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Canto VI of Dante’s Inferno paints a sobering scene.

Dante and Virgil have just arrived in the third ring of hell, where God punishes the sin of gluttony. An accursed rain — cold, foul, toxic — pours down on the circle. The eternal deluge turns the ground into a horizonless slough of stinking refuse.

Dante beholds a mess of souls lying prone on the ground and drowning in this thick paste. Like great slugs, they can barely move beneath the weight of their sins’ consequences. Yet as heavy as they seem, they are insubstantial; Dante treads right through them.

Without warning, Cerberus, the three-headed monster of hell, bounds out of the downpour. He bares three sets of teeth and opens three maws wide to devour Dante and his guide. Virgil reacts fast, scooping up two heaping handfuls of mud and shoveling them into the beast’s triple gullet. Like dogs with a spoon of peanut butter, the ravenous mugs of Cerberus gobble down the disgusting meal and leave Dante free to pass through “that polluted mix of soul and slush” (The Inferno 6.100–101).

Heavy Sin of Making Light

Dante’s grim picture of gluttony mirrors the tone of Scripture (Deuteronomy 21:20; Proverbs 23:20–21; 28:7). The Hebrew word for gluttony (zālal) derives from a verb not specific to food. Often used in contexts that describe reckless overindulgence and wastefulness, it means to make light of, to despise, to handle as worthless, and so to squander. Moreover, gluttony is a species of idolatry (1 Corinthians 10:6–7), which treats the belly as a god (Philippians 3:19), worshiping and serving the contents of the cupboard rather than the Creator.

Ironically, by assigning food the weight of glory due to God alone, we make light of it. Let me explain: God designed every bit of creation to communicate his glory. That means food has a peculiar derivative glory intended to help us savor God. It is weighty because it is attached to him. But untether that gift from the Giver, and it drifts away like an escaped birthday balloon. Elevate food above its Maker, and we gut it of its glory. When you divinize the gift, assigning to it more weight than God intends, you desecrate the gift and dishonor the Giver.

Thus, gluttony is the heavy sin of making light. It indulges in one of God’s gifts (generally food or drink) untethered from supreme satisfaction in God. It is the disordered eating that springs from disordered desires. The glutton despises God’s good designs for food, and thus, squanders it.

Bite-Sized Theology of Food

God invented food and gives it to man for at least three glorious purposes. First, to fuel our bodies for fruitful dominion and labors of love (Genesis 2:16; Psalm 145:15–16; Ecclesiastes 3:12–13; Acts 17:25). Food strengthens us for God’s mission.

Second, to facilitate fellowship through Christlike hospitality. Jesus catered truckloads of food and wine during his earthly ministry as a foretaste of the jovial hospitality of his kingdom (Matthew 14:13–21; John 2:1–11), and he calls his followers to feast others in the same Spirit (Luke 14:12–13; Matthew 25:35–40; cf. Nehemiah 8:10).

Third, to further our delight in him. Food communicates God’s fullness (Proverbs 24:13–14; Isaiah 55:1–5; John 6:35; Romans 1:20). God created food — aged cheddar, sourdough bread, campfire hotdogs, ice cream — as tangible, tastable images of divine things. Food’s greatest glory is divine flavor; it tastes like the Trinity.

In other words, God designed food to help fulfill the greatest commandments: Love self rightly, love others generously, and love God fully and increasingly. He gives us principles and patterns for our use of food to guide us toward these ordered loves.

Good Gone Rancid

But as we all know, sin defiles our use of food. Sin does not spoil food itself; all food is clean (Mark 7:18–19; Romans 14:14; 1 Corinthians 10:25–26; Titus 1:15). But when sin disorders our desires, we become disordered eaters. When you seek in food what you can only find in God — control, happiness, identity, comfort, hope — the good gift goes rancid.

Satan loves to help us turn food into idols (Genesis 3:1–7; Exodus 16:2–3; Luke 4:1–4; 1 Timothy 4:1–5). From the start, he has employed sinful eating with great success. Whether we overeat (Psalm 78:21–31; Ezekiel 16:49) or undereat (1 Timothy 4:3), he cares not; gluttony concerns the manner and motivation of our eating, not the amount.

