It is one of the most common questions a grace believer is asked, and one of the most common he asks himself in the quiet of his own conscience. Can a person who has trusted Christ go on committing the works of the flesh? Can he be genuinely saved and still sin — not once, not in a moment of weakness, but really and repeatedly? And behind the question lies a fear that has been planted by a great deal of religious teaching: that if a saved man does these things, then perhaps he was never saved at all.

The question deserves a careful answer, because a careless one does damage in either direction. Answer it loosely and you seem to make grace an occasion to the flesh. Answer it legally and you put the believer back on the performance treadmill that grace took him off. The way through is to see that the question is really two questions wearing one coat. Is a man still saved if he commits the works of the flesh? And should he, and what does it cost him if he does? The whole confusion of our day comes from collapsing those two questions into one. Keep them apart, rightly divide the word, and the fog lifts.

This study assumes a truth established elsewhere — that the believer in the Body of Christ cannot lose his salvation, because it rests on the finished work of Christ and the seal of the Spirit, not on his own performance. That case is made in full in "Once Saved, Always Saved: The Eternal Security of the Believer". Here we take up the next question. Granted that you cannot lose it — can you still walk in the flesh after you have it? And what does Paul say happens when you do?

What Salvation Is Not

Before we can say what continuing in sin does to a believer, we have to be clear about what made him a believer in the first place, because most of the trouble comes from a wrong definition of salvation smuggled in at the very start.

Salvation is not repentance from every sin. It is not turning over a new leaf, cleaning up your life, and presenting the reformed version of yourself to God as your qualification. If salvation were the forsaking of every sin, then no one living has been saved, because no one has forsaken every sin. The standard would not be the finished work of Christ but the unfinished work of the sinner, and it would never be finished.

Neither is salvation a promise never to sin again. It is not a vow, a pledge, a commitment of the will to a sinless future. Make salvation rest on such a promise and you have made it rest on the strength of the one making the promise — which is to say, on the flesh, the very thing that cannot keep it. That is not grace. That is a contract the sinner signs and then breaks before the ink is dry.

Paul could not be plainer about the ground on which a man is saved:

"For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast." (Ephesians 2:8–9)

"But to him that worketh not, but believeth on him that justifieth the ungodly, his faith is counted for righteousness." (Romans 4:5)

Notice whom God justifies — "the ungodly." Not the reformed, not the clean, not the man who has first sworn off his sins, but the ungodly man who simply believes on Him that justifies. Salvation is something God performs upon a sinner through the finished work of His Son; it is received, not achieved. And what God gives by grace He does not give on probation: "For the gifts and calling of God are without repentance." (Romans 11:29). God does not change His mind about a gift He has given.

This also settles the meaning of repentance itself, which is so often turned into the back door through which works re-enter the gospel. Repentance is a change of mind — a man who once trusted himself, his religion, or his own righteousness now trusts the finished work of Christ. It is not a reformation of conduct offered up front as the price of admission. That distinction is worth a study of its own, and it has one in "Repentance Rightly Divided: What Paul Meant and What He Did Not". For our purposes here it is enough to fix the foundation: a man is saved by trusting Christ, not by quitting sin and not by promising to. Once that is settled, the question of his later sins can be answered honestly, without panic.

The Flesh Did Not Leave When the Spirit Came

When a man trusts Christ he is given a new identity and a new nature, but his flesh does not pack its bags and leave. The old man and the new man are both present, and they are at war. Paul says so to believers, in the plainest terms:

"For the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh: and these are contrary the one to the other: so that ye cannot do the things that ye would." (Galatians 5:17)

That is not written about the unsaved. It is written about a saved man who has the Spirit, and who finds the flesh still pulling in the opposite direction. This is why Paul has to tell believers — people he calls saints — "Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, that ye should obey it in the lusts thereof. Neither yield ye your members as instruments of unrighteousness unto sin" (Romans 6:12–13). You do not tell a man not to yield to something he is incapable of yielding to. The exhortation only makes sense because the yielding is possible. And it is why Paul warns the Galatians, "only use not liberty for an occasion to the flesh" (Galatians 5:13). The liberty is real, and so is the flesh that would seize it as an occasion.

Hold that fact in place, because everything else rests on it. The saved man still has flesh, and the flesh can still win a battle for his walk. The Christian life is not the absence of the flesh; it is a walk in the Spirit in the presence of the flesh.

