Freedom From Sin — Zac Poonen

To still our hearts once again and pray that God's power will move and minister to our hearts exactly what we need. The Bible says, be still and know that I am God. And if there are other thoughts and worries and anxieties on your mind right now, I want to encourage you to cast them all away, cast them on the Lord and say, Lord, I know the answer to everything in my life depends on my first getting right with you.

And then all the other things will find their proper place. So Heavenly Father, as we come to you this evening, we pray that your name will be greatly glorified in our midst. We come to you with a hunger.

We pray that the Holy Spirit will come upon us. Lord Jesus, be glorified in our midst. Give us your word from heaven. We want to please you. We want to win your approval. We want to open our whole beings to your rulership, to your government, to the ministry, entry of your Holy Spirit into every nook and corner of our lives.

Cleansing, purifying, empowering. Help us, Lord, we pray. As we look into your word, give us attentive minds and alertness, freshness and openness to receive what you have for us this evening. We trust you in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.

The Sixfold Freedom God Offers His Children

Amen. Okay, we're going to have six Bible studies during these evening sessions, two this evening and two tomorrow evening and two on the third evening. So we're going to study a six-fold freedom that God has for all his children.

There are many things we need to be free from, but I want to mention the things that most important that the Bible speaks about as primary in our Christian life. So first of all, let's turn to Psalm 124.

Psalm 124 and the Escape From the Snare

Psalm 124 we read. I want to apply this to the life of the believer, your life, my life, where it says, I want to read it like that. Had it not been the Lord who was on our side, let every child of God now say that.

Had it not been the Lord who was on our side, when Satan and men and the lusts in our flesh rose up against us, then they would have swallowed us alive because the anger of Satan has been kindled against us because we became God's children.

Then the waters of spiritual death would have engulfed us and the stream would have swept over our soul. The raging waters of death would have swept over our soul. But blessed be the Lord, he did not leave us alone.

He did not abandon us defenseless to be torn by their teeth. And listen to this, our soul has escaped as a bird out of the snare of the trapper. The snare is broken and we have escaped. We have escaped from the cage, from the snare.

Our help is in the name of the Lord who made heaven and earth. The name of Jesus is the one through which we conquer. And I want to think of, you know, when you think of that picture there, that bird escaping from the cage, we see six cages from which God wants us to escape and we want to look at them one by one.

Sin as the Believer’s Greatest Enemy

And the first cage is the cage of sin. Now that is most important because we live in a world today where in Christianity in general, sin is not considered to be the greatest enemy of the believer. If you look at a lot of Christian television today and a lot of books that are being written, you don't find an emphasis on sin as being the most serious thing of all.

It's poverty or sickness that is considered to be the serious problems that believers are facing. And the great danger of watching Christian television that emphasizes this so much is that after some time you will really believe that your biggest problems are poverty and sickness.

Now I'm not saying poverty and sickness are not problems. I'm saying they are so small compared to sin. That's what many people don't understand. And that's what many people don't realize. It's like saying cancer is more serious than an injury or even a broken bone.

A broken bone is serious. It's not as serious as cancer. A broken bone won't kill you. Cancer can kill you. So if you contrast cancer with a broken bone, that's something like sin versus poverty and sickness.

So I'm not saying that God's not interested in the minor problems. But the great danger of believers concentrating on the minor problems is even if they get delivered from those minor problems, they still die from the major problem.

So in a world, in a Christendom that does not emphasize sin or define what sin is or explain how we can be free from sin or tell us how to overcome our lusts, it's important that in our churches we major on that because that is what the New Testament majors on.

The Old Testament did not major on freedom from sin. It's very important to understand that. You don't see verses like sin shall not have dominion over you in the Old Testament. In the Old Testament majored on being free from poverty, being free from sickness, being free from earthly enemies, on getting a large area in which Israel could live, Israel defeating its earthly enemies.

You never find anyone in the Old Testament fighting the devil. The first person who fought the devil was Jesus Christ. Nobody till then, not Moses, not Elijah. Elijah fought the prophets of Baal and the Israelites fought the Amalekites and many other iths but never Satan.

And the mark of God's blessing upon Israel was that they would prosper financially and that the Lord was their healer. They would not get sick. That was the Old Covenant blessing and we can see how clearly it is the Old Covenant gospel that is being preached around the world today.