Satan has always been an influencer for the demonic diet plan. We spy the first glutton in the first garden. Eve may have taken only one bite, but her tongue trumped her obedience. Or think of Esau. He exchanged his birthright, the promise of God’s presence and blessing, for a bowl of bean soup (Genesis 25:29–34). Jesus himself would have succumbed to gluttony if he took Satan as his dietician (Luke 4:1–4).

In modern times, the father of lies has had a heyday with food. Many still overeat, but perhaps even more become gluttons through strict diets, food legalism, undereating, or endlessly scrolling “food porn.” Many of the fittest people on Instagram are gluttons because diet dominates their lives. Washboard abs can be just as accurate an indicator of disordered eating as a beer belly.

Consider yourself. Has food become an idol? Does your life revolve around meals? Does your mind fixate on food? Do you keep secrets about your eating habits? Do you ignore your diet’s effects on your body — or obsess over them? Does your relationship with food hobble your ability to love others well?

Munching on Mud Pies

Returning to Dante, his repulsive images help us grapple with “the sin of the throat that damns the soul” (Inferno 6.53). In The Divine Comedy, Dante paints soul-pictures to show us the reality of sin and its effects. His images incarnate the sins they depict. So, what does Dante reveal about gluttony and God’s three glorious purposes for food?

First, gluttony is self-destructive. Gluttony may seem like a warm, cozy, even festive sin. However, freezing rain and stinking mud come nearer the truth. Food should fuel us, but Dante shows gluttons as lethargic, lacking all the alacrity fruitful labor demands. Ironically, as gluttons make light of God’s good gifts, they become at once physically heavy and insubstantial. By eating more, they become less. At its best, food sharpens our capacities to know God and draw us up to him; gluttony mires the soul in mud.

Second, gluttony isolates. In Dante’s vision, none of these souls speak to one another. In one sense, they wallow together; in another, they are totally alone. Gluttony has this effect. Overeating is often a private affair. But overscrupulous eating can isolate as well, tempting us to refuse the hospitality of others due to calorie count or content. The imperatives of “clean eating” can divide Christians just as surely as the old-covenant food laws misapplied in the New Testament (cf. Galatians 2:11–14).

Finally, and most seriously, gluttony spoils our appetite for God. Dante captures this tragedy through Cerberus. With three mouths and one stomach, the hound of hell perfectly symbolizes eating gone wild. Even more striking, this thrice-ravenous beast is satisfied with handfuls of mud. C.S. Lewis loved Dante, and I wonder if he had this scene in mind when he wrote,

We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased. (The Weight of Glory, 26)

Gluttony makes light of glory. Like Cerberus, the glutton munching on mud pies settles far too easily. Food will never satisfy the soul’s ravenous appetite for eternity (Ecclesiastes 3:11). Above all, Dante reveals the sin of gluttony as insufficiently hedonistic.

Too Full to Be a Glutton

Eating devolves into idolatry when you look to food to meet a hunger only God can sate. So don’t eat to fill a hungry soul. Until you are “filled with all the fullness of God,” food will always tempt you to squeeze more than it can give (Ephesians 3:19). Food threatens the soul until we heed God’s call to glut ourselves on him (Isaiah 55:1–2).

Scripture so often compares God to food because the delights of the table point to him. He satisfies the soul like a cool draft in the desert (Psalm 42:1). He thrills more than new wine, fills more than fresh bread; he is sweeter than honey and richer than milk. He is the fullness and fatness of all delicious things (Psalm 63:5). When we come to him, we “eat what is good” (Isaiah 55:2). All the best things we seek in food, we find in God. So, devour the Bread of Life. Drink down the Living Water. When it comes to this divine food, gluttony is impossible. You cannot overindulge in God.

And when you’re full of God, you’re free to feast (and to fast!). In other words, when your appetites are ordered under God, and his gifts are tethered to him, you are free to enjoy food or forgo it as a means of enjoying God — just as he intends. This is the glory of food: to help us taste and see that the Lord is scrumptious.

When you savor God and delight in food as a means of tasting him, you will be too full for gluttony.

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ABSTRACT: William Tyndale’s New Testament remains significant not just because of its inherent achievement and impact when it was first published in the sixteenth century. His work of translating the New Testament into English continues to shape English Bible readers and translation efforts in three spheres: translation theory, matters of diction and style for English Bible translations, and Bible literacy in English-speaking lands. Five hundred years later, English-speaking Christians have abundant reason to thank God for Tyndale.

