If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say that we have not sinned, we make Him a liar, and His word is not in us. I want to speak to you tonight on the subject of the sin of teaching sinless perfection. The sin of teaching sinless perfection. That's one of the things that we can find in these verses that we've just read. First of all, let me just back up and make sure that you understand what I'm talking about when I talk about sinless perfection because I like even for the children to understand that of any age what I'm speaking on as much as possible. What is sinless perfection? What does that term mean? We don't find it in the verses of Scripture that I've just read, but you can see it's there in essence. What I mean is that erroneous teaching, that mistaken teaching, that a child of God can reach the place in their lives where he or she no longer sins. Now, for me, it's hard to imagine that anybody could believe such a thing, let alone teach it to anyone else. It's hard for me to believe that anyone can believe and teach such a thing with an open Bible in front of them, looking at the Bible characters themselves in the Old Testament and the New Testament. Is it really possible tonight, is it really possible tonight for you and for me or anyone else that's saved by the grace of God to get to the place in our life where we're so mature that we'll get to the place to where there'll be no more sin in our lives. In other words, we'll never more sin. Does the Bible teach that? The truth is, tonight, sinless perfection in this life is impossible. And to teach such a doctrine is itself a sin. And I'll show you that tonight, if you have a doubt about it. Here are some things tonight that I want to give you. on this subject. We're not going to exhaust this subject tonight, but we do want to put this across because this is an erroneous teaching and it needs the light of the Word of God upon it. Now, sometimes people will argue, well, you can't live above sin because I can't, but you want to understand that because you and I can't do something, it doesn't mean that somebody else can't. So we've got to have something else besides our personal experience to rely upon. Personal experience is good only so long as it agrees with the Word of God, and after it quits agreeing with the Word of God, it's worthless. So let's begin tonight, and let's look at some things that I want you to see about sin as perfection. First of all, the doctrine or the teaching of sin as perfection places a burden upon a child of God that will rob – that's right, I said rob – him or her of joy. And joy is supposed to be a part of being saved. Assurance, and God wants His children assured. Peace of mind, and God wants us to have peace of mind. He plainly teaches us that in His Word. And it will hinder Christian service, and it can even affect your personal health. Now, I say that because it has done all of these things. And this is the teaching of the doctrine of sinless perfection. It's not just a harmless doctrine. It's a very serious doctrine, as all false doctrine or false teaching is. Now, for Christian, or if Christians are honest, they will admit that try as they may, and this is not just one, they fail and fall far short of the standards that sinless perfection requires, not every once in a while, but every day of their lives. I mean, whether you're looking in the Old Testament, the New Testament, or whether you're looking at the saints of God since that time, right on down to the present day, you'll find, dear people, that there aren't any people that can meet the requirements of God's holy standards 100 percent, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. It's just impossible to do that. But people teach this, and they teach this, and they make out like that they have, but we'll talk about that in a few minutes. Now, why do people sin? First of all, they sin because of ignorance sometimes. People, you know, people take the word ignorance to mean something, a bad name. But the Bible, Paul said, brethren, I would not have you to be ignorant. That would defend a lot of Baptists I know today, to insinuate that they're ignorant. But ignorant means you don't know anything about a particular subject, or you know very little about it. But in the case of Christians, many Christians sin because of ignorance. And people say, if you sin ignorantly, is it a sin? Yes, sir. If you study the Bible, you'll find out it's a sin. A sin is a sin. Lawbreaking is a sin. If you ignorantly break a law, they can arrest you and prosecute you and give you whatever penalty it requires. Ignorance of the law is no excuse. Many people have probably already used it. I've told you this many times. I didn't see that stop sign, officer. Yep, that worked, didn't it? He said, well, you didn't see the stop sign. That's a different matter altogether. Pardon me for stopping you, sir. Drive on. No, sir, you say, you should be looking. You should be looking. That's no excuse. No excuse whatsoever. Well, I said, well, I didn't know what kind of woman this was when I married her, so marriage doesn't count. That won't work, will it? It won't work. Sins of ignorance, sins of forgetfulness. You ever forgot to pray? Sure you have. You ever forgot to do right? Sure you