Why Paul Warns the Saved at All

Here is the argument that ought to settle the whole matter, and it comes not from a clever inference but from the plain shape of Paul's own letters.

Paul lists the works of the flesh — and he does it more than once, to more than one assembly of believers. He lists them to the Galatians:

"Now the works of the flesh are manifest, which are these; Adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, Idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, Envyings, murders, drunkenness, revellings, and such like: of the which I tell you before, as I have also told you in time past, that they which do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God." (Galatians 5:19–21)

He lists them to the Colossians — "fornication, uncleanness, inordinate affection, evil concupiscence, and covetousness" (Colossians 3:5), and again "anger, wrath, malice, blasphemy, filthy communication" (Colossians 3:8). He lists them to the Ephesians and to the Corinthians. He names them, he says they are "manifest," and he tells the saints to identify them and abstain from them.

Now ask the simple question: why? Why warn the saved about the works of the flesh at all? A warning, by its very nature, carries three assumptions inside it. First, that the people warned are the people addressed — and Paul addresses these warnings to saints, to brethren, to those he says are sanctified and sealed. Second, that the people warned are capable of the thing they are warned against — you do not warn a man away from what he cannot possibly do. Third, that the thing is genuinely resistible — the warning assumes a real choice between walking in the Spirit and walking in the flesh.

Put those three together and the conclusion is unavoidable. If a saved person were incapable of committing the works of the flesh, then every one of these passages is empty air, a caution against the impossible. And if committing the works of the flesh proved that a person was never saved, then Paul has aimed his warnings at exactly the wrong audience — he is telling saved people to avoid what only the unsaved can do. Neither makes sense. The warnings are real because the danger is real, and the danger is real because the saved man can, in fact, walk after his flesh. The admonitions prove it. Take away the believer's ability to sin and you have not honored him; you have made nonsense of half of Paul's epistles.

Paul Asked the Question First

We are not the first to raise the objection. Paul raised it himself, before any critic of grace could — and he raised it twice, in the very chapter where he had been piling grace upon grace:

"What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound? God forbid. How shall we, that are dead to sin, live any longer therein?" (Romans 6:1–2)

"What then? shall we sin, because we are not under the law, but under grace? God forbid." (Romans 6:15)

This is precisely our question — shall we continue in sin? — and the most instructive thing about it is how Paul answers. He had every opportunity to say what the modern teacher says. He could have answered, "No, because a true believer would never continue in sin." He could have answered, "No, because if you continue you will lose your salvation." He could have answered, "No, because such a person was never really saved." He says none of these things. Not one.

What Paul does instead is appeal to who the believer now is. "How shall we, that are dead to sin, live any longer therein?" The argument is from identity, not from threat. "Knowing this, that our old man is crucified with him" (Romans 6:6). Therefore, "reckon ye also yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord" (Romans 6:11). The motive Paul gives for not continuing in sin is never "or else you will forfeit what grace gave you." It is "this is no longer who you are; reckon it so, and yield yourself accordingly." That is the grace answer, and it is a world away from the answer the Lordship teacher gives.

"But Not as a Lifestyle"

Which brings us to the argument that has to be met directly, because it is the most sophisticated hedge of all. It is the position usually called Lordship salvation, resting on what is taught as the perseverance of the saints. It does not deny that a believer can sin. It concedes that. What it claims is that a genuine believer cannot continue in sin — cannot make sin his practice, his pattern, his lifestyle. A real Christian may fall, the argument runs, but he will not walk on in the works of the flesh; and so the man who does walk on in them shows that his profession was never real. When such a person is confronted, the verdict is one of a short list: "You were never really saved." "A real Christian wouldn't do that." "Faith without works is dead." "You need to repent and get right with God again." And the proof texts are always the same — "they which do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God" (Galatians 5:21), and its companions in First Corinthians 6 and Ephesians 5.

It sounds careful. It sounds like reverence for holiness. But it does not survive examination, and here is why.