The English-speaking segment of the Christian church is in the midst of commemorating the five hundredth anniversary of its most epoch-making book. Only three copies of this book have survived. When the British Library purchased one of these copies from Bristol Baptist College in 1994, it declared the book to be “the most important printed book in the English language.”¹ That book is William Tyndale’s English translation of the New Testament, which marked the first time the Bible had been translated directly from its original language into modern English.

The importance of Tyndale’s New Testament resides not just in its inherent achievement and its impact in its own day. These are significant, but more relevant to us is the lesser-known story of the five-hundred-year influence of Tyndale’s New Testament after it ceased to be printed following Tyndale’s death. This legacy is the subject of the essay that follows. My goal is to paint a picture of what we owe to Tyndale’s New Testament today and how we came to receive these benefits.

Radical Commitment to God’s Word

Before we trace the influence of Tyndale’s New Testament over its five-hundred-year history, we need to know something about its parentage and birth. William Tyndale was a farm boy from Gloucestershire, England. He was probably born in 1494. The uncertainty of that date, coupled with a complete scarcity of verifiable information about his childhood, tells us that he came from an undistinguished background. Yet God endowed him with such an extraordinary linguistic ability that in his later years he spoke seven languages fluently in addition to his native English: Latin, Hebrew, Greek, German, Italian, Spanish, and French.

Of course, Tyndale did not master those languages without an education in them, but when we inquire into that education, we are in for a surprise. Although Tyndale spent a dozen years in the hallowed halls of Oxford and Cambridge Universities, nearly everything that he carried away of use in his eventual work of translation was the result of self-education, not the classroom. In fact, during his five years in Luther-friendly Cambridge, Tyndale spent his time as an independent scholar engaged in self-directed study instead of a degree program.

After his heady years at Oxford and Cambridge, Tyndale returned to his native region and served a two-year tenure as tutor to the sons of a prominent local family. It was here that he discovered and confirmed his life’s vocation as a translator of the Bible. The famous moment that codified Tyndale’s calling occurred when a Catholic priest said in his hearing that “we were better to be without God’s law than the pope’s.” Tyndale famously replied, “If God spare my life, ere many years I will cause a boy that driveth the plow to know more of the Scripture than thou dost.”² This is the first time we hear of Tyndale’s resolve to be a Bible translator, and it was the turning point of his life. As we will see, the plowboy statement is the most misunderstood and misrepresented sentence associated with Tyndale.

The story of Tyndale’s fugitive life of exile is well-known. Since it was a capital offense in England to own any part of the Bible in English, Tyndale saw that the only way he could pursue his vocation as Bible translator was to move to Germany. Even there his work was a risky venture. When the printing of Tyndale’s New Testament had reached Matthew 22, the printer’s shop was raided by Catholic sympathizers, and Tyndale barely escaped with his unpublished manuscript in hand. In 1526 the book that shaped our world was published in Germany and smuggled into England, where it was publicly burned by Catholic authorities and privately circulated throughout the land among the growing numbers of Reformation adherents.

Tyndale died a martyr’s death in 1536. He remains influential in our lives today because he was receptive and faithful to the calling of God on his life. In the rest of this essay, I explore three spheres of Tyndale’s five-hundred-year influence — on Bible translation theory, on the words and style of English Bible translations, and on Bible literacy in English-speaking lands. In all three spheres, Tyndale’s New Testament still speaks, even though its publication ceased with Tyndale’s death.

Tyndale’s Influence on Bible Translation Theory

Tyndale’s influence on the philosophy of Bible translation is a little-known aspect of Tyndale’s legacy.³ But this topic is important because every translation of the Bible has specific characteristics based on the philosophy of translation adopted by a translator or committee of translators, a fact hidden from most Bible readers to their detriment.⁴

Tyndale’s philosophy of translation set the compass for English Bible translation until the middle of the twentieth century, and even after that it has been accepted by half of the Bible-reading public. That legacy is as important as the words and style that Tyndale chose for his English translation because those words and style are dependent on his philosophy of translation. Another philosophy would have yielded different words and a different style from what are being praised in this commemorative year.