have. You thought about it later and you said, oh my, yep, oh my, that's right. You have sinned against God. Sins of ignorance, sins of forgetfulness. Have you ever given in to temptation? More times than you can count. More times than you can count. And we can just go on and on tonight. So, we Christians sin for many, many reasons. And we can do it quite easily because we have a sinful nature. And sinning, you know, is something that we specialize in. We can do that without even thinking. And oftentimes do do it without thinking. Let him cross our minds. There are people that teach sinless perfection. And people that listen to them and believe them, and the people that listen to them and believe them, even sometimes think that this other person that's teaching this has themselves actually achieved the place in their life where they live above sin, as the old saying goes, or they live a sinless life. And this makes these people feel inferior to the people that make the claim that they don't sin. And I believe that sometimes this is exactly what they want you to do. They want you to get the idea that they are superior to you and to me. That they are superior. That we are inferior to them because there's a reason for that. That makes us look up to them and think they're super-duper. So I think sometimes that people buy this line and sometimes the people peddling this line do it intentionally in order to mislead people. Because people do like to lord it over other people. And if you've got an experience that you can brag about that the other person knows they can't achieve, then many times you can hoodwink a lot of folks and they'll follow you. You just look around, you can see many instances or remember many instances of people who believe people's outlandish claims. and followed them and given them money and sold their homes and everything else because they believed that they were superior or had some special place with God that the normal person doesn't. Now Christians can get to the place to where they believe they're unfit for service to God because they still have sin in their life and this disappointment will completely put the air brakes on their service to God and they'll begin to say, well until I get to where I can't sin, I'm not fit for the service of the Lord. So it's not a harmless teaching. And then, as I've said before, some Christians are weak. They're weak. And they get to thinking about something like this, and they say, well, I sin, and there must be something wrong with me. Am I really saved? Would a saved person not be able to live above sin eventually? And sometimes there's something wrong with me, and they go out every day and they try to watch everything they say and everything they do, and they try not to sin. But when they come home in the evenings, they sit down and they look back and they say, Oh, as hard as I tried, and it was a miserable day, I sinned here because I forgot. Because sin is not only doing what you're not supposed to do, It's failing to do what you ought to do also. And it is doing what you shouldn't do. So it's commission, the things that you commit that are wrong, and the things that you omit that are right. And, dear people, there aren't any people that know all that's to be known and that are so sharp that they can respond always perfectly in every situation. Yeah, there's no problem tonight for you and for me to find that in anybody's life. In fact, I challenge anybody to tell me they live above sin. Just don't make that mistake around me. Just give me one day with you. And I'll give you part of that day back. That's a sad situation. But some people, that gets to working on their mind. And that gets to working on their mind. And they get depressed. And they get distressed. And then sometimes they'll even put them in the hospital. Do you know that Christians can get so fouled up in their thinking that they'll end up in the hospital with mental problems? And many times this is what a false teaching will do to you. You see, the Bible said God has given us a sound mind, but that sound mind is connected with the Word of God. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge. And the Bible talks a whole lot about wisdom and sound thinking. And we have to get this as the Holy Spirit blesses us through the study of God's Word. So one of the things wrong with sinless perfection is that it places a burden upon a child of God that will rob him or her of their joy. After all, if they can't attain sinless perfection, what ought they to be happy about? They're sinning, and others have attained that, or say they have. They begin to lose their assurance of salvation because they say, surely, if I'm saved, I should be able to live above sin. It robs them of their peace of mind day and night, even at night when they're lying upon their beds. They're trying to think of this. I remember a person saying to me one time that had a friend that tried to live above sin, and she said she's perfectly miserable. All day long she's so afraid, she actually is afraid, stays in a strain, that she's going to commit sin. Well, I tell her she can just get out of the strain because she's going to do it. Just go ahead and accept it. Not that sin is not something we should hate or strive not to commit, but, dear