And that is what carnal people want. You know a baby doesn't know how serious cancer is. You go to some illiterate villager, even in India, she doesn't know what cancer is. She's more worried about a broken bone.

She says cancer, x-ray showed cancer, I couldn't care less about that. Fix my broken bone. But if you got cancer and a broken bone, you'd want your cancer fixed because you know the truth. And they don't know the truth that cancer is more serious than a broken bone.

How many of you really believe that sin is worse than sickness? How many of you really believe that anger is worse than cancer? How many of you would be desperate to get rid of anger like you would be desperate to get rid of cancer?

I tell you, even in our churches, there are very few. How many people are interested in getting rid of gossiping, evil speaking, bitterness and unforgiving attitude, jealousy, pride, telling lies and small things?

How many people believe that these are all much much more serious than tuberculosis, AIDS, leprosy, cancer and all the other imaginable diseases that you can think of? I'll tell you why these are more serious.

The Bible says in Revelation 21 all liars will go to hell. It doesn't say all cancer patients or all lepers will go to hell anywhere. It doesn't say anywhere that people with AIDS will go to hell. But it does say all liars will go to hell.

It does say God fights against proud people. Pride is such an evil that God fights against them. It doesn't say God fights against liars, they just go to hell. But God fights against proud people even when they are on earth.

But nowhere does it say God fights against people who got cancer or God fights against people who are poor. That shows that poverty and sickness are not as bad as pride. How many of you believe that? Any type of pride?

You think pride is found only in the unbeliever? No, it's found in so many believers. All of us who are delighted to know about how our sins can be forgiven. But that is only step one. There are three stages, like there are three tenses in grammar, past, present, future.

In the same way there are three stages in God's saving us from sin. The most important evidence that sin is the main thing, that the deliverance of freedom from sin, that's the cage we need to escape from, is found in the fact that the very first promise in the New Testament is Matthew 121, Jesus will save his people from their sins.

And the angel told Joseph, you shall call his name Jesus for this reason. So the very fact that we take the name of Jesus means that we have understood he is called Jesus because he came to save me from my sin.

And do you know when I get saved from my sins, I get saved from a lot of secondary problems, including abject poverty and a lot of sicknesses. It's true. The principle holds good, you seek the kingdom of God first and the things of earth will be added to you.

In the Old Testament it was not like that. They were told to seek the kingdom, seek earthly things, and they would get it. But Jesus came with another law. You know when John the Baptist came, he came with a completely new message.

And I want to paraphrase his words. He says, all of you Israelites, for 1500 years your prophets have told you that you can have a Canaan's land, that you can have earthly blessings. Your enemies defeated, the Philistines, the Amorites, the Moabites, all defeated.

You can have many other earthly blessings like prosperity. You can have plenty of children, your barns will be blessed, your fields will be blessed, your cattle will be blessed. The promise was even your cattle won't have miscarriages, your wives won't have miscarriages.

And you will always be the number one nation on earth if you obey God. And you won't get any sickness, you read in Deuteronomy 28, you won't get any madness or blindness or any of such thing if you obey God.

And you'll be blessed wherever you go earthly wise. John the Baptist says, but now I am preaching another message. The kingdom of heaven is near. It hasn't yet come. Till now for 1500 years you had a kingdom of earth with earthly blessings.

But now another kingdom is coming, the kingdom of heaven. It was going to come on the day of Pentecost. Jesus was going to prepare the way for it and lay the foundation. The kingdom of heaven. And therefore you need to repent.

You need to turn from sin. And to the most religious people of his time, John the Baptist said, I will not baptize you because I don't see any fruit in your life towards turning away from sin. I mean, you fellas are prosperous and you fellas are healthy.

That's great. But I can't baptize you just because you're prosperous and healthy. That's an old covenant gospel. I'm preparing people for the kingdom of heaven. And then Jesus came and he preached the kingdom of heaven is near.

Kingdom of God is coming. Some of you who are standing here will see the kingdom of God coming with power. And they did see it on the day of Pentecost. The kingdom of God came with power. And since that day, the kingdom of heaven is preached.

But today we have preachers who have reverted back to that old testament gospel of a kingdom on earth, of having God blessing us with better property and better cars and more money and all that type of stuff.

And many of you have heard it. And those are the most popular books in the Christian bookshops. Yet the word of God still stands true. You shall call his name Jesus because he came for one purpose to save his people from their sins.