Thankfully, Tyndale left a remarkably complete (if succinct) statement of his philosophy of translation, which I will summarize. First, though, we need to clear the air of a grand misperception.

The Truth About the Plowboy

Earlier I noted the occasion on which Tyndale said that he hoped to be instrumental in ensuring that the whole cross section of English society would be familiar with the Bible, even a hypothetical plowboy. Tyndale made those comments in reply to a priest who had raised the issue of what authority deserves to be normative in the church’s belief and practice. Some would argue that Tyndale also had translation philosophy in mind — specifically, that he wanted to translate for a grade-school reading level. But what does Tyndale’s statement actually mean?

A preliminary point is that in Tyndale’s own writing we do not hear about his famous plowboy. Instead, Tyndale speaks consistently of “laypeople,” who represented the entire cross section of British society.⁵ More importantly, it is likely that Tyndale himself was not the author of the plowboy reference but was instead echoing a comment from the famous Desiderius Erasmus (1466–1536), who had deeply influenced Tyndale during his years of self-education at Cambridge University. In the preface to his edition of the Greek New Testament that Tyndale used as the basis of his translation, Erasmus wrote, “I would wish that all women, girls even, would read [the New Testament]. . . . I long that the husbandman should sing portions of them to himself as he follows the plough, that the weaver should hum them to the tune of his shuttle.”⁶

We should note that the context of this statement by Erasmus is the same as it was for Tyndale in his reply to the priest — not a theory of Bible translation but the question of authority for belief and the need for the Bible to reach all segments of society. Neither Erasmus nor Tyndale spoke of a target audience for Bible translation (a concept that did not surface until the rise of dynamic-equivalent translation in the middle of the twentieth century). Tyndale’s loyalty — and that of his successors for five hundred years — was not to a target audience with minimal linguistic ability but to the words that the writers of the Bible actually used, whether hard or easy to grasp.

In summary, Tyndale was not an early proponent of dynamic-equivalent translation aimed at a grade-school audience.

Tyndale’s Philosophy of Translation

The misinterpreted plowboy statement is so entrenched in popular thinking that it comes as a shock to learn that Tyndale was firmly committed to a literal theory of translation. He believed that the task of a translator is to find the English words that best match the original words of the Bible. If no English equivalent word existed for a particular biblical term, Tyndale sometimes invented one (repent and atonement, for example). Overall, Tyndale added some 1,700 words to the English language, the same number Shakespeare added at the end of the same century.

Tyndale himself made it clear that he endorsed literal translation. Writing to fellow English Reformer John Frith, who was imprisoned in the Tower of London awaiting martyrdom, Tyndale wrote, “I call God to record against the day we shall appear before our Lord Jesus to give a reckoning of our doing, that I never altered one syllable of God’s word against my conscience.”⁷ Not a single syllable: Tyndale the translator was committed to precise lexical correspondence between the original Greek and the English translation.

Nor is this the only place where Tyndale asserted this theory of translation. In his religious treatise The Obedience of a Christian Man, Tyndale wrote that “the manner of speaking” in the original texts of the Bible is so compatible with English that “in a thousand places thou needest not but to translate it into English word for word” in order to achieve effects of “grace and sweetness, sense and pure understanding.”⁸

One more crucial passage from Tyndale tells us even more. In the prologue to his 1534 revision of his 1526 New Testament, Tyndale offered the dictum that “in many places, me thinketh it better to put a declaration [explanation] in the margin, than to run too far from the text [of the original]. And in many places, where the text seemeth at the first chop hard to be understood, yet the circumstances before and after [i.e., the context], and often reading together, maketh it plain enough.”⁹

Tyndale here plants his flag firmly against the practice of importing explanatory commentary or interpretation into the biblical text that is being translated. He obviously thought it was a good thing, not a bad thing, for a reader to wrestle with the biblical text, even if at first glance it is difficult to understand. Tyndale’s goal was transparency to what the biblical authors wrote, not transparency to the immediate understanding of an English reader.

Where can we find the influence of Tyndale’s philosophy of translation five hundred years later? We find it in the contemporary translations that articulate and follow a literal philosophy of translation. Examples are the New King James Version, the English Standard Version (ESV), and the Updated American Standard Version. The preface to the ESV correctly claims to be not simply in the King James lineage but in the Tyndale–King James mainstream tradition of English Bible translation.