people, you can go nuts as a human being if you'll just try, and it won't take much trying to do what is impossible for you to do. And so it robs us of the peace of mind and a little hindering service because you can't serve God as you ought to with a millstone tied about your neck. And then, of course, your health, it can destroy your health. And God is not responsible, God is not responsible for our health being destroyed because we have imbibed or drunk deeply of some false doctrine. That's why the Bible is given to us, so that we might stay straight. And the Lord intends for us to read it and believe it. For goodness gracious alike, quit running around thinking that you've got to have a certain feeling. God expects us to take what the Bible says and let it be settled right there. Just because God said it, that's what faith is. Faith is not believing what God said, in addition to some special feeling, too. That's not in the Bible. Faith is believing what God said, period. Let the feelings flow from that. Feelings don't have any part of assuring you of anything. And I hope to impress you with that. I've said that many times, and I want to say it again. I certainly hope to impress you with that, and if I haven't done it, I hope to do it before it's all over with. I get so sick and tired of people running around trying to direct their lives by feelings instead of by the Word of God. You'll never get anywhere like that because you're all the time looking for a certain feeling, and feelings are subjective, not objective. What you feel like today, you may not feel like tomorrow. And what does that person feel? You don't know what I feel, only I know what I feel. And how can you match what I feel when you don't even know what I feel? You may have somewhat of an idea, and then sometimes you may not have the faintest idea of what I feel. So it's a foolish thing, and the Lord didn't intend for that to be. Now, the second thing I want to point out to you is this. Such a false teaching has caused people to cheat and be dishonest by the way that they define sin. They do this so they can say that they live above or without sin because after all, they've got to be able to say that they are sinlessly perfect and live above sin. What they do is they lower the standards, and this fits in with what John is saying here, they lower the standards for what God calls sin down to their personal level of living. Now when you start lowering the standards of God, that's sin within itself. But they lower the standards so that they can meet the standards of sinless perfection as they define it. But in doing this, they have sinned. They have sinned. You see, I said the sin of teaching sinless perfection. Because people lower the standards. These folks will call sin errors, mistakes, and so forth. But let me tell you something. When they're through calling it all those things, it's still sin. A polecat is a polecat regardless of what you change his name to. You go out there and catch a polecat and say, I'm going to make this fellow smell good. I'm just going to call him a little kitty. And from now on, since I called him a little kitty, nobody has to worry about him spraying and him stinking. The only thing is, that's not going to work with the Polecat, because names by which you call him has nothing to do with what he is. I would never be stupid enough to let somebody convince me he will not make you stink because he's not a skunk. I have named him Kitty, and he is Kitty and not Polecat. I'll say, you can buy that stuff if you want to, I just don't want you hanging around my house because I don't want to smell you. One of the other days, talking about, here's the way they let you know they do before they spray you. That's fine. I don't intend to hang around and watch for all those signs. I don't know about you. She'd stand around and say, well, they do this, and they do that, and they stomp their feet. Shoot. You needn't go through that. Save your time, polecat. I'll leave you all the room you want. And if we're in a room, I'll do my best to make room, OK? Because I don't want it. But you see, people lower the standards and say, well, I'm not sinning. No, what they've done is they've tinkered with the standards, you see. Well, I can be seven feet tall if I just tinkle with the ruler. I can, and I'm not. But it'll sound good-willing. That's right. When it comes time to stuff that basketball in that ten-foot goal, I'll come up short. But I can do that, too, if I just lower that pole down to where I can jump up and get it. But all of that's not us. I'll be violating the rules for basketball. And so that's what some folks do. And they claim that they live above sin. I think that I've reminded you, I've told you all, I'll do it again, and not because I'm old, but because some of you might have forgotten it. I know some of you. The name tags up here now say you are, your name there. But I talked, when I was 18, you know how I was impressed with this? Right over here on the east side of town, I talked with a man, and he was a preacher, and he said to me, he said, I don't ever sin. I said, what? He said, I don't ever sin. Well, I've never seen one of those before. And I had run up on one. And actually, I was curious. I was real curious. And I