To mistake conscious freedom from sin for deliverance from sin by the atonement is a great error. Sin is what Jesus Christ faced on the cross; it is only through his sacrifice that we have deliverance. Conscious freedom from sin is how I experience this deliverance in my own life; the evidence that I am delivered is that I know the real nature of sin in me. No one can know the real nature of sin until they are born again. It takes the power of Jesus Christ’s atonement inside me—that is, the impartation to me of his absolute perfection by the Holy Spirit—to make me know what sin is.
The Holy Spirit applies the atonement to our entire being—to the realm we are conscious of and to the realm we’re unconscious of. Only when we grasp the full scope of the power of the Spirit inside us do we understand the meaning of 1 John 1:7: “The blood of Jesus . . . purifies us from all sin.” This verse doesn’t refer only to sin I’m aware of; it speaks to the tremendously profound understanding of sin which only the Holy Spirit inside me has.
If I walk in the light as God is in the light—not in the light of my conscience but in the light of God—and walk with nothing hidden, nothing folded up, then I am let in on the amazing revelation that the blood of Jesus purifies me from all sin, so thoroughly that God Almighty can see nothing to censure in me. In my consciousness, this freedom from sin works through a clear knowledge of what sin is. The love of God at work in me makes me hate with the hatred of the Holy Spirit all that is not in keeping with God’s holiness. To walk in the light means that everything that’s of the darkness drives me closer to the center of the light.