Conversely, dynamic-equivalent translations (for example, the New International Version, the New Living Translation, and the Good News Translation) have departed from Tyndale’s theory and practice of Bible translation. Their prefaces run counter to what Tyndale advocated, and it is important that we keep the record straight in this commemorative year.

Tyndale’s Influence on the English Bible

Tyndale not only articulated a long-standing translation philosophy; he also bequeathed words and style that have influenced the Bible-reading public for five hundred years. In the following, I examine both the nature of Tyndale’s actual words and style, and the means by which these have lived on for five hundred years to the present day.

The misunderstanding about Tyndale’s plowboy statement has led many astray regarding the style in which Tyndale chose to express the content of the New Testament in English. Probably the dominant and incorrect view of Tyndale’s style is that it is colloquial and deliberately scaled down to the linguistic level of a ten-year-old. There are two avenues by which to refute this error.

One refutation comes from the relationship between Tyndale’s New Testament of 1526 (along with its 1534 revision in which Tyndale introduced four thousand changes) and the King James Version of 1611. The King James translators incorporated 83 percent of Tyndale’s New Testament verbatim. The remainder they tweaked. We know before the fact, therefore, that whatever descriptors we use for the KJV are also accurate for Tyndale’s prevailing vocabulary and style.

What exactly do detractors say about the King James style? They stigmatize it as being stilted. They claim that the King James translators desecrated language upward. If that is the case, then Tyndale’s translation is subject to the same strictures. But the claims are false.

The second way to answer the question of Tyndale’s style is to look at his translation itself. When we do, we can see the untruth of the common claim that Tyndale reduced the language of the New Testament authors to monosyllables and short sentences. Because Tyndale was committed to reproducing what the biblical authors actually wrote, his English style is as varied as the style of the New Testament writers.¹⁰

We need to remember that Tyndale himself was the single greatest force in moving the English language from Middle English to Modern English. In his “Letter to the Reader” appended to his 1526 New Testament, Tyndale expressed the wish that “the rudeness of the work now at the first time” not “offend” his readers.¹¹ This is his acknowledgment of the deficient state of the English language as it was beginning its transition from Middle English to Modern English. Tyndale’s translation of the Bible and then its dissemination throughout English society were the primary forces that enabled this transition. The saying “no Tyndale, no Shakespeare” is true.

The most obvious stylistic trait of Tyndale’s New Testament is its clarity. Passages in Tyndale’s New Testament flow seamlessly and are easily grasped. This clarity makes the rhetorically embellished passages as easy to read as the simple style of narrative sections. The following passage serves as representative of Tyndale’s style:

Blessed be God the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, which hath blessed us with all manner of spiritual blessings in the heavenly things by Christ, according as he had chosen us in him through love, before the foundation of the world was laid, that we should be saints and without blame in his sight. (Ephesians 1:3–4, spelling and punctuation modernized by the author)

Is this eloquent? Yes, it is what experts in rhetoric call the high or exalted style. Is it easily grasped? Also yes. Tyndale wrote for the plowboy but not to him in the sense of simplifying what the New Testament authors actually wrote.

The reason the quoted passage seems familiar to most readers of this essay is that Tyndale’s style and many of his words have been passed on in unbroken continuity from 1526 to the present day. The medium of that transmission was the King James Version. Once Tyndale had set the wheels of English Bible translation in motion, a succession of sixteenth-century English translations kept adding to the joint project of moving progressively toward the culminating King James Version. That translation, in turn, was synonymous with what the English-speaking world meant by “the Bible” for the next four hundred years. Through the centuries, readers of the English Bible have been reading Tyndale’s New Testament without knowing it.

Does Tyndale’s New Testament still speak in the words of the Bible you use? The answer depends on what translation you read. If you use a translation in the tradition of literal translation, the answer is yes. If you use a translation produced by translators who depart from the King James tradition, the answer is no.

Tyndale’s Influence on Bible Literacy

The most comprehensive influence of Tyndale’s New Testament over the past five hundred years is simply the fact that the English-speaking world has been able to read the Bible in its own language. We can credit Tyndale with breaking down the wall that had prevented people from access to a vernacular Bible in English. To understand the nature of this liberation, we need to know the following story of suppression, which today seems unbelievable.