First, the word that carries the whole argument is not in the text. The qualifier "as a lifestyle," "habitually," "as a settled practice," "continually" — that word is added. Galatians 5:21 does not say "they which practice such things as a lifestyle." It says "they which do such things." The qualifier has to be imported, and it has to be imported precisely because without it the verse proves far too much. Read flatly, the list condemns everyone, for who has never been angry, never envied, never spoken a filthy word? So the teacher quietly inserts "as a lifestyle" to keep the verse from sweeping himself away with it. But a word that has to be added to a verse to make a doctrine work is not the verse's testimony; it is the teacher's.

Second, even with the qualifier inserted, the argument still grounds a man's assurance in his works. However it is dressed, the lifestyle test sends the believer to look at his own conduct in order to discover whether he is really saved. His behavior becomes the evidence, and therefore, in practice, the ground of his confidence. But Scripture grounds assurance not in the believer's record but in Christ's finished work and the Spirit's seal. A salvation that must be verified by the absence of certain sins is a salvation through works after all, only with the works moved to the back where they are harder to see. It belongs to Israel's program — "he that shall endure unto the end, the same shall be saved" (Matthew 24:13) — quietly carried over into a dispensation where it does not belong.

Third, and most decisively, the lifestyle theory is refuted by a whole assembly in the Scriptures, because the Corinthians did exactly what the theory says cannot happen. As a body they were not merely stumbling occasionally; they were carnal:

"And I, brethren, could not speak unto you as unto spiritual, but as unto carnal, even as unto babes in Christ... For ye are yet carnal: for whereas there is among you envying, and strife, and divisions, are ye not carnal, and walk as men?" (1 Corinthians 3:1, 3)

This was a settled condition, not a single misstep. They had lawsuits between brethren, drunkenness at the Lord's table, divisions, pride, and the very catalog of First Corinthians 6 among them. One man was living in open, ongoing incest "as is not so much as named among the Gentiles" (1 Corinthians 5:1) — the sort of thing that should have shamed even the heathen. By the lifestyle test, not one of these people could be saved. Yet hear Paul's own verdict on the man in open fornication:

"To deliver such an one unto Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that the spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus." (1 Corinthians 5:5)

That the spirit may be saved. The man's spirit is already saved; the discipline is aimed at his flesh, not at his standing. And of the whole carnal assembly Paul says, after rehearsing the very list of the unrighteous who shall not inherit the kingdom:

"And such were some of you: but ye are washed, but ye are sanctified, but ye are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God." (1 Corinthians 6:11)

Read that little word were. The unrighteous lifestyle describes what the Corinthians were — the world out of which they were saved — set against what they now are: washed, sanctified, justified. Paul is not putting them on probation; he is reminding them who they no longer are. The lists of the works of the flesh in these passages describe the unrighteous as a class, the children of disobedience under wrath, not a believer being measured to see whether he passes. As Paul tells the Ephesians after the same kind of list, "Be not ye therefore partakers with them. For ye were sometimes darkness, but now are ye light in the Lord: walk as children of light" (Ephesians 5:7–8). Were darkness; now are light. The command is to walk as what you already are, not to behave in order to become it. And lest anyone read that were as proof that a true believer always reforms — that the change of life is what marks him out — let him remember that these are the very same Corinthians Paul still calls carnal, babes walking as men (1 Corinthians 3:1, 3). The word were marks what they had been before Christ saved them, not a moral transformation they had since achieved; for in their conduct many of them had not yet been transformed at all, and were saints all the same.

There remains the heaviest text in the lifestyle teacher's hand, and it is one we have not yet touched because it is not Paul's at all: "Whosoever is born of God doth not commit sin; for his seed remaineth in him: and he cannot sin, because he is born of God" (1 John 3:9), with its frequent companion, "faith without works is dead" (James 2:20). On these two the whole "a real Christian could not continue in sin" doctrine is finally built. But neither was written to the Body of Christ. First John and James are Remnant Epistles — addressed to the believing remnant of Israel, to "the twelve tribes which are scattered abroad" (James 1:1), under the terms of their own program. Their rule of life is written for our learning; it is not written to us as our marching orders, and the security of a grace believer cannot be built upon it. And even on their own ground these verses say less than is claimed: John is speaking of the new birth and the divine seed that remains — language that belongs to Israel's kingdom hope, not to the mystery — and he describes the new nature, which cannot sin, not a promise that the believer's flesh will never act. To answer the question of the Body of Christ out of epistles addressed to another people under another program is the very failure to rightly divide that bred the confusion in the first place. The whole matter is laid out in "What Are the Remnant Epistles?".

