Taking Promised Land, by His Power

In his excellent book Addictions: A Banquet in the Grave, Ed Welch gives this really helpful analogy about how real freedom from sin is obtained:

The real spiritual battle, biblically understood, is similar to the way the Israelites were delivered from Egypt and taken to the Promised Land.

"I [the Lord] have come down to rescue them from the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land into a good and spacious land, a land flowing with milk and honey." (Ex. 3:8)

This was God's promise. He said that he would bring his people out of slavery and give them a land that was their own. The land was theirs. Those who trust in Christ have gone through an even more dramatic deliverance. Through the wonder of Spirit-wrought faith, we are united to Christ, so that what was his is now our own, and the sin that was ours has been placed on him. We died with Christ to the penalty and power of sin, and we are raised with Christ to live for God as his beloved children.

Scripture then makes very bold statements about our life in Christ. It almost seems to suggest that we don't sin anymore. For example, Romans 6:6 says that "our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves to sin." This, however, is similar to God saying that the land belonged to Israel. They were promised the land, but they still had to fight for it. Furthermore, not all their battles were successful. There were times when Israel fought without the Lord himself leading them into battle. We, too, have been promised something truly remarkable. We are promised a holy and blameless life, and then we are told to fight for it.

It's worth highlighting that last part about how the Israelites got slaughtered by their enemies whenever they tried to fight "without the Lord himself leading them in battle". So it is with us. Freedom from any particular sin has been promised to us, but must fight to actually walk in that freedom, and yet only as the Spirit empowers us can we hope to take any new territory.

"by the Spirit....put to death the deeds of the body" Romans 8:13