didn't believe him at all. So I began to throw questions at him. Naturally, you say you can do something. I mean, you ought not to mind if I question you on some things. And so just a young preacher boy, I asked him about, you know, I said, well, what you do? You ever run a stop sign? Oh, he said, yeah. I said, that's a sin. He said, no, that was a mistake. I caught on right away what the game was. It was the game of lowering the standards. See, what was sin becomes a mistake, an error, a misjudgment, a slip. Ah, that's the way you do it. That's the way the game is played. I was introduced to that kind of thinking and that doctrine early in my ministry and had a first-hand experience with it. And I can say that tonight, that's the game that some people play. Then people sometimes say they live above sin because they rationalize sin. They rationalize sin. Now, dear people, what do I mean by rationalize sin? Okay. There's a friend of mine told me, he was talking to a preacher one time in a certain denomination, and they were talking about adultery. And those, as he said now, and talking about a couple of individuals committing adultery that profess to be Christians. And this preacher said, well, two Christians committing adultery is not like two lost people committing adultery. He said, it's like this. You've got a clean white sheet here that's washed. Yes, I got that. And you've got another clean white sheet here that's washed. And if you put both of them on the bed, they can't get one another dirty. Yeah, I got that. Well, he says that Christians, two Christians, committed adultery, a man and a woman, it can't be sin because they're both Christian. Now, I didn't get that. Now, he lost me on that curve. He went, boop, to the right, and I just kept going. But you know what that man was doing? He was rationalizing sin. rationalizing sin. You know how we rationalize sin? I rationalize sin. We lose our temper, and we blame it on our forefathers. Oh, it's that Johnson blood. Oh, it's that Gordon blood. It's not really our fault. We inherited that, so we have nothing to do with it. Isn't that right? You know what that is, that's rationalizing sin. No, you know what that is, that's lying on your kinfolk. That's what you're doing, lying on your kinfolk. Oughtn't it a shame? And them dead, a lot of them, they can't even defend themselves. Whoa, grandma's laying out there, she's been dead for 40 years, and here you are blaming her and she can't even come defend herself. Well, people rationalize sin. What am I saying? People can even sin while trying to claim sinless perfection. They're doing exactly what they say they don't do, or that people can get to the place to where they won't do it. And the next thing I want you to understand is this. Those who teach sinless perfection actually call God a liar. Now, I don't know where you came from, but where I came from, when you call God a liar, that's a sin. And if that's not a sin, And you didn't have any that you needed to be saved from. This is exactly what John says. He said, listen, if we say we've not sinned, first of all, he said, he said in verse 80, if we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves that truth is not in us. And then he says in verse 10, if we say that we have not sinned, we make him, that is God, a liar. Now that's serious, isn't it? Now, dear people, I said that It was a sin to teach sinless perfection. And it is a sin. And there's a lot of sin involved in it. The Apostle Paul, in Romans 7, 14-25, and we'll not read that for the sake of time, Romans 7, verses 14-25, talks about his battle. He said, the things that I would do, that's what I don't do, and things that I wouldn't do, that's what I end up doing. And he said, I just have an awful battle. Awful battle. And then, of course, in our text, here's John saying what he says about, and notice what John says. The writer of this is John, the beloved apostle. And he says in verse 8, if we, if we, he includes himself, he's Christian there, say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves. This book was written to Christians. And it's talking to Christians about sin in their lives, and it's fighting, for one thing, sinless perfection. Now, dear people, I want you to understand something. I'm not saying that we shouldn't live as faithfully for God and as sinless a life as possible. But I am saying that we cannot live above sin. And you know what I mean when I'm talking about trying to faithfully live for God. You're talking about a man whose habit of life is to live for the Lord. You're talking about someone who is right with God and who tries to do right and be right and stay right, and you see that in the lives of the men in the Bible that are called righteous people. They did not live above sin. They could not live above sin. There are other scriptures in the Bible besides Romans 7 and 1 John 1 here, verses 8 through 10, that we could refer to tonight, that show you that nowhere in the Bible is sinner's perfection taught in this line. Now, after this life is over and we are out of the flesh, then we'll be able to handle that. But, someone will say this tonight, and I've heard this too. They'll say, well, you're teaching against this preacher, and what you're doing is you're causing people