Greater Than Our Old Life: Why You Can't Stop Sinning by Trying Harder

Running should be the easiest thing in the world.

Watch a two-year-old in a church nursery. The moment they can stand, they run. Nobody teaches them. Open a door for a five-year-old and they are gone before you finish the sentence. It is not exercise to them. It is just what a body does when it is happy.

So why does it feel like punishment to the rest of us?

Jeff Sullivan, who preached at Christchurch Miami this Sunday, is fifty years old and teaching himself to run again. There is an Army fitness test involved, so the motivation is not optional. He has run a marathon. He has run a 50K. And he will tell you plainly that runner’s high is a rumor he has never once experienced.

These days it takes him twenty minutes of warm-up to go on a twenty-minute run. His hips are stiff from years of sitting, so he spends an hour walking strangely around his neighborhood to wake up muscles that have gone quiet. “I must look ridiculous to my neighbors,” he said, kicking his heels and swinging his arms.

Here is what he was actually describing. Something he was built to do, that a child does for fun, now has to be relearned from scratch — because a thousand small choices over forty years quietly trained his body out of it.

Hold onto that. It is the most honest picture of the Christian life you will hear this month.

The list you already agree with

Colossians 3:5 is where most of us get stuck. Paul gives a list of what has to go, and it is not a gentle list: sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires, greed. Then a second list a few verses later — anger, rage, malice, slander, filthy language, lying to each other.

Now, read that list honestly and notice something.

Almost nobody disagrees with it.

I have never met a person who said, “You know what I want more of in my life? Rage. Let’s get some more slander in here.” We do not defend greed. We know what it costs to always need more, to always work more. We know what sexual sin does to a marriage, to a friendship, to a person’s sense of themselves. We know exactly how it feels to hear our own words leave our mouth and think, why did I even say it that way?

We are not confused about the list. We hate the list.

And we cannot kill it.

That is the honest position of most people in a church on a given Sunday, and it is worth saying out loud because so much of our religious life is built on pretending otherwise. The problem was never that you did not know what was wrong. The problem is that knowing has never once been enough.

So when Paul says put to death, the only reasonable response is a question. How?

Paul’s answer is in the verses you skipped

To find it, you have to stop reading forward and start reading backward. The command in verse 5 is standing on top of something in verses 1 through 4, and if you take the command without the foundation you will spend your life exhausted.

Verse 1: Since, then, you have been raised with Christ, set your hearts on things above.

Verse 2: Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things.

Notice he says it twice. Heart, then mind. Paul will not let you split those, because we are experts at splitting them. We file the heart under feelings and the mind under doctrine and treat them as separate departments. Paul treats them as one engine.

And notice where he starts. Not with your hands. Not with your calendar. With your interior life — what you want and what you dwell on.

Sullivan illustrated the difference with two instruments and two very different childhoods.

His mother played piano and had a rule: all four of her boys would learn. An hour of practice a day, every day, unless you could get away with skipping. It worked, in a sense. He learned. He describes his own playing as “pretty bad but acceptable.” He obeyed, he followed the structure, and he was genuinely grateful for it.

And the day he graduated, he never touched a piano again.

His son had the opposite experience. No lessons. No requirement. It simply was not part of how they parented. Then, heading off to college, the boy decided he wanted to play guitar. So he sat in his room with YouTube tutorials. Later he found someone to coach him. He played whenever he could, as much as he could.

He now plays in his church’s worship band.

Same family. Opposite result. And the difference was not discipline — the piano had far more of that, enforced daily for years. The difference was that one of them was assigned from the outside and one of them came from the inside.

Jesus said it in one line: where your treasure is, there your heart will be also (Matthew 6:21). What you love, you will find a way toward. What is merely required of you, you will drop the moment the requirement lifts.

Which quietly rewrites the question. It is not what should I be doing? It is what do I actually want?

”Sin doesn’t make you bad. It makes you dead.”

But that only pushes the problem back a step. Because if the answer is desire, and my desires are the very thing that is broken, then I am still stuck. You cannot want your way into wanting differently.

This is where Sullivan quoted a line from Louie Giglio that is worth carrying around for a while:

Sin doesn’t make you bad. It makes you dead.

Sit with that, because nearly all of us have filed sin somewhere else. Our common psychology, our loose theology, or honestly just our own opinions, tell us sin is a matter of good and bad. So we treat it as a disease to heal from. A problem to correct. A character flaw to improve on. A bad habit with a better version available if we try harder.

