SIN
NATURE, DEATH OF
GOD wants you to know that the sin nature has died, or to put it in the words of The Wizard of Oz, the wicked old witch is dead. Now, when Dorothy’s house fell on the wicked witch, what did they do? They partied and they celebrated because the wicked witch was dead.
Here’s what we don’t do. Instead of praising God that the sin factory has been shut down, we go around thinking the sin factory is still open. We are deceived by the Evil One. We ought to be praising God that the wicked witch is dead rather than thinking that the factory is still open.867
[Deception, Satan’s; Satan, Lies of; Sin, Victory over]
YOUR sin factory was shut down when you accepted Jesus Christ as your Savior. However, even though the factory closed down, it did not alleviate the flesh. Since the factory called sin is shut down, but the flesh has not shut down, then the sin nature and the flesh are not the same thing. What then is the flesh that’s still alive and operating as opposed to the sin nature that has shut down?
Simply stated, when the sin nature shut down, what the sin nature had produced had to find someplace to lodge itself. So, the factory shut down but what it had produced had to find some place to call home, and what it found was your body. The flesh is the body that has now been inhabited by the patterns of sin established when the sin factory was alive.
The General Motors factory in Arlington, Texas, shut down. Though the factory is shut down, there are still cars riding up and down the highways that were produced at this factory. While shutting down the factory solves the problem of future production, it doesn’t get rid of what has already been produced.
When you accepted Jesus Christ, God killed the old person you used to be before you met Jesus Christ. He did this without changing your essential personality or your essential soul. He shut down the factory called sin. However, that factory has been producing a lot of stuff for a lot of years, and the stuff that was produced by the factory has now lodged itself in the body. The new nature can’t produce sin. It’s impossible. But everything the factory of sin produced is still riding on the highway of the flesh.868
[Flesh; Sin, in the Believer; Sin Nature, Residue of]
Rom. 6:6; Gal. 2:20