to go ahead and sin. Only crooks. Only crooks. You see, there's a certain class of people that are going to find a way to sin regardless of what you say. And so I don't spend a whole lot of time worrying about what they're going to say, because if they don't find one thing, they're going to find another. That's right. That's right, because the whole object is to sin, and they're going to find a way to sin one way or the other, you see. All right, so somebody said, well, if this, they say this, if you preach once saved, always saved, then what you do is encourage people to make professions of faith and then go out and live in sin. No, sir, I don't. They encourage themselves. They don't listen to everything that's in the Bible. They don't listen to all the Scripture. And that's not my fault. That's not my fault. That's theirs. The same way with this, dear people. Don't try and tell me that a message like this is going to encourage people to go out and sin and not worry about it. I'll tell you one thing right now. If you belong to God, He'll straighten you out. He'll chastise you. He'll chastise you. That's what He said. He said, if you're my child, I'll get the rod out on you. I'll correct you. I'll straighten you out, but if you don't belong to me, then I'm going to chastise you. I'm going to treat you like a child. So, dear people tonight, it's a sin to say that you need to teach a sinful doctrine in order to get people to try to live right. Now, since when is God so desperate that He needs to use that which sent His Son to the cross in order to cause people to try to live right? He's not that desperate. That's not what the Bible's all about. This same Bible that refutes sinless perfection instructs God's people to live just as righteously as possible, and when we sin, to ask God's forgiveness and try not to repeat it. Because the Bible said, he that confesseth and forsaketh his sin, or forsakes it, shall be forgiven. You don't pull that stuff on God. I'm going to pull one on God. I'm really not sorry I did, and I'm going to confess it, but, you know, I'll get forgiveness and I'll go on. No, sir, that's not the way it's done. You don't pull that on God. You don't pull that on somebody that reads even your motives, you see. You don't pull that. You won't pull that on people too long before they'll get wise to that, you see. You can't get away with that. That won't work. That won't work a bit. All right, dear people, tonight, when we're talking about The Christian, what are we talking about? First of all, let's get this. And we're talking about the Christian and sin. It's always a serious subject. Number one, what happens when a person is saved? When a person is saved, they become a child of God. They're positioned before God changes. Before you're saved, you're a child of the devil. Before you're saved, you're a child of God's wrath. Before you're saved, you're under the penalty of God's law. That's an eternal hell. That's what it's going to cost you. That's what it'll take. That's it. But once you truly turn from your sin and unbelief and put your faith and trust in Jesus Christ, your position changes. You're no longer an outlaw. You're now a son or daughter of God. You're in God's family. Now, you've changed families, and your position and your standing with God is different. Your sins have all been forgiven, past, present, future, as far as you ever having to be judged to send you to hell. Or they're gone. But you are still in the flesh. You are still a man or a woman. You are a child of God, but you're still in the old flesh. And you still have an old nature. You've become partakers of the divine nature, but you still have an old nature. And that old nature is still as attracted to sin as it ever was. The old nature. The only thing is now, the person that's in that body has been saved, and that spirit man or part of you is not attracted to it like they once were. But the old flesh, you know, it still is attracted to the world. And you're still living in the flesh. And therefore, the world still appeals to you. That's why all the warnings in the Bible to Christians about resisting temptation and about all the things that they're not supposed to let happen in their lives. And that's why God said, if we confess our sins, His faithful and just to forgive us our sins. That word confess means to say the same thing about your sin that God says about it. And you haven't confessed your sin until you say the same thing about it He said about it. He said wrong, sin against Him, violation of His holy law. You've got to take that attitude and you've got to take that position before you've really confessed your sin. You see? And so, for a Christian to say, well, I'll do what I want to, it won't make any difference, you know, because I can't live perfectly. Well, you may say that, and in your old sinful way, you may think you've gotten somewhere, but you haven't gotten anywhere with the Lord. Not in one place at all. We don't, listen, I do not live above sin. I don't. I wish I could. I wish I could live a life without sin. It grieves me that I am not perfect. Dear people of the night, it grieves me that I'm not perfect. I wish I was. I wish I was. I've been accused of thinking I was perfect by folks who didn't like my preaching.