So when the carnal Corinthians stand as living proof that a saved man can continue in the works of the flesh and remain a saved man — and when the texts marshaled against that proof turn out either to describe the unrighteous as a class or to belong to another people altogether — the lifestyle theory has no answer left. It has staked everything on a thing that demonstrably happened in the pages of Scripture.

What Continuing in the Flesh Does Cost — and What It Cannot Touch

To say that sin does not cost a believer his salvation is not to say it costs him nothing. It costs him a great deal. The grace believer must hold both truths at once, or he will fall off the wagon on one side or the other. Let us mark carefully what is touched and what is not.

His standing is not touched. The believer is "made the righteousness of God in him" (2 Corinthians 5:21), and that righteousness is Christ's, not his own; it does not rise and fall with his conduct. Over him stands the unanswerable challenge, "Who shall lay any thing to the charge of God's elect? It is God that justifieth. Who is he that condemneth?" (Romans 8:33–34). His sin grieves the Spirit who seals him, but it does not break the seal.

His fellowship is not touched — and this point is often gotten wrong, so it is worth stating plainly. In the dispensation of grace, fellowship is not a thing the believer loses by sinning and buys back by confessing. Fellowship is a possession. "God is faithful, by whom ye were called unto the fellowship of his Son Jesus Christ our Lord" (1 Corinthians 1:9). The believer was called unto that fellowship; it is fellowship with the Son, and through Him with the Father, and it rests on God's faithfulness, not on the believer's performance. A sinning believer does not drop out of the fellowship of God's Son and have to be readmitted. What his sin disrupts is his enjoyment of that fellowship and his walk within it — the experience, not the possession. The confess-to-be-restored machinery that is so often attached here belongs to another program and another people, and it should not be carried into the dispensation of grace.

His reward can be touched. Here is where the believer's works do come into account — not for salvation, but for reward at the judgment seat of Christ, where a man's labor is tried and may be "burned," so that "he shall suffer loss: but he himself shall be saved; yet so as by fire" (1 Corinthians 3:15). That is a real loss and no small thing, but it is loss of reward, not loss of sonship. This subject has its own full treatment in "The Judgment Seat of Christ: Rewards, Not Condemnation", and we need not duplicate it here.

And the Lord does deal with His sons — but not in the way most assume, and here we must be careful, because this is the point where covenant thinking most often leaks into grace. Paul says, after speaking of the weak and the sickly and those who had died among the Corinthians:

"For if we would judge ourselves, we should not be judged. But when we are judged, we are chastened of the Lord, that we should not be condemned with the world." (1 Corinthians 11:31–32)

There is, then, a real dealing of the Lord with His own — Paul says plainly, do not imagine that we escape it. But notice carefully what it is and what it is not.

It is not God's physical retribution. You will search Paul's epistles in vain for a single instance of God striking a believer with sickness, disease, or death as punishment for sin. That was the way God dealt with Israel under a covenant in which He had bound Himself to chastise His people in the flesh — but it is not the way of grace. The believer is at peace with God (Romans 5:1), and God was in Christ "not imputing their trespasses unto them" (2 Corinthians 5:19); on what ground, then, would He exact payment in the believer's own body for sins already laid upon His Son? Even the weak and sickly and sleeping ones of First Corinthians eleven are not people God was striking down. In the flow of Paul's argument they are the poor and neglected members of the body whom the self-absorbed Corinthians had failed to support — the very ones a healthy body would have cared for. The "many sleep" is a rebuke of Corinthian neglect, not a record of divine lightning.

What, then, is the chastening of verse 32? It is the Lord's accountability of His sons for the things they do in His body — the same dealing we have just seen at the judgment seat of Christ, where works are tried and a man may suffer loss of reward though he himself is saved (1 Corinthians 3:15; 2 Corinthians 5:10; Romans 14:12). And it is forestalled now by self-judgment: "if we would judge ourselves, we should not be judged" (1 Corinthians 11:31). The whole force of the verse is in its contrast — "chastened of the Lord, that we should not be condemned with the world." This is the fatherly, corrective accounting of a son, expressly so that he is not swept into the judgment of the lost. "God hath not appointed us to wrath, but to obtain salvation by our Lord Jesus Christ" (1 Thessalonians 5:9), and "There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus" (Romans 8:1). It is not, and never becomes, the wrath of a Judge.

