If our sin does not in fact separate us from God, why would the Bible encourage believers to strive for sinlessness? And why would it bother to give dire warnings to those who practice sin in their life? “But immorality or impurity or greed must not even be named among you…for because of these things the wrath of God comes upon the sons of disobedience.”(Ephesians 5:3-6). Make no mistake about it; Paul is addressing the Church here, not non-believers. And he makes it abundantly clear that no such person “has an inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and God.” Such warnings are repeated many times throughout the New Testament.

When the Bible speaks about sin as it concerns the Christian, it is actually talking about two broad categories of sin: that of walking in sin (the practice of sin as a lifestyle) and that of periodically falling into sinful behavior (what I’ll call a pitfall). So we need to understand that even though such biblical passages serve to caution us against stepping into the pitfall of sin, their primary purpose is to warn those who may be moving toward making sin the practice of their lives—those who time and again choose to live in sin.

We’d all be in big trouble if separation from God resulted merely from periodically falling into sin through the weakness of our flesh. Still, we must not discount sin, no matter how minor, as somehow being insignificant in God’s eyes, because the very nature of sin is that it has potential to grow and spread just as a cancer does in the body. All sin runs along a path that leads somewhere. And this, of course, brings up a very important question: when does sin as a pitfall develop into sin as a practice? Where is the dividing line between sin that merely displeases God and sin that drives His Spirit from us?

Excerpted from: Free from the Power of Sin: The Keys to Growing in God in Spite of Yourself