Every one of those framings smuggles in the same assumption: that the patient is alive and needs improvement.

Colossians says something else entirely. Verse 3: For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God.

Not you struggled. Not you underperformed. Died.

That is either the most discouraging sentence in the chapter or the most freeing one, and which it becomes depends entirely on what you do with it.

Here is the case for freeing. If sin is a flaw, the cure is effort — and you have already run that experiment, for years, with the results you know. But if sin is death, then effort was never going to touch it, and all those failed attempts were not the personal scandal you took them for. They were the predictable outcome of applying the wrong category.

Dead people do not need coaching. They need someone who can conquer death.

And that, Sullivan said, is what the cross actually was. Not a good man martyred — history is crowded with those, and if that were the story, Jesus would be one more name on a long list of admirable people who were treated unjustly. Instead it was the Son of God saying, I will take upon me the sins of the world. The sky went black. The ground shook. God put his wrath on the sin that stood in for yours and mine.

You were never going to out-discipline a grave. Someone had to open it.

Hidden — which is not the same as finished

There is one more word in verse 3 worth slowing down for, because it changes how you read your own week.

Your life is hidden with Christ.

Not gone. Not completed. Hidden — like something valuable that has been buried, and is being uncovered a little at a time.

That image does real pastoral work. It means the old self showing up again on Tuesday is not evidence that nothing happened to you. Sullivan put it this way: you have this treasure that is dirtied and buried and genuinely there, and your old self still raises its head from time to time, and underneath all of it Christ has already transformed you and is steadily uncovering more as his radiance works outward.

He also made a point that matters for anyone who has ever felt like a second-class Christian because their story lacked drama.

Some people are Saul on the Damascus road — full of rage and self-righteousness one moment, undone the next, turned so fast that everyone who knew them has to start over. Some are the disciples, who lived alongside Jesus for three years and remained, by every honest account, clueless, right up until the Spirit made sense of it. And some of you cannot name a day at all. Church as a child. Grandparents in church. Maybe a Christian school. You have never not believed, and you have quietly wondered whether that counts.

One factor is identical in all three: Christ is the one who killed the sin. Not the intensity of your conversion. Not the quality of your testimony.

What you put on, and what it is for

Only now, with all of that underneath it, does Paul get to the clothing.

Verse 12: as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience. Bear with each other. Forgive as the Lord forgave you. Over all of it, verse 14, put on love, which binds everything together in perfect unity. And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts.

Two things about that list.

First, it assumes you will still need it. If we were instantly perfected the moment we believed, we would have nothing to forgive one another for. The command to forgive is Paul quietly telling you that this is a process, and that the church is the place it happens.

Second — and this is the sentence from Sunday most likely to rearrange something in you — look at what is actually on the list. Compassion. Kindness. Humility. Gentleness. Patience. Love. Peace. Every one of those is an interior quality that radiates outward. Not one of them is a task you can complete.

Which means the disciplines are not the goal.

Reading your Bible is not the goal. Memorizing Scripture is not the goal. Serving, giving, showing up — none of these is the destination. They are how you teach your heart to become the destination: becoming love, becoming humility, becoming forgiveness, becoming kindness.

That is not permission to skip them. It is the opposite. Sullivan’s application was direct: your gathering to worship is how you set your heart. The Word read aloud is how you set your mind. Forgiving the person two rows over is how the thing gets worked into you. These are the instruments Christ is using to kill what is dead in you — so do not treat Sunday lightly, and do not skip it.

Then the last verse stops being a slogan you learned in Sunday school and becomes a description of an actual life. Whatever you do, in word or deed, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus. Your work. Your family. Your hobbies.

Your running.

You do it to the glory of God, because your heart and your mind are set on him who is not merely in your life.

He is your life.

Where to start this week

If you are somewhere in the middle of this — you agree with the list, you cannot kill it, and you are tired — here is the order Paul actually gives, which is not the order we usually attempt.

Stop starting with the behavior. You have tried that and you know how it goes.

Start by asking what you want, and then take that honestly to God as the thing that needs changing. Not help me stop doing this, but change what I love. That is a prayer he answers, and it is the only one that reaches the root.

Then put yourself where the work gets done. Gather. Sing. Sit under the Word. Forgive somebody. Not because those things earn anything, but because they are the instruments, and a heart is trained the way a body is trained — slowly, unglamorously, one brick after another, until the thing you were built for stops feeling impossible.

You are not being asked to run a race you are dead for. You are being asked to live like someone who has already been raised.

Frequently asked questions