Nothing Left to Raise
For four weeks I've watched the church lay down one hard truth after another. This is what's left standing when the last one goes — and the verb we lost was the one that saved me.
Years ago, on a Thursday, I lied to the man whose one job was to help me stop.
He was my accountability partner — a churchy way of saying the friend I’d asked to ask me the hard questions, the structure I’d built specifically to fight what I was doing. He asked. And I looked at him and lied. I told him I was fine. I’d done the one thing I’d asked him to help guard me against the week before, and I said nothing, and I let him pray for me, and three days later I stood up and preached on wisdom from Proverbs.
I want you to sit in that with me, because I’ve spent a lot of years not sitting in it.
I was leading a ministry. Building it, actually — pouring real hours into discipling people in the Christian life. And by every visible measure, it was working. There was fruit. People were growing. From the outside, and honestly from most of the inside, I looked like a young man on fire for God.
I was living contrary to Scripture in multiple streams and feeding a private habit I hid from everyone. Two lives, running at the same time, inches apart. I’d prepare a lesson on holiness with the previous night still on me. I’d teach people to walk in step with the Spirit and mean it, genuinely mean it, and then go kill nothing in myself the moment the lights went down.
Here’s the part I understand now that I couldn’t see then. I wasn’t a man with no spiritual life. That would almost be easier to explain. I had an enormous spiritual life. I felt real conviction when I sinned — sharp, hot, sincere. I sought God’s forgiveness, and I genuinely gloried in it; the relief was real, the gratitude was real. And then I soared in the pleasure of the sin again the next weekend, and felt the conviction again, and sought the forgiveness again, and round it went.
I called that repentance. It wasn’t. It was rehearsed repentance — the full liturgy of being sorry, performed on a loop, with one thing missing from the middle of it. I never actually killed anything. I confessed the sin, thanked God for covering it, and left it exactly where it was, alive and waiting for me to pick it back up again. I had a functional spiritual amnesia — except it wasn’t that I forgot. It’s that I’d built a cycle where forgetting was the point. Feel it, confess it, move on, repeat.
It ended the way those things end. I was found out. I resigned, and I dressed the resignation in a respectable reason, and the respectable reason was a lie too — the last lie on top of all the others.
You can see the sins well enough, but the sins aren’t the confession. This is the confession: I was doing more Christianity in that season than I have in almost any season since. I just wasn’t putting anything to death. And it turns out you can do an astonishing amount of the first while doing none of the second — and call the whole thing a calling.
I don’t think I’m the only one. I think there are people reading this who haven’t actually killed anything in years, and who would never know it, because the activity is so loud you can’t hear the silence underneath it.
My version of this was loud and obvious. Yours is probably quieter. That’s what makes it more dangerous.
Because most of us aren’t living a double life with a dramatic secret. Most of us are just busy. Busy being Christians, even. We go to church. We serve. We read the plan, we know the words, we’d pass any doctrine quiz you put in front of us. By every visible measure, the faith is working.
And underneath all that motion, a question almost no one asks: when is the last time I actually put something to death?
Not “when did I last feel bad about a sin?” We do that constantly. I mean: when did I last take a specific corruption in myself — name it, drag it into the light, and go to war with it until it died? When did I last lose something I wanted to keep? For a lot of us, the honest answer is a number of years we’d rather not say out loud, if ever. We’ve just treated Jesus as fire insurance instead of life-changing. We’ve been active the whole time. We just haven’t been killing.
And it’s not because we’re sinless. It’s because our sins got respectable. The sharp tongue we call honesty and even embrace as our God-given personality. The ability to be offended we hold onto because we tell ourselves that without it, we’d be a doormat. The self-pity we’ve nursed so long that it feels like personality. The envy we’ve rebranded as ambition. We’ve made a quiet peace with all of it and say, “Oh well.” We’re not at war with these things. We’re cohabiting with them and making them our pet sins.
What we do instead of killing is feel. We feel convicted — genuinely, sometimes intensely. We confess. We feel the relief of grace. And we mistake that whole emotional circuit for repentance, when it’s really just the feeling of repentance running on a loop with nothing dying at the center of it. We’ve been sorry a thousand times. We’ve changed almost none of it.
And we are being told, from every direction, that this is fine. That the things we should be killing are actually the truest parts of us. That peace with ourselves is the goal, and war with ourselves is the sickness. The whole spirit of the age is built to talk us out of the one verb the Christian life can’t live without.
This is where all of it has been heading. Not a new question — the same one, asked for the last time, with nowhere left to hide from it.
It’s easy to nod at all this as a description of the lukewarm church out there somewhere.
