Love’s Victory Over Original Sin (Rewritten)

What theologians often call original sin—sometimes described as inbred sin—is the inner condition of the heart from which sinful actions either arise or are always threatening to arise. It is an condition of inner selfishness in which human ego reigns. As long as this inner condition remains unchanged, love has not fully conquered the soul.

Regeneration—the new birth — introduces a real power that restrains original sin from regularly breaking out into actual sin. Still, occasional lapses may occur, often in moments of weakness or inattention, and usually without deliberate intent. These moments deeply grieve the justified believer. They feel humiliating, even condemning — but they are temporary defeats, not final ones. For believers who are well taught, there is always a return to Christ’s atoning blood and to the promise: “But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous....” (I John 2:1 NRSV).

We are not claiming that every justified person experiences these lapses. Some believers, from the moment of pardon, live without condemnation. But church history and lived Christian experience suggest that these cases are rare. Most believers, while battling the sin that still dwells within, do not experience uninterrupted victory.

So what, then, is the difference between sin in an unbeliever and sin in a believer? It’s the same as the difference between poison inside a rattlesnake and that same venom injected into a healthy human body. For the snake, venom is natural — it delights in it, produces it, and sustains it. But when that poison enters a human body, every vital system immediately resists it, working to expel it. Sin in the believer is not cherished; it is opposed.

Romans chapter 7 was never meant by Paul to portray the normal Christian life — not even at its lowest stages. Yet the reality of sin within believers — this inbred egocentricity — breaking out at times against a weakened will, has led many Christians to mistake that chapter as a description of the Christian at his or her best. In truth, it describes an awakened but un-redeemed legalist, striving for justification through works and failing because sinful inclination still dominates.

Tragically, this portrait of a Christ-less, convicted Jew has been held up before countless Christians as the highest example of Christian maturity — as though Jesus, assisted by the Holy Spirit, could do no better than this. These believers need no convincing that sin can exist in believers; their own experience tells them so. What they struggle to believe is that life without willful sin is possible on earth.

Yet just as nature abhors a vacuum, so does the spiritual life. If sin is fully removed from the heart, something must replace it. That something is perfect love — love that fills the soul to the full extent of its capacity. The final, decisive victory of love over sin — the coup de grâce — is first a negative work: the destruction of sin itself. But this is immediately followed by a positive and limitless work: being “filled with all the fullness of God.”

This fullness expresses itself in the complete fruit of the Spirit — love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, meekness, faithfulness, self-control. Some Christians believe that this negative work — the destruction of the very inclination toward sin — happens at conversion. We now explain why we reject that idea.

Why Sin Is Not Fully Destroyed at the New Birth

1. It contradicts universal Christian experience. Across all ages, cultures, and branches of the church, genuinely converted people consistently testify that after conversion they discover inner conflict. Passing from death to life does not end struggle — it begins a new kind of struggle. Believers now battle not only the world and Satan, but also the disordered tendencies of their own nature.

This leaves only three possibilities:

• These believers were never truly regenerated.
• They all backslid almost immediately after conversion.
• They are genuinely regenerated, yet still struggling with remnants of the carnal nature.

The first option accuses nearly the entire church of self‑deception about their relationship with God. The second assumes near‑universal apostasy soon after conversion — an appalling conclusion. The third explanation aligns perfectly with the testimony of believers everywhere and preserves the integrity of the church’s witness.

2. It contradicts the historic teaching of the Christian church. Every major branch of the Christian church — Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Anglican, and Protestant — has affirmed that something sinful remains in believers after regeneration. Augustine and Calvin insisted on this no less than Arminius and Wesley. When a doctrine has survived centuries of intense theological conflict, reform, and restatement, that continuity strongly supports its truth.

Occasionally, smaller groups have rejected this view. For example, Count Zinzendorf and the Moravians in London once taught that entire sanctification occurred at the new birth. But their own experience contradicted the theory, and the doctrine ultimately weakened believers’ confidence in Christ. It was eventually abandoned.

