- Freedom comes from reckoning yourself dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus, not from willpower.
I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me. (Galatians 2:20)
— Galatians 2:20
Weight-Bearing Prose
The core theological assertion is that Christ Himself is our sanctification (1 Corinthians 1:30). This is not a process of moral improvement but a person. Your union with Christ in His death and resurrection is the sole basis for dealing with sin’s power. The ’old man’—the person you were in Adam, under sin’s dominion—was crucified. This is a legal and spiritual reality. The flesh, your physical body with its appetites, remains, but its power is broken because its master is dead. The ongoing struggle serves a divine purpose: to teach absolute dependence. If God instantly removed every desire, we would lapse into self-reliance. Instead, He uses the struggle to bring us to the end of ourselves, to the cry of Romans 7:24, so we will receive the solution of Romans 7:25—Jesus Christ our Lord. Paul’s categories are clear: under law, sin revived and I died (Romans 7:9); under grace, I died with Christ and am freed from sin’s dominion (Romans 6:7, 14). Any teaching that frames victory as the gradual diminishment of desire misplaces the object of faith from Christ’s finished work to our fluctuating experience.
Integration
Your assurance is never based on the absence of struggle. It is anchored in the finished work of Christ, which you believed. When condemnation whispers, remember there is now no condemnation for those in Christ Jesus (Romans 8:1). When you feel weak, that is the precise moment to affirm ‘yet not I, but Christ liveth in me.’ Come boldly to the throne of grace to find mercy and help in time of need (Hebrews 4:16). This is not a challenge to perform better, but a landing place of rest. Christ is your life, your righteousness, your sanctification. The battle does not mean something is wrong with your salvation; it means you are on the journey of learning to depend on Him alone. Keep coming back to this: it is no longer you who live, but Christ lives in you. This is your reality. Grow in the knowledge of Him, not in the analysis of your failure. He is sufficient.