The Past, Present, and Future of Salvation

So as I said, salvation has got three tenses. Salvation from the guilt and the penalty and the punishment for sin from the wrath of God because of all the sins we have committed in the past. That's past tense salvation.

And then salvation from the power of sin, present tense, as long as we are alive, from the power of sin pulling us down so that we do not sin. And then in the future tense, salvation from the very presence of sin where we will come into a life in heaven when Jesus comes back, where we will not even be tempted, where there will be no sin in thought, word, deed, unconscious attitude, motive, no part of us, every part of our being will be completely free from sin.

That's something we look forward to. But we need to deal with the past and present very clearly. So that's what I want to look at. First of all, concerning the past. And I want to turn to Romans in chapter three.

Christ’s Death and the Punishment for Sin

Romans is the great book that talks about freedom from sin, the number one cage that the bird has to escape from. Romans chapter three. We read here in verse 24. No, sorry, not 24. First of all, he speaks about and passing over.

In the last part of verse 25, a passing over of the sins previously committed. So when God deals with our past sins, he first wipes out our past sins. He forgives them. He cleanses them. He tells us that Christ has paid the punishment for our sin.

I don't know whether all of you have thought sufficiently about the death of Christ. I have meditated on it for many, many years, from my earliest new birth experience. And as time has gone on, I've got more and more light on what Jesus actually underwent on the cross.

See, many people only think that he physically died for our sin. But if I were to ask you, is physical death the punishment for your sin? Tell me. Because God is a just God. And if physical death is the punishment for my sin, and if I've sinned all my life, God says, you've got to be punished.

You've got to be killed physically. I die one day, I pay the punishment. And then when I'm resurrected, I have to go to heaven. Because I died. I paid the punishment for my sin. Is that the punishment for sin?

Do we tell sinners, if you keep on living in sin, you'll die physically? No. Have you thought through it? What is the punishment for sin? Is it burning physically in hell, with fire burning my body? Jesus told a story of a rich man who was in hell in Luke 16.

Where was his body? Have you thought of that? His body was in the grave on the earth. He was in hell before they conducted his funeral. While they were conducting his funeral and the bishop was saying he was a good man, this guy was already burning in hell.

But how was he burning? Not with a body. What went to hell? His soul, his spirit. And in his spirit, he felt a burning. And he thought, hey, I want, you know, because all his life on earth, he felt burning means I need water.

He thought he had a tongue. He didn't have a tongue. I've heard of people who got their left hand amputated and they still get scratchy and suddenly they discover, hey, I don't have a left hand. Because the brain never forgets that you once had a left hand and you feel scratchy on your left hand, even after it's amputated.

So this guy in hell thought he still had a tongue and he said, get me some water. My tongue's burning. It wasn't his tongue that was burning. His tongue was on earth, in the coffin. It was his spirit that was burning.

What does it mean for the spirit to burn? It means to be forsaken by God. He had never experienced that on earth. That is hell, to be forsaken by God. One day, the Bible says in the future, all unbelievers will also be resurrected.

You read that in Revelation 20. They will stand before God and then read carefully, they will be cast not into hell, but into the lake of fire. Their spirits will come out of hell, rejoin their resurrected bodies.

They'll stand before God. The books will be opened. Every sin they have committed will be played from the videotape of their memory onto the screen. And they'll be judged according to the deeds they committed.

And then their spirit, which was in hell, which is in their body again now, will be thrown not into hell, but into the lake of fire. So strictly speaking, nobody's body ever goes to hell. That's in the Bible.

If you haven't read it carefully, you probably don't know that. But nobody's body ever burns in hell. It burns in the lake of fire. It says hell itself is cast into the lake of fire. You read Revelation chapter 20.

So, I mean, you read my book, Good Foundation, it's all there. But what I want to say is that that is the punishment for sin. And to be forsaken by God. And not just for one or two days, but for eternity.

That's what we tell unbelievers. If you live in sin, you'll be forsaken by God for eternity. Now, my question is, did Jesus take the punishment for your sin or not? That's very important for me to know.

I can never be free from the feeling of my guilt if I don't know that Jesus took the entire punishment for my sin. And the wonderful thing is he did. That is why he cried out on the cross, my God, my God.