So convinced have Christians been of the soul’s incomplete healing at regeneration that many have assumed full purification must wait until death — or even purgatory. But these conclusions raise their own serious problems.

3. It is philosophically unreasonable. The deeper a stain, the stronger the cleansing agent required. Christ’s blood is the cleansing power — but its effect corresponds to the believer’s faith. No faith brings no cleansing; perfect trust brings complete cleansing. Is it reasonable to assume that a newly awakened sinner — still shaken by fear, doubt, and guilt — exercises the highest possible faith at the moment of conversion? Human experience suggests otherwise. Trust matures through use. If confidence in other people grows slowly, it is reasonable that our deepest confidence in God also develops over time.

It makes far more sense to believe that the Holy Spirit performs two distinct works: one to deal with the believer’s own sins, and another to remove the inherited corruption passed down from Adam.

Dr. Fairchild of Oberlin College offered a modern defense of the opposing view, arguing that moral action is indivisible — that virtue, wherever it exists, is already pure, needing only reinforcement through habit. He explained believers’ awareness of mixed motives by claiming that good and evil do not coexist, but rapidly alternate. But this explanation raises a pressing question: does Christ offer immediate salvation from this alternation? Whether sin alternates with holiness or exists alongside it, the heart still needs cleansing. If habit alone is the remedy, then time — not Christ — becomes the true savior.

This theory also contradicts the lived experience of believers who clearly perceive simultaneous inner conflict. It rests on an outdated psychological assumption that the mind can only perform one action at a time — an assumption convincingly refuted by later thinkers like Sir William Hamilton.

4. Our strongest objection to this doctrine is simple: it contradicts Scripture. When the apostle Paul writes in Galatians 5:17, he is clearly addressing believers and describing their ongoing spiritual condition: “For what the flesh desires is opposed to the Spirit, and what the Spirit desires is opposed to the flesh; for these are opposed to each other....” If Paul had been trying to correct the modern idea that regeneration and sanctification are the same thing, he could hardly have spoken more plainly. He insists that even those who are truly regenerate still experience an inner conflict between two opposing principles. The purpose of the epistle is not to deny that struggle, but to show how it can be resolved — by the Spirit gaining full control and the sinful nature being brought to an end.

One passage alone decisively overturns the theory that the soul is completely sanctified at the moment of the new birth. Paul writes to the Corinthians, “And so, brothers and sisters, I could not speak to you as spiritual people, but rather as people of the flesh, as infants in Christ.” (1 Corinthians 3:1 NRSV). These believers were genuine Christians. Paul calls them “brothers,” refers to them as “babes in Christ,” and earlier in the letter addresses them as “saints.” They had been born into God’s kingdom by the Holy Spirit. And yet, with all the generosity Paul could muster, he could not honestly describe them as “spiritual” in the sense of being fully holy. Their old fleshly selfish nature was still plainly active. At this point Paul is not even talking about what they do — that comes later — but about what they are. They are, at the same time, carnal and babes in Christ. These are not alternating states; they coexist.

At one time, Dr. Edward Robinson tried to soften this apparent contradiction by redefining the word "carnal" or "of the flesh" (σαρκίνοις) in this passage to mean merely “weak” or “imperfect,” without implying sinfulness. But it quickly became clear that this definition came more from theological bias than sound scholarship. In his later editions, Robinson abandoned that interpretation entirely.

Why Misconceptions About This Are Harmful 

We have spent so much time on this mistaken identification of entire sanctification with justification because of the serious harm it causes.

• First, it leads many young believers to abandon their faith when they discover that sin still exists within them.
• Second, those who cling to Christ despite this confusion are prevented from seeing the great and glorious promise of full salvation available in this life, and are left stuck in a mixed, low-level spiritual experience.
• Third, if this doctrine were true, the global Christian church would shrink from millions to only a handful. For we would have to count as regenerate only those who experienced complete sanctification at the moment of conversion.