It’s harder to ask the question straight: what have I actually put to death lately? And to sit in the silence if the answer is nothing.
There’s a sentence in Paul that the modern church has quietly stopped being able to hear. Not because it’s obscure — because it’s violent.
“If by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live” (Rom 8:13).
Put to death. That’s the verb. Not manage, not balance, not integrate, not make peace with. Kill. And Paul stakes everything on it: the clause before says that if you live according to the flesh, “you will die” — and he doesn’t mean you’ll feel distant from God. He means death in its fullest, most final sense.1 The commentators who handle this verse carefully refuse to soften it, because Paul refuses to. This isn’t advanced discipleship for the especially serious. It’s the difference between life and death, stated as a command.2
The Puritan John Owen built an entire book on this one verse, and gave us the line that has never been improved on: “Be killing sin or it will be killing you.”3 There’s no neutral third option, no holding pattern, no maintenance mode. Sin is not a static thing you contain; it’s a living thing that is either dying at your hand or growing at your expense. The Christian life, on this account, has a verb at its center, and that verb is kill.
A verb needs an object
Here’s the thing about a command to put something to death: it only makes sense if there’s something there to die.
“Put to death the deeds of the body.” Mortify what is earthly in you (Col 3:5). The grammar requires an object — a real corruption, a genuine self-in-rebellion that has to be dragged out and executed. The whole vocabulary of the New Testament Christian life assumes it. Put off the old self. Crucify the flesh. Deny yourself. Every one of those verbs reaches for an object, and the object is always the same: a version of you that has to die so a truer one can live.
And this — slowly, over years, without anyone deciding it on purpose — is exactly what we have lost.
Walk back through what this series has watched come apart. We started with judgment — the conviction that sin earns condemnation — and we watched the church quietly retire it, until sin carries no weight and there’s nothing to be saved from. Then we watched the authority of Scripture get relativized, until the texts that name sin no longer bind, and there’s no fixed word left to call anything sin at all. Then we watched the self get sacralized — you are your desires, express them, honor them — until the inner life isn’t a battlefield but a sanctuary, every want a piece of the authentic you.
Now stand back and see what all three have done together, because this is where they were always heading. Remove judgment, and there’s no penalty that makes sin worth killing. Remove Scripture’s authority, and there’s no standard by which to know what to kill. Sacralize the self, and there’s nothing you would dare to kill, because the thing the New Testament calls “the flesh” has been renamed “who I really am.” Strip out all three, and you haven’t made the Christian life gentler. You’ve removed its object. You’ve left the verb — put to death — with nothing left to put to death.
That’s the quiet catastrophe underneath the whole project, and it’s why this series has been one argument and not four. It was never really about any single doctrine. It was about sanctification all along — because when you relativize judgment and Scripture and the self, the thing that actually dies is mortification itself. You’re left with a Christianity that has every feature except the one verb that made it transformative. Activity without killing. Worship without dying. A faith you can practice with enormous energy, as I did, while putting nothing to death — because there’s nothing left you’re willing to call dead.
Killing is only half
But here’s where Scripture refuses to let mortification curdle into something grim, and it’s the half that even the church that still preaches “put sin to death” most often forgets.
You are not only killing. You are being made alive.
The old tradition had two words for the one motion: mortification and vivification. The putting to death and the making alive. They aren’t two separate projects — a season of killing followed by a season of living — but two faces of a single turn, the way exhaling and inhaling are one breath. Paul’s own language insists on it. The same passage that says “put to death” also says “put on the new self, which is being renewed after the image of its creator” (Col 3:9–10).4 You strip off the grave-clothes, and you put on the clean garment. The killing is never the point. It’s the clearing of ground so something can grow.
This is why Paul can hold together two things that look contradictory — that you have already died with Christ, and that you must still, daily, put sin to death. The commentators call it the indicative and the imperative: be what you are.5 You are already, by God’s act, a new creation. Now — by the Spirit, never by raw willpower, never by gritted teeth — become in practice what you already are by grace.6 Mortification without that grace is just moralism, the exhausting religion of self-improvement. But grace without mortification isn’t grace at all; it’s the verb-less Christianity we’ve been tracing all month — the one I lived — the one that lets sin sit alive and unbothered while you call yourself forgiven.
What you’re killing toward
And here is the thing that makes the killing bearable — that makes it, finally, hope and not horror.