The only time in his life he ever called his father God. Because there he was standing, not as a son before a father, but as a criminal. For sins he had never committed. Like it says in Psalm 69, I repaid what I had not stolen.

My sin was put upon him. And the Bible says in 2 Corinthians 5 .21, he was made sin. The Bible says in Galatians 3 .13, he became a curse. He became a curse. He was made sin. I take it exactly like it says.

He bore my sins. He was made sin. He became a curse. He was forsaken by God. And he cried out to the judge of the universe, why have you forsaken me? Because when a man is forsaken by God, he loses all his senses.

He can't even understand. Why have you forsaken me? You say, well, I know I can understand. You can understand it because we have not been forsaken by God. That's why we can understand it. That's why we can explain it here.

But when a man is forsaken by God, he's lost all his senses. And that's exactly what Jesus cried out. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? I can understand that. The very fact that he asked that question proves that he was forsaken by God.

Because when a man loses, he's forsaken by God, he can't even think straight. Like all the people in hell. What Jesus experienced for three hours was actual hell. You see, if you want to see how serious sin is, understand this.

This is what Jesus experienced. That's why I say you can't play around, play the fool with sin. That's what Jesus faced on the cross to free me from sin. Actual hell. The next question I have is, the punishment for my sin is eternity in hell.

But Jesus hung only for three hours. He was not forsaken by the Father forever. Because at the end of the three hours, he said, it is finished. And we know it was finished. The punishment for sin was finished, because immediately after that, he looked to heaven and said, Father.

Once again, the relationship of father and son had come back before he died. It was only for three hours that he stood there before, my God, my God, he had become the son of the Father again. So how did Jesus experience an eternal hell in three hours?

Because he was God. God is an infinite being. And it's very simple arithmetic. Infinite being multiplied by three hours is equal to finite being multiplied by eternity. It's very simple mathematics. Absolutely true.

An infinite being can experience even in one minute. Didn't have to take three hours. But he was kept there for three hours. To experience what a finite being, all the billions of human beings experiencing eternal hell for billions of human beings are about this size in God's eyes.

Experiencing eternity in hell is equal to one infinite being forsaken by God even for one minute. But he was forsaken for three hours. So Jesus actually experienced an eternal hell when he died. And that is why I say no angel, no created being could ever take my sin, because every created being would have to be a finite being.

And a finite being can never, never take the punishment for all the billions of people and cannot experience an eternal hell in three hours. Even the greatest angel, the greatest created being is not infinite.

That's why the only person who could die for our sins was God himself. That to me is one of the clearest proofs that Jesus Christ was Almighty God. And when we look at the garden of Gethsemane, we find that this was what he was shrinking from.

Gethsemane and the Loss of Fellowship With the Father

Have you ever thought about why did Jesus say, Father, take this cup away from me if possible? We know it was not physical death, because we know multitudes of martyrs have gone to their death, boldly singing hymns of praise.

When the lions open their mouth to eat the mouth, they're praising the Lord when they're being burnt at the stake. They're singing praises. Can you imagine the captain of our salvation being less bold than them?

Oh no, he was much stronger, much bolder than them. In fact, an angel came and strengthened him, it says. How could he be afraid of physical death? I tell you, Jesus would have died, would be been ready to die a million physical deaths if it was only physical death.

Do you know what Jesus dreaded the most? You and I may dread physical death the most, because we are so human. But the more divine we become, the more we get closer to God, the less we are afraid of physical death, the less we are afraid of physical pain, the less we enjoy physical comforts.

We become more and more interested in spiritual comforts, and we are afraid of spiritual death. And the thing we begin to value most as we come close to God is fellowship with the Father. We can say the most spiritual person is the one who values fellowship with the Father more than anything else in this world.

In the measure in which you value fellowship with the Father, that you don't want it broken even for a second, in that measure you're spiritual. You know how this fellowship with the Father can be broken for a second?

One bad thought against somebody, one lustful thought, one bitter thought, one word of evil speaking against somebody. Look at some of the believers in our churches who go gossiping, backbiting, all the time.

You think they value fellowship with the Father? They are a million miles away from the Father. How can they understand what Jesus was struggling with in the Garden of Gethsemane? You may understand it when I explain it to you now.

It won't change your life. You've got to get it in your heart. If only your eyes were open to see this wonderful truth that fellowship with the Father is the most wonderful thing in the whole universe.