There is also a corrective discipline that runs through the assembly itself, and here Paul draws a line worth pausing over. He divides all men into two classes and assigns the judging of each to a different party: "For what have I to do to judge them also that are without? do not ye judge them that are within? But them that are without God judgeth. Therefore put away from among yourselves that wicked person." (1 Corinthians 5:12–13). Those without — outside of Christ, the unsaved — God judges; their reckoning is His, and it is no part of the believer's business. But those within — the members of the body — the assembly is told to judge, and to act. So Paul could deliver a man "unto Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that the spirit may be saved" (1 Corinthians 5:5), and he names two by name — "Hymenaeus and Alexander; whom I have delivered unto Satan, that they may learn not to blaspheme" (1 Timothy 1:20). This is not God inflicting bodily harm; it is the removal of an unrepentant member from the fellowship and protection of the body, out into the world's sphere, in the hope that the loss of that fellowship will bring him to his senses. The "destruction of the flesh" is not the breaking of his body but the breaking down of his fleshly course — the works of the old man left to run their bitter end in the world, that he may come to himself. Its aim is restoration — "that the spirit may be saved" — and it is administered through the assembly, not by a bolt from heaven.

Notice that even under this severest discipline the man is never reclassified as lost. Paul calls him one "that is called a brother" through the whole proceeding (1 Corinthians 5:11), and says his spirit shall be "saved in the day of the Lord Jesus" (1 Corinthians 5:5). The assembly judges his conduct and his place in the fellowship; it does not, and cannot, judge away his standing in Christ.

And there is a quiet but weighty implication in the way Paul divides it. If the assembly judges those within while God judges those without, then God is not, in this present time, sitting in judgment over the man who is within. The believer's sins are not being arraigned before the bar of heaven now — which is precisely why Paul can say he is at peace with God and that his trespasses are not imputed to him. God's own reckoning with the one who is within is reserved; it waits for the judgment seat of Christ. And when it comes, it is a judgment concerning reward — the gold and silver, the wood and the stubble — and not condemnation, "that we should not be condemned with the world" (1 Corinthians 11:32; 3:11–15). The present judging of the saved man's walk belongs to the assembly and to the man himself — "if we would judge ourselves, we should not be judged" (1 Corinthians 11:31) — while God's judgment of him is future, and is about his works, never about whether he is His.

It is here that someone will raise a verse Paul wrote to Timothy, supposing it proves that God does judge some of a believer's sins in the present: "Some men's sins are open beforehand, going before to judgment; and some men they follow after. Likewise also the good works of some are manifest beforehand; and they that are otherwise cannot be hid." (1 Timothy 5:24–25). But the verse will not bear that weight, and its own context shows why. Paul is instructing Timothy in the choosing of elders — "Lay hands suddenly on no man, neither be partaker of other men's sins" (1 Timothy 5:22) — and the judgment in view is the discernment Timothy must exercise over a man's fitness for the ministry, not a divine tribunal sitting over a believer's sins now. The lesson is patience in ordaining: a man's true character comes out in time. Some men's sins are evident up front — they arrive at the evaluation before the man does, "going before" him to it — while another man's sins are hidden and "follow after," surfacing only later. The subject is the visibility and timing of the evidence, not the infliction of any penalty.

The parallel clause settles it. Paul says the very same thing about good works: they too are either "manifest beforehand" or else they "cannot be hid" and come out later. If "going before to judgment" meant that God was punishing those sins in the present, then the matching clause would have to mean that God was rewarding those good works in the present — which no one claims, and which would empty the judgment seat of its purpose. The controlling idea in both halves is the same: manifest, and cannot be hid. The passage is about disclosure, not present recompense. Whatever is not brought to light now is brought to light later — and for the believer "later" is the judgment seat, where the hidden things are made manifest and "then shall every man have praise of God" (1 Corinthians 4:5), not the bar of his condemnation.

And there is, finally, the harvest a man simply reaps. "Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap. For he that soweth to his flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption." (Galatians 6:7–8). Sin in the flesh bears its own bitter fruit in this life — in the body, in the home, in the conscience, in the wasted years — and that fruit is real and often severe. But it is the natural reaping of what was sown, not the penal rod of an offended Judge.