You are not putting sin to death so you can be a slightly better person. You are putting it to death because of where this is all going. “Beloved, we are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is” (1 John 3:2). That’s the destination. Not improvement — likeness. You will see Christ, and the seeing will finish the work, and you will be like Him.7
And John adds the line that turns the whole grim arithmetic of mortification into something with light in it: “everyone who thus hopes in him purifies himself as he is pure” (1 John 3:3). The killing is driven by the hope.8 You don’t put sin to death out of fear or duty or self-hatred. You put it to death because you’ve seen where you’re headed — a face you will one day look full in — and you cannot carry the old corruption into that presence, and more than that, you don’t want to. The hope does the purifying. Without it, John says, life is empty. With it, every act of mortification is one more thing you set down because your hands are getting ready to hold something better.
So here is the whole method of this newsletter, landed on its final question. The culture says: become who you are. Find the self inside you and express it without apology. Scripture says something stranger and harder and infinitely more hopeful: die, and be made alive into who He is making you. The self you’re chasing isn’t behind you, waiting to be excavated and honored. It’s ahead of you, in the face of Christ, waiting to be revealed — and the only road there runs through a daily death.
Name what you’re killing
So I’m going to ask you the question the whole series has been walking toward, and I want you to actually answer it, not let it slide past.
What are you killing right now?
Not what do you feel bad about. Not what would you confess if pressed. What sin, specifically, are you at war with this week — named, hunted, actively dying at your hand? If you can answer that cleanly, then thank God and keep your blade sharp. But if you went quiet just now — if you scrolled back through the last month, the last year, and couldn’t find a single thing you’ve genuinely put to death — then I’m not writing this to shame you. I’m writing it because I lived in that silence for years and called it a ministry, and someone should have grabbed me by the collar.
So let me grab yours. Here’s what to do, and it’s painfully simple.
Pick one. Not all of them — you’ll do nothing if you try to do everything. One. The pet sin from a few paragraphs ago that you felt the heat on when I named it. The tongue, the offense you nurse, the self-pity, the envy, the thing you’ve been calling your personality. Pick the one you’d least like to give up, because that’s the one with its hooks deepest in you. That reluctance you feel — not that one — is the sin defending its own life. Listen to it. It’s telling you where to aim.
Then go to war with it. Specifically, concretely, this week. Name it out loud to one person who’ll ask you about it again — a real accountability you don’t lie to, which I know something about. Cut off whatever feeds it. When it rises, refuse it, and when you fail, get up the same hour and refuse it again. This isn’t a feeling. Feelings you already have in abundance; feelings are the loop you’ve been mistaking for repentance. This is an act, repeated, against something that wants to stay alive.
But hear the one thing that keeps this from being a self-improvement project — because if you miss it, you’ll just exhaust yourself building a better you and call it sanctification. You do not kill sin by raw willpower. Paul is explicit: it’s “by the Spirit“ you put the deeds of the body to death. The power isn’t yours, but the act is still required of you. Not “let go and let God,” as though you were a passenger. Not “grit your teeth and fix yourself,” as though you were alone. Both are counterfeits. The truth is stranger: you fight with everything you have, and the strength you fight with isn’t yours. You say a daily yes to a killing that God is doing in you and through you and will not do without you.
So stop waiting to feel sanctified. Stop running the loop — the conviction, the relief, the nothing-changes. Pick the sin you’re most fond of, and by the Spirit, start killing it today. Not because God will love you more when it’s dead. Because He already loves you, and He refuses to leave you cohabiting with the thing that’s killing you.
I told you at the start that my version of this was loud and obvious. I didn’t tell you how it ends.
It ends here — with me writing this. Restored. Years past the resignation and the lies and the cycle I couldn’t break on my own. I am not the man who lied to his accountability partner on a Thursday. That man, by the grace of God and a great deal of slow, unglamorous killing, is dead. I had to put him to death, over and over, for longer than I wanted to — and I didn’t do it alone, and I didn’t do it by feeling sorry. I did it by the Spirit, the same Spirit who would not let me stay in the grave I’d dug.
That’s the part the loop could never give me. The loop kept me feeling forgiven while leaving me exactly where I was. What actually saved me wasn’t softer than mortification. It was mortification — the real thing, the daily death — and on the other side of it, a life I could not have manufactured and did not deserve. The killing was never the end. It was the door.
Because here is what we are killing toward, and it’s the only thing that makes any of this bearable. “We shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is” (1 John 3:2). That’s the destination. Not a tidier version of yourself. Not a respectable Christian who finally got the pet sins under control. Likeness to Christ — the actual face of God, seen at last, and the seeing finishing the work that every small death began. And the hope of that face is not passive: “everyone who thus hopes in him purifies himself” (1 John 3:3). The hope does the killing. You put the old self to death because you’ve glimpsed where you’re going, and you will not carry the corpse into that light.