In 1408, church and government officials established an edict known as the Constitutions of Oxford. It prohibited translating any part of the Bible into English and teaching its content without permission from the church.¹² The famous case of the Coventry martyrs (as recorded in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs) illustrates how completely this edict was followed in England until the publication of Tyndale’s New Testament. During the very years that Tyndale was doing his translation work, a handful of parents were condemned and burned in Coventry for teaching their children the Lord’s Prayer and Ten Commandments in English.

On that occasion, a Mistress Smith momentarily escaped execution for lack of evidence, but as she was being escorted home from the site of execution by a summoner, the latter heard a rustling of paper in her sleeve. An inquiry into the source of the noise disclosed a copy of the forbidden Lord’s Prayer and Ten Commandments, so Mistress Smith was promptly led back to the place of execution and burned.¹³

It was Tyndale’s New Testament that ended this tyranny. Opening the door to distribution of the English Bible was Tyndale’s greatest legacy, but of course it required everything that we have noted about Tyndale’s 1526 New Testament to effect the change. Tyndale met all the requirements for this achievement. He subjected himself to a fugitive life on the European continent because he could not translate the Bible in his native land. There he laid down his life for the venture.

Not just any translation would have achieved the permanent revolution that Tyndale’s New Testament initiated. The effectiveness of an English Bible translation depends on the quality of its words and style, as well as the degree to which it matches what the biblical writers wrote. All that we have noted about the greatness of Tyndale’s New Testament gave the English Bible the jump start that ensured its success to the present day.

Read with Greediness

An irony of Tyndale’s life is that if he had been able to escape martyrdom for just two more years, he might have returned to England a hero. In 1538 King Henry VIII mandated that a copy of the English Bible be made available for people to read “in some convenient place” in every parish church in England. The most endearing picture of the eagerness with which the English Bible was embraced in the years of its early dissemination in England comes from a historian of the era named John Strype:

It was wonderful to see with what joy the book of God was received . . . all England over, among all the . . . common people; and with what greediness God’s word was read, and what resort to places where the reading of it was. Everybody that could, bought the book. . . . And even little boys flocked among the rest to hear portions of the Holy Scriptures read.¹⁴

It is fitting that we honor William Tyndale’s life and achievement in his own day, and also the influence of his translation work through five centuries. But that belongs to the past. The more important issue is the use we make of Tyndale’s legacy in our own lives today. Because of William Tyndale, we too can flock to the words of life and read them with greediness.

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Gluttony will kill you. Not just your body; the stakes are far higher. Your very soul could hang in the balance with gluttony. So also with other seemingly minor sins like grumbling and gossip, fruitlessness and impatience.

“Be killing sin,” John Owen wrote so memorably, “or it will be killing you.” It’s not just the “big sins” that put our souls to death; it’s also the seemingly “small sins” like laziness, stinginess, and worldliness — sins we often tolerate in ourselves and in the church.

But no sin is safe. Sin, at bottom, is preferring other things to God. Sin is an anti-God and anti-Christ impulse lurking in our own souls. Sin is not only a matter of what we do but what we believe and love. Our sin — however seemingly small and private — is an affront to God, his purpose in all he does, and his calling on our lives to honor him. For all creatures, sin dishonors our Creator. Worst of all for professing Christians, sin dishonors our Redeemer.

Indwelling Sin and Spirit

While we cannot rid ourselves of all sin in this life, a great day is coming for those who fight against their sin — an eternal, unending day without sin. All the difference in the world (and in eternity) exists between those who only have indwelling sin and those who also have the indwelling Holy Spirit. The Spirit works and moves in Christians. He prompts, inspires, enlivens, and empowers the fight against every anti-God impulse — both big and small — in our souls. The Spirit hates the sins we often tolerate. And he’s ready to help.

We can scarcely appreciate the trembling reality that we have the Spirit of God in us. But how will we do our part? Practically, what does it feel like to have the Spirit animating us to take up arms for God in our own souls and bodies? What does it look like when the indwelling Spirit goes to war in and through us on our indwelling sin — small and “respectable” sins included?

We will answer this question in at least seven ways this month at Desiring God as we focus on defeating “seven sins we tolerate.” But before we begin that journey, let’s make two quick stops in Romans 8 to rehearse the great call and great cause in the fight.