It will change your attitude to sin. It will give you victory over sin. It will free you from sin's power. It will make you hate sin. It will make you love Jesus Christ for the tremendous price He was willing to pay in order to free you and me from sin.

God opened my eyes to this many, many years after I was born again. And when my eyes were opened first to see what it was that Jesus was struggling with in Gethsemane, He had come close to that point where He was going to be forsaken.

And He knew it was coming. And for all eternity, for millions and millions and millions of years, He had enjoyed this wonderful fellowship with the Father. Even during His 33 years on earth, that fellowship was never broken by the slightest sin, thought, word, deed, attitude, motive, no disobedience, perfect fellowship.

And now He knew that because of your sin and my sin, He would be forsaken. And He didn't want to be forsaken even for one minute. And He said, Oh Father, do you really have to forsake me? You mean this wonderful fellowship?

I don't mind physical death. I don't mind the taunting, the being naked, the scorn, everything. I don't mind the spitting, the killing, the nails. But Father, will this fellowship that you and I have had for eternity, you mean I lose it for one minute?

Oh, three hours? I can't bear that. Can't you please do it some other way? It's a human being speaking now because Jesus is a man. And I can imagine the Father saying, Well, my son, you can come back here right now from Gethsemane.

Come straight up. You have never sinned. You have every right to come back to heaven. The only thing is, all those millions of people will go to hell. That includes you and me. I can imagine Jesus saying, Zacfunen will go to hell forever.

I make it personal. You can make it personal too. And Jesus thinks about that. And He says, Okay, for His sake, I'll go. I won't run away. When I saw that for the first time, I actually wept. I said, Lord, I had wept many times when I saw movies about Jesus hanging on the cross.

That was physical death. You know, you weep when you see the whipping. But this time, I was weeping for something else, for the deepest death that Jesus suffered. I said, Lord, I cannot imagine that you love me so much, that you were willing to face hell for a wretch like me, who rebelled against you, who didn't have time for you, who sinned so much.

You knew I would sin so much even after I'm born again, that I would live for earthly things so much even after I'm born again and seek the honor of men, live for the fashions of the world, and you still love me.

I can't believe it, Lord. Please help me to value fellowship with the Father, to hate sin. If that doesn't move you, I know you only got it in your head. You know, when you hear that somebody has died, you don't weep because you don't even know that person.

But if it's your husband or wife or your child, you weep. And when you realize that Jesus went through this for you, it'll really break your heart as it did mine. And I got a new understanding of sin, of the price that Jesus paid to forgive my sin.

It wasn't easy. For me, you can just say, oh Lord, I'm sorry. Please forgive me. And it's because of this casual attitude with which so many people come to Jesus for forgiveness that they never get free from sin.

When I saw all this, I began to hate sin in my life like anything. I said, Lord, I don't want to smell of sin in my life. I want to hate it. Please show me more and more and more and more and more the sin in my life.

I've had enough of looking at the sin in other people. I don't want to see sin in other people anymore. And I tell you that changed my life. When I said, Lord, I don't want to see sin in other people anymore.

I want to see it myself. Because when I see sin in other people, I only criticize. When I see sin in myself, I'll be free from it. When I see sin in other people, I'll be a gossiper like a lot of people sitting here are.

I'm sorry to say. But when you see sin in yourself, you have no time to speak evil about others. You're seeing your own need. You're weeping before God. That's the thing that makes a man a godly man. That's the thing that makes a woman a godly woman.

Like Jesus said, he who has years to hear, let him hear. What a price he paid that I might be free from sin. And he forgave me, shed his blood, forsaken by the father, restored to fellowship at the end of that three hours.

Christ’s Descent to Hades and the Finished Work of the Cross

And where did Jesus go? You know, there are certain charismatic preachers today who say that Jesus went and suffered in hell for three days after that. That's an absolute lie of the devil. Don't you believe all these liars?

Not liars. I think they're deceived. Jesus didn't go to hell. He'd suffered it already for three hours. And it was over. He said, it's finished. After he says it's finished, how can he go to hell for three days after that?

I find there's a pathetic ignorance of scripture among a lot of people who claim to be filled with the Holy Spirit. They live so much in these emotions that they don't study the word. Don't be deceived by that.

When the Bible says he descended into Hades in Acts chapter two, that's the Greek word. It's translated as hell in King James and all, but the real word is Hades as you see in the NASB. Hades was in the center of the earth and it had two sections.