This is where the whole series has been heading, all four weeks of it. We watched the church lay down judgment, and Scripture’s authority, and the very idea of a self that needs saving — and I told you those losses would converge somewhere. They converge here. Strip out everything that makes sin worth killing, and you don’t get a lighter, kinder faith. You get a faith with no verb, no war, no death — and therefore no resurrection, because resurrection is only ever on the far side of a grave. A Christianity that has nothing left to put to death has nothing left to be raised.
So this is the question the whole month was always going to end on. Not what do you believe — you believe plenty. Not how do you feel — you feel constantly. The question is: what are you putting to death, and who are you becoming as it dies?
The culture says become who you are. Scripture says something better, and harder, and truer than anything the age is selling: die, and be made alive into who He is making you. The self worth having was never behind you, waiting to be expressed. It’s ahead of you, in the face of Christ, waiting to be revealed.
Be killing sin. It was always the way home.
And I’ll see you there — both of us unrecognizable, both of us finally ourselves.
This closes the June series — four weeks on what the church loses, one doctrine at a time, when it trades hard truth for an easier peace: judgment, the authority of Scripture, the self that needs saving, and now the daily death that was supposed to change us. Thank you for walking the whole arc. If you came in partway, the four read best in order.
A note, because I told you a hard story, and I don’t want you to mishear the ending. I’m restored, not finished. The man who lied on a Thursday is dead, but staying dead is daily work — I still put things to death now, and some of them have my own name on them, as the last few weeks here have made plain. If you saw yourself anywhere in this series, you’re not too far gone, and you’re not behind. You’re just being invited, like I was, into the one work that actually changes anything. It’s slower than you’d like. It’s also the only thing that’s real.
→ If this series meant something to you, send the whole arc to one person. Not the timeline — one person you’ve watched get quieter in their faith, or louder in their activity with less and less underneath it. These four pieces were written for exactly that person, and they were written to be handed over, not broadcast.
→ If you’re new here: Theologetics is a weekly Monday essay for believers who hold the right doctrine and can’t always connect it to the hard parts of being alive — and for the ones who walked away because the church couldn’t. Reading culture through Scripture, one question at a time. Subscribe and it lands in your inbox every Monday. Free, and staying that way.
→ And one more thing, because the timing matters. Next Monday I’m writing something different — not an essay, a letter. About what this newsletter has become over the last year, who it turned out to be for, and something new I’m opening on July 7 for the people who want to go deeper than a weekly piece can. If these four weeks were worth your time, that letter is the one to read. I’ll see you there.
“Nothing Left to Raise” is the fourth and final piece of the June arc.
The series in order: [1 — judgment] · [2 — Scripture] · [3 — the self] · [4 — this one].
A fifth question — where all of this is finally going — comes after the launch.
Douglas J. Moo, The Letter to the Romans, 2nd ed., NICNT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2018), 516–17. Moo argues the "death" of v. 13 is "death in its fullest theological sense: eternal separation from God as the penalty for sin," and warns, "We must not eviscerate this warning."
Moo, Romans, 517, quoting John Murray: "The believer's once-for-all death to the law of sin does not free him from the necessity of mortifying sin in his members; it makes it necessary and possible for him to do so."
John Owen, The Mortification of Sin in Believers (1656), expounding Rom 8:13. The treatise is, in its entirety, an exposition of this single verse; the maxim "Be killing sin or it will be killing you" is its governing thesis.
F. F. Bruce, The Epistles to the Colossians, to Philemon, and to the Ephesians, NICNT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1984), 141. Bruce links the texts directly: in Rom 8:13 Paul speaks of putting to death "the deeds of the body," "the 'deeds of the body' being such things as are listed here in Col. 3:5."
Bruce, Colossians, 140: the believer's existence on "two planes" produces Paul's "transition back and forth between the indicative and the imperative: 'Be what you are!'"
Moo, Romans, 518: holiness is achieved "neither by our own unaided effort — the error of moralism or legalism — nor by the Spirit apart from our participation — as some who insist that the key to holy living is surrender or 'let go and let God' would have it — but by our constant living out the life placed within us by the Spirit."
I. Howard Marshall, The Epistles of John, NICNT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1978), 172–73: "we shall be like him… the effect of seeing Jesus is to make us like him," a transformation Marshall connects to 2 Cor 3:18.
Marshall, Epistles of John, 173–74: the hope of likeness carries a moral demand — believers are to "seek to be pure, and so to be like Jesus" — and "without the dimension of hope life is empty."