This Is God's Will — Not Optional Theology

Here is the place where most of us need to stop and sit for a moment, because the church has not told us this clearly and the silence has cost us.

This is not the advanced curriculum. This is not the spiritual program available to the unusually committed. The transformation we have been describing — the iron filling with fire, the child of dust being conformed to the image of the Son, the love of God being poured through a person into a starving world — this is the stated, willed, non-negotiable intention of God for every person He has called.

"for you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Walk as children of light"

— Ephesians 5:8 (NET)

Not: walk as people trying to become children of light. Not: walk as people who hope someday to carry some light. You were darkness. Now you are light. Walk like it. The identity precedes the instruction. The instruction is simply: live out what is already true of you.

This is the Pauline indicative, and it is the most countercultural thing in the New Testament. Not a target. Not an aspiration. A statement about what has happened to you and what you now are. The church that organizes itself around sin-management has missed this — not the sin, but the starting point. You do not begin with the problem and work toward the solution. You begin with who you are in Christ and reason from there. The child of light is not a person who has reduced sin sufficiently. The child of light is a person in whom God is at work, pouring His own life through a willing vessel, and the transformation is what He is doing, not what the person has achieved.

"For sin will not rule over you, because you are not under law but under grace."

— Romans 6:14 (NET)

That is not a promise to the especially disciplined. It is an indicative addressed to the whole church at Rome. Sin will not rule over you. Not: sin will reduce its ruling over you as you improve. Will not. Paul is not describing a ceiling to strive toward. He is describing the floor of the regenerate condition.

And because it is the floor, not the ceiling, every person in Christ already stands on it. The question is not whether sin has dominion over you. The answer is already given. The question is whether you are walking in what is already true — or walking as though the bath never took.