One was hell and the other was paradise or Abraham's bosom. Lazarus the beggar went to Abraham's bosom of paradise. The rich man went to hell. Both went to Hades. Hades had two sections. It's like Bangalore city and Bangalore cantonment.

It's two different parts. Hades had two sections and the important thing here was you couldn't cross from one to the other. It was like that. And Jesus and the two thieves all went to Hades. Jesus and the repentant thief went to the paradise section of Hades and the unconverted thief went to the hell section of Hades.

And when it says Jesus was not left in Hades, he was not left in paradise. He told the thief, I'll be with you today in paradise. He was there for three days in the paradise section of Hades. He wasn't atoning for our sin.

That was finished on the cross. He said it is finished. And after the three days in paradise, he came out of the grave. And when he ascended up to heaven, he took paradise from the center of the earth up to the third heaven, the presence of God.

Okay. So that's what Jesus suffered for our sin. He took the punishment. And when I know that and I accept it, all I have to do is receive it. Lord, I thank you. It's so easy. It's free for me, but tremendously costly for him.

The greatest price ever paid by anyone in the universe was when Jesus paid the price for my sin. And now it is absolutely free for me. I just accept it. Thank you, Lord. I accept it. I'm free from what?

From the guilt and the penalty. Now Satan cannot accuse me anymore. He cannot make me condemned. He cannot remind me of any sin in my past because it was all paid for on the cross. It was all paid for on the cross.

Do you feel guilty about something? If you have not repented of your sin, you better feel guilty because guilt is God's way of making you come to him. The only sin that cannot be forgiven is the sin that you will not confess.

Did you get that? The only sin God will not forgive is the sin that you don't confess. If you confess, he is faithful and righteous to forgive all our sins because the price has been paid. If somebody has paid your debt, nobody can ask you to pay that debt again.

Forgiveness and Justification

It's been paid. But more than that, it says here in Romans chapter 3 in verse 24 that we are justified as a gift by his grace. Justification is more than forgiveness and it's important for us to understand that.

Forgiveness is like clearing the debt of my past sin. Justification is when the righteousness of Christ which I don't deserve. Forgiveness itself is a wonderful thing but when the righteousness of Christ is put to my account when it clothes me like a dress and I stand before God in Christ.

Ephesians says you are in Christ. It's like a paper which is inside the Bible. It's in the Bible. So, I am in Christ and I stand before God except that that is justification. God sees me in Christ. To use a earthly illustration, if sin is like a debt.

Supposing I had a debt of a hundred million rupees to somebody and I know in my entire lifetime I can never pay it and I'm always afraid to meet that man because I'm wondering when he'll take me to court.

That's how I'm afraid to meet God. But one day, if he takes this certificate of debt and tears it up before me and says, you're forgiven. My debt came from minus 100 million to zero. What a wonderful thing that is.

I should be the most excited man in the world if my bank account came from minus 100 million to zero. It was minus 100 million in the red and in one moment this wonderful man forgave me and I'm zero. Justification is when this wonderful man says, I want to do something more for you.

I want to put a hundred million rupees into your bank account. Can you imagine that? That is absolutely amazing. I who was a beggar and a pauper and a terrific debtor have suddenly become a rich man. That is justification.

I hope you've understood now the difference between forgiveness and justification. They are not the same. It's justification that has made me wealthy before God because the entire righteousness of Christ's worth more than a million rupees has been put to my account.

It's mine in Christ. I can partake of it now. I can draw from this hundred million rupees and live on it. Why is it we are not more holy? Because you don't go to the bank and draw from this righteousness which will free you from gossiping and free you from anger and free you from bitterness and free you from worldliness.

The entire righteousness of Christ is in my account. But many believers don't draw on it. Some believers have got faith. They go into the bank and say, give me, okay, give me a hundred thousand rupees right now.

Boy, other people go and say, can you give me five rupees? Check for five rupees. They get five rupees and they remain defeated, defeated, defeated, defeated. The other fellow goes and draws a check for a million rupees and he knows there's 99 million still there.

And he becomes an overcomer. He's drawing on the righteousness of Christ and he's overcoming sin because he's got faith. It's his. It's been put to his account. But you know, any amount of money put to your account will never become yours till you go and draw it.