For everyone who has been born of God overcomes the world. And this is the victory that has overcome the world- our faith. Who is it that overcomes the world except the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God?
1 John 5:4-5
Jesus loves us as we are, but also loves us not to leave us as we are. He loved us in our sin, he loves us and forgives us of our sin, he loves us to deliver us from our sin , he loves us to give us victory over our sin, and he loves us to empower us to live apart from sin. Thank the Lord for his continual grace and patience in our fallenness.
The Savior did not love me that I might continue in my sin: He loved me in my sin that He might rescue me from my sin. From my sins, yes; from the penalty due to my sins, yes. But that is only half of the Gospel: from my sin. He died that I might live a life of holiness, delivered from my sin. He did not only die that my past might be forgiven and forgotten, and that I might go to heaven when I die; He died that the period in between forgiveness and heaven might be crammed with all the glory that our almighty Savior can pour into it.
Leith Samuel, “Grieve Not the Holy Spirit,” Daily Thoughts from Keswick: A Year’s Daily Readings, ed. Herbert F. Stevenson (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1980), 260.