As an experienced minister, I sometimes find myself in conversations with younger ministers seeking a good way to handle a tricky pastoral situation. In one such conversation, the presenting problem was a man mired in serious sexual sin. I gave the (to me) standard answer: remind him that he was cleansed from his old sins, challenge him to live in his new identity, and support him intensively as he does it. My young interlocutor objected that surely you can’t tell an adulterer that he used to be an adulterer while he’s still cheating on his wife.
Well…yes you can. Paul did exactly that in 1 Corinthians 6:9-11. Consider the context of the whole book: Paul has to address their lawsuits with one another (extortion, theft, covetousness), their drunkenness (and at the Lord’s Table, even), their eating from the tables of pagan temples (idolatry), dallying with prostitutes (fornication, idolatry), and so on. The addressees of this letter manifestly still have the sorts of problems he’s talking about in 6:11, and what does he say? “…and such were some of you. But you were washed, but you were sanctified, but you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus and by the Spirit of our God.” (And by the way, it’s not just Paul. Peter tells us that a believer who lacks virtue “has forgotten that he was cleansed from his old sins.”)
What my young friend was missing is no trivial oversight; it’s one of the major points of New Testament teaching. Paul does not say “You stopped all that nonsense, and therefore you’re now clean,” as though your cleanliness rests on your works. Paul says “Jesus cleansed you from all that nonsense, so stop it already.” If you belong to Jesus, your cleanliness is an accomplished fact, a gift you were given. Your practical holiness is based on that gift, not the other way around.
That’s not just a major theological difference (although it is that); it’s a major practical difference too. When I have a man on my hands who belongs to Christ and is committing adultery, do I tell him, “You used to be an adulterer”? Would I really say that? YES, YES, YES!!!! I would, Paul did, and if you would not, repent! He has been washed from his adultery, and made as clean as it gets, and therefore we help him enact his new identity as a son of God rather than his old identity as an adulterous son of Adam.
How is this defeated man, his life rotted out by adultery, supposed to confidently embark on a new course? Where would he get the chutzpah to believe that he could have a different life than the nightmare that he’s made for himself? From God’s assurance that he is no longer an adulterer, that’s where! The adultery was nailed to the cross with Jesus, died on the cross with Jesus, was buried in the grave with Jesus, and when God raised Him from the dead three days later, Jesus did not come out of the grave dragging the adultery with Him. It’s gone! Finished. Dead forever, and good riddance. So we tell him that, and we walk with him and make it stick.
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