John Wesley is an especially credible witness here. Through decades of travel and close personal examination of believers, he knew the spiritual lives of Christians better than perhaps anyone since the apostle Paul. And Wesley stated plainly: 

“We do not know a single instance in any place of a person receiving, in one and the same moment, remission of sins, the abiding witness of the Spirit, and a new, a clean heart.” 

If Wesley never encountered such a case in more than eighty years, it is safe to say that such individuals have always been exceedingly rare.

Salvation From Sin 

Now, if we admit that while sin’s rule is broken at conversion, its presence remains, then we can move on to a crucial truth: there is a salvation from original sin available in this life.

Everyone agrees that sin must be entirely removed before we can enter heaven. But that cleansing cannot occur after death without leading to the doctrine of purgatory. Nor can it happen at the instant of death without making death itself the true Savior. To avoid both conclusions, we must believe that entire sanctification is meant to take place here and now.

Even before Christ came into the world, his mission was foretold in his very name. He was to be called Jesus — Joshua, Savior — a name echoing victory. But he was not sent to save people politically or nationally. He came to save individuals, not from Roman rule, but from slavery to sin. “He shall save his people from their sins.” The word sins here does not merely refer to guilt and punishment, but to sin itself — the inner condition that produces sinful acts.

As Dean Alford explains, this includes sin in its earliest form, the inward state from which outward acts are born. Selfish desire conceives before sin is committed. Christ saves not only from sinful actions, but from the inward corruption that gives rise to them.

Peter confirms this understanding when he explains Christ’s mission by saying that God sent Jesus “to bless you by turning every one of you from your iniquities.” Bengel captures the meaning beautifully: Christ turns us away from sin, and removes sin’s tendency from us. He stops both the act of sin and the inward pull toward it.

This is the heart of redemption. As one writer puts it, human depravity consists in the capacity for extreme wickedness. Redemption, then, must reach all the way to removing that capacity. Capacity is not the same as mere possibility. Adam could sin, but he first had to develop a disposition toward sin by listening to suggestions that weakened his faith and cooled his love.

In the same way, mature Christians like George Whitefield or Jonathan Edwards did not possess the capacity to commit crimes like theft, even though it was theoretically possible. That capacity would have had to be developed gradually through compromised faith and misplaced desire.

This helps explain John’s bold statement that the one who is born of God does not sin, because God’s seed remains in him (1 John 3:9). John is describing a believer in whom the regenerating work of love has reached maturity. Such a person, while abiding in Christ, lacks the inward inclination to commit known and willful sin.

 One Further Misconception

Finally, we must address the claim that regeneration must result in complete sanctification because it is a divine work — and God’s works are always perfect.

This argument sounds convincing but does not hold up. God himself is perfect, but not everything God produces is perfect in the same sense. Nature is full of imperfections: malformed animals, twisted trees, dwarfed plants, failed crops, and children born with physical weaknesses. God’s works are perfect when the conditions are perfect. God does not grow oranges in Alaska or apples in Florida, and God does not produce identical human forms across every climate.

The same principle applies spiritually. Perfect holiness emerges only under perfect conditions — complete faith in Christ expressed through full surrender to his will. Yet God’s creative and redemptive love does not wait for ideal conditions. It begins its work even in weakness, often producing partial and imperfect results at first.

Where faith is weak, spiritual life will be weak. But when faith fully grasps Christ as an all‑powerful Savior, complete salvation from sin follows. Then Christian maturity steps into the world clothed in the fullness of Christ.

Every spiritual transformation is the result of two forces working together: the divine and the human. When human cooperation is incomplete, the result is necessarily imperfect. God will not override the human will to compensate for its deficiencies. And so human weakness is reflected in the outcome, even when divine power is fully available.

That is why believers can be born into God’s family with remnants of depravity still present — remnants meant to be cleansed away by strong faith in the purifying blood of the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.

 

 

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This is a revision of Chapter 3 of Love Enthroned: Essays on Evangelical Perfection (1875) by Daniel Steele, completely rewritten with the assistance of Microslop CoPilot. The original chapter can be found here: LOVE TRIUMPHANT OVER ORIGINAL SIN.