Great Call to Fight

First, consider the very passage that inspired Owen to say, “Be killing sin”: “If you live according to the flesh you will die, but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live” (Romans 8:13).

Apart from divine intervention, to be a sinner is to have a terminal diagnosis. In a moment we’ll address the action of the divine Son in providing a cure; in verse 13, the actor is the divine Spirit. The great call for every Christian is to fight our sin “by the Spirit” — big ones and seemingly little ones as well. Romans 8:13 makes no distinction.

Sinners who receive the indwelling Spirit do not settle in with their indwelling sin. They have received a Spirit who is not passive. He’s not along for the ride. He pricks. He energizes. He counsels. He convicts. He pushes. He shoves when he has to (John 14:26; 16:8–14; Romans 8:26–27).

But the Spirit does not put to death sinful deeds of the body apart from us. We participate. You are involved: “you put to death by the Spirit.” How does this work?

Our team of teachers will say more in the days ahead, but here we emphasize that God’s Spirit joins his power to God’s word. The divine Spirit directs our conscious minds to the staggering promises of God in Scripture for our good. He equips us not with sheer willpower but with God-honoring promises of superior pleasure in him so we might overcome sins great and small.

Every sin holds out some promise of pleasure. Such promises are deceitful (Hebrews 3:13), but they are promises nonetheless. The Spirit specializes in directing us to God’s word for the better promises and superior pleasures that he offers. And in so doing, the Spirit goes to work in us, on our hearts, to change us from the inside. We defeat sin’s pull not by pretending it doesn’t exist, but by giving ourselves to the superior pull of God’s promises.

Great Cause for Hope

Then comes the great cause of real hope for the fight. Romans 8:13 highlights the Spirit; Romans 8:32 holds up the Son as our guarantee of genuine triumph: “He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things?”

If Romans 8:28–39 are the Himalayas of God’s promises, verse 32 is Mount Everest. Its seeming simplicity (God “did not spare his own Son”) paired with its unbounded extent (“all things”) powerfully feeds our hope for victory over sin. This remarkable verse takes the gospel we believe — that the divine Father gave his own Son to rescue sinners — and pairs it with a vastness and depth of deliverance we might otherwise hardly dare to believe.

Romans 8:32 is a promise of God’s “future grace.” Without demeaning the “past grace” shown at the cross, this verse adds, If you believe that, then all the more should you believe God will give you everything you need to get safely home — even victories against your tolerable sins. If God was so committed to saving sinners that he gave his own Son, how could he not see you through the smaller things — through “all things”?

“Faith in future grace” is one way to phrase our hope. “For the joy set before us” is another. Amazingly, as Piper writes, “Most of our experience of God’s active grace lies in the future. The grace that we have already experienced from God is infinitesimally small compared to the future grace that we will experience from now to eternity” (Battling Unbelief, 140).

And that is the grace through which God will help you put to death the sins, however tolerable, that continue to dog you.

Battling Unbelief

The call to battle our own sin extends beyond the level of behavior to unbelief in the heart — to fight the fire of sin’s deceitful promises with the superior promises of God’s word.

John Piper’s book Battling Unbelief applies this paradigm to eight common sins: anxiety, pride, misplaced shame, impatience, covetousness, bitterness, despondency, and lust. In honor of this (newly republished) book, our team will apply the same paradigm to seven more subtle struggles, sins we may be prone to tolerate rather than kill: gluttony, grumbling, laziness, gossip, stinginess, fruitlessness, and worldliness.

During the month of October, we invite you to reflect with us on the slight, private sins we secretly harbor — and to take up fresh arms against them. Cast away the false promises of sin and embrace the superior promises of God. Embrace the Spirit’s prompting and power. Put to death grumbling and covetousness, irritability and laziness. And rejoice that whether you contend against complaining or squandering, jealousy or lethargy, the Spirit of God himself stands ready to help with his own touch of omnipotence.

In this episode of 'Theology Refresh,' David Mathis and Lewis Guest IV talk with Bible scholar and pastor Johnny Gibson to equip you with the tools to understand and enjoy the Old Testament in new ways.

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Mature believers are not perfect people. But as we grow in discerning good and evil, we better understand and apply the wisdom of God.

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