Everyone who practices sin also practices lawlessness; and sin is lawlessness. (1 John 3:4)
Hidden in the word “practices” is personal responsibility. There’s a lot of blame assigned when one sins, and rarely is there full accountability. It’s plural because we’re not talking about missteps and mistakes, but premeditated and perpetuated wrongdoing. The heinous act of divorce, for example, is born out of selfishness, which cascades into full blown lawlessness. If you’re abiding in the Lord, everything biblical about marriage is operative and self-correcting by the power of the spirit of God: sacrifice, obedience, compassion, tenderness, patience, empathy, and understanding, for example. All these attributes must be eschewed to proceed with this premeditated narcissistic act. Simply stated, you can’t practice sin and righteousness at the same time. Sin requires a conscious decision to take an ill-fated fork in the road.
You know that He appeared in order to take away sins; and in Him there is no sin. (1 John 3:5)
To cohabitate with the Lord who is sinless, you must have your sins “taken away.” In fact, this was the only reason he came to this earth, to remove sin and all of its ramifications. Beyond the hard-hearted sin described above, there are the besetting, beguiling sins that everyone deals with on a daily basis, like flare ups of anger, procrastination, worry, laziness, uttering harsh or sarcastic words, etc. There’s no one more tried and true to resolve these episodes than our Lord. Wrapped up in the word “appeared” is all that Jesus had to bear in order to qualify as our savior and advocate. It wasn’t pretty, and it wasn’t easy. He paid his own “retainer,” a cost we could never afford, to be at the ready when we sin, to lead us back to righteousness.
No one who abides in Him sins; no one who sins has seen Him or knows Him. (1 John 3:6)
We shouldn’t get carried away with the “black and white” of this verse. We all know Christians sin. This reality was acknowledged earlier in John’s letter (1 John 2:1). Here his rhetoric is offered to establish an important point: you either abide in him or you don’t. Remember the fork in the road? Christians at some point in their lives have taken the high road and haven’t (and can’t) look back. Theologically, they’ve been sealed. Their names are in the Book of Life. They are now represented by Jesus in all matters in which they’ve might have slipped in a side bar conversation with God and the case is dismissed.
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