Why Do I Feel More Sinful the Closer I Get to Jesus?

I thought growing closer to Jesus would make me feel like a better Christian.

In some ways, the opposite has happened.

The more I read my Bible, the more I pray, and the more time I spend thinking seriously about my relationship with Jesus, the more aware I become of my own sin. Things I could once excuse easily have become harder to ignore. Memories from years ago sometimes come back with a weight they did not carry when I was actually living through them. Even sins I have confessed and believe I have been forgiven for can still occupy space in my mind.

There is something strange about knowing that I am forgiven while still remembering exactly what needed forgiving.

For a while, that seemed backward to me. Shouldn't getting closer to God make me feel cleaner? Shouldn't spiritual growth eventually mean looking back at myself and being impressed by how far I have come?

Instead, the closer I get to Jesus, the less interested I am becoming in comparing myself with the person standing next to me. And I think that change in comparison explains a lot.

It Is Easy to Feel Righteous When I Compare Myself to the World

There is no shortage of evil to look at.

Turn on the news, spend ten minutes online, or look honestly at human history and you can find cruelty, greed, sexual immorality, hatred, violence, corruption and selfishness almost immediately. Some of it disgusts me. Some of it should disgust me.

But I have discovered that looking outward can also become a crutch.

If I need to convince myself that I am a pretty good person, I can always find somebody doing something worse than I am. My anger doesn't look particularly serious beside someone else's violence. My lust can seem insignificant beside someone else's sexual immorality. My pride looks harmless compared with somebody else's arrogance. My selfishness seems reasonable when I compare it with greed on a much larger scale.

As long as I choose the person I am comparing myself with, I can usually construct a scale on which I come out looking pretty good.

The equation changes when the finger points back at the person doing the analysis.

Jesus warned about this tendency when He spoke about seeing the speck in another person's eye while failing to recognize the log in our own. His point wasn't that wrongdoing in other people doesn't matter. He was confronting the hypocrisy that can develop when I become an expert on somebody else's failure while remaining strangely forgiving of my own.

That is much more uncomfortable.

Everyone seems worried about what everyone else is doing. I understand the temptation because I do it too. But as my faith has grown, I have increasingly found myself being pulled back toward the part of this fallen world for which I have the most direct responsibility: me.

I cannot personally repent for the sins of everyone else. I cannot make another person follow Christ. I cannot force the world to become what I think it should be.

I can ask Christ to show me what needs to change in me.

The Closer I Get to Jesus, the More Clearly I See the Difference

I don't think I necessarily feel more sinful because I am becoming more sinful.

I think part of what has changed is the standard I am looking at.

If my standard is another imperfect human being, I can always negotiate with my conscience. If my attention is increasingly fixed on Jesus, those negotiations become harder.

That doesn't mean Christians eventually become incapable of sin. Scripture doesn't describe the Christian life that way. First John is remarkably direct about it: claiming to be without sin is self-deception, while confession is met with God's faithfulness and forgiveness. The Christian response to sin is therefore neither pretending it isn't there nor deciding that its presence makes Christ's work ineffective.

For me, becoming more aware of sin has happened alongside becoming more willing to confess it. The two experiences have not cancelled one another out. They have grown together.

That can hurt.

There are things from my younger years that I understand very differently today than I did when I was living them. I sinned openly at times without understanding the full impact of my actions and without the meaningful relationship with my Creator that I have today. I have brought those things before God. I have asked for forgiveness.

I believe I am forgiven.

I know I am forgiven.

But my mind still remembers.

Forgiveness Does Not Erase My Memory

This has been one of the more difficult parts of growing in my faith.

There are moments when my mind takes me backward. Something reminds me of who I was, something I said, something I did, or a period of my life I would rather leave behind. Suddenly I can be mentally standing in a place that Christ has already forgiven me for occupying.

The Bible doesn't tell Christians to pretend their past never happened. Remembering sin can produce humility. It can remind us of the seriousness of what Christ has forgiven. It can even help