One boundary is worth marking. The passage usually reached for on this subject is the chastening of Hebrews twelve, with its scourging and its rod. But Hebrews is not the Body's epistle, and Israel's chastening ran along covenantal and national lines, under a relationship in which God had obligated Himself to discipline His people in the flesh. We do not carry that into the dispensation of grace. For the Body of Christ, Paul defines the Lord's dealing with His sons, and it is this: accountability at the judgment seat, corrective discipline through the assembly, and the reaping of what is sown — never divine retribution in the believer's body.

So the answer to what continuing in the flesh costs is this: it robs the believer of the enjoyment of his blessings, the joy of his walk, and his usefulness; it lays up loss at the judgment seat of Christ; it can bring the corrective discipline of the assembly; and it reaps the bitter harvest of the flesh — and all of that is reason enough for any son who loves his Father to abhor it. But it does not cost him his standing, his fellowship, or his salvation, because those rest on what Christ did, and Christ's work cannot be undone by the believer's failure.

Common Questions: Can a Saved Person...?

The principle becomes practical the moment someone names a specific sin, and people always do. Can a saved person smoke? Can a saved person steal? Can a saved person commit adultery? Can a saved person practice sodomy? Can a saved person commit murder? Each of these is really the two-question coat again, and the answer is the same shape every time. Is he still saved if he does it? — yes, because his standing is sealed and the blood of Christ covers all his sin or none of it. Should he, and what does it cost? — no; it is a work of the flesh, condemnable in itself, and it costs his walk and his reward at the judgment seat, and brings the harvest of the flesh. The Lordship error is simply the collapse of the first question into the second.

Notice the trap hidden in the question. The moment a man says, "Well, surely a saved person could not do that one," he has built a tier of sins the cross of Christ cannot reach — a class of offenses so grave that Christ's blood was insufficient for them. But Scripture knows no such tier. The blood that covers covetousness covers adultery; the blood that covers a sharp word covers murder. Christ paid for all of it, or He paid for none of it.

Can a saved person steal? The cleanest proof in all of Paul stands here. "Let him that stole steal no more: but rather let him labour, working with his hands the thing which is good" (Ephesians 4:28). Paul is commanding a saved man — a member of the Body, addressed among the saints at Ephesus — to stop stealing. You cannot give that command to a man who could not be both saved and a thief at the same time. The very existence of the command proves the possibility.

Can a saved person commit adultery? Adultery stands in the very list of First Corinthians 6 that Paul sets before the saints, and the answer is the same as for every other item on it: a believer can commit it, it is grievous, and it does not unseal what God has sealed. We need not even leave Paul's own assembly for the proof — in fact we have already met the case. The man of First Corinthians 5 was living in fornication "such as is not so much as named among the Gentiles, that one should have his father's wife" (1 Corinthians 5:1); and though Paul names it fornication, it was fornication with his father's wife, which is adultery as well. Yet under the severest discipline the assembly could bring, that man was still one "that is called a brother" (1 Corinthians 5:11), and his spirit was to be "saved in the day of the Lord Jesus" (1 Corinthians 5:5). His standing was never in doubt; only his walk and his place in the fellowship.

Many reach instead for David here — but David is not our proof, and it is worth saying why, because to lean on him is to hand the objector a weapon. David lived under Israel's covenant, in which the Spirit could be withdrawn — "take not thy holy spirit from me" (Psalm 51:11) — and in which God had bound Himself to "chasten him with the rod of men" (2 Samuel 7:14), a chastening that fell in this present life as the sword upon his house and the death of his child (2 Samuel 12:10–14). That is precisely the covenant dealing we have already seen does not belong to the Body of Christ. The believer today is sealed unto the day of redemption, and his sins are not visited with such retribution; so we prove the point not from David but from Paul, where the man in open sin remains a sealed and sanctified saint. The wrongness of adultery is not in question; neither is the security of the believer.

Can a saved person practice sodomy? By sodomy we mean what Paul describes in Romans 1 — not, as the word is sometimes wrongly narrowed, the abuse of children, but the homosexual practice he sets out plainly: women who "did change the natural use into that which is against nature," and "likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly" (Romans 1:26–27). It is this that First Corinthians names — "nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind" (1 Corinthians 6:9) — and then says of the Corinthians, "and such were some of you: but ye are washed" (1 Corinthians 6:11). Some at Corinth had lived in that very thing and were now saved saints. The flesh that once practiced it does not vanish at salvation, and the call to the believer is to abstain and to walk as what he now is.

Can a saved person commit murder? Even murder appears in the list given to saints — "murders" (Galatians 5:21). No sin carries graver consequence in this life, and none should be more unthinkable to a son of God. But it is named there precisely to make the point that there is no sliding scale of forfeiture, no sin so large that it reaches past the cross to cancel the seal of the Spirit.

Can a saved person drink alcohol? Here the question must be split more finely, because two different things are usually lumped together. Drunkenness is named in the lists — "drunkenness" (Galatians 5:21), "drunkards" (1 Corinthians 6:10) — and Paul forbids it to the Body outright: "be not drunk with wine, wherein is excess; but be filled with the Spirit" (Ephesians 5:18). So drunkenness is a work of the flesh like the rest: a believer can fall into it, it is condemnable, it costs his walk — and it does not unseal him. But the drinking itself is named nowhere as a sin. It is a liberty, and no man may bind it: "Let no man therefore judge you in meat, or in drink" (Colossians 2:16), for "the kingdom of God is not meat and drink" (Romans 14:17). That liberty is governed not by a rule of abstinence but by two things — that the believer never be "brought under the power of any" (1 Corinthians 6:12), and that he hold his freedom in love, never using it to wound a weaker brother (Romans 14:21; Galatians 5:13). To forbid the cup outright is to add a commandment God never gave; to be mastered by it is to turn liberty into an occasion to the flesh — and neither is the way of grace. The full case is made in "Does the Bible Teach Total Abstinence from Wine and Strong Drink?".

Can a saved person smoke? This one is worth including because it is a different category and teaches how to handle the dozens of "is this a sin that sends me to hell" questions believers carry. Smoking is named in none of the lists; it is not even a "works of the flesh" question in the technical sense. It falls instead under the believer's stewardship of his own body. "All things are lawful for me, but I will not be brought under the power of any" (1 Corinthians 6:12), and "know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you... therefore glorify God in your body" (1 Corinthians 6:19–20). That is a matter of the walk, of wisdom and stewardship — never a matter of whether one is saved. And the same answer disposes of most of the anxious "is X a damning sin" questions: locate it where Paul locates it, and you will find that it touches the walk, not the standing.

Conclusion: Who You Are, and How to Walk

So can a saved person continue in the works of the flesh after salvation? He can. The flesh did not leave him at salvation; Paul warns him against the works of the flesh precisely because he is capable of them; Paul anticipated the very objection and answered it not with a threat but with an appeal to identity; and the carnal Corinthians stand in the pages of Scripture as proof that a believer can go on in gross sin and yet remain washed, sanctified, and justified. The "not as a lifestyle" hedge does not hold, because it adds a word the text does not contain, grounds assurance in the believer's own works, and is refuted by an entire assembly that did the very thing it says cannot be done.

But none of this is comfort to the flesh, and the grace believer must never let it become so. The works of the flesh are always wrong, always condemnable, always unbecoming of a saint of God. They cost the believer his joy, his peace, his usefulness, and his reward; they grieve the indwelling Spirit — "grieve not the holy Spirit of God, whereby ye are sealed unto the day of redemption" (Ephesians 4:30) — though they never drive Him away; and they reap their own bitter harvest in this life. The believer is not made less nigh to God by his sin, for he was "made nigh by the blood of Christ" (Ephesians 2:13), and that nearness is a finished work, not a feeling that rises and falls with his walk. The grace of God does not excuse them; it is the very thing that teaches us to forsake them:

"For the grace of God that bringeth salvation hath appeared to all men, Teaching us that, denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly, righteously, and godly, in this present world." (Titus 2:11–12)

The response to sin for the believer is therefore not "get right or you were never in," and not "do better or you will lose it." It is the response Paul himself gives: remember who Christ made you, reckon yourself dead to sin and alive to God, and yield your members to righteousness because that is now who you are. Walk in the Spirit, and you shall not fulfil the lust of the flesh. The man is secured by grace; the walk is the grateful answer of a son who knows he is.

© 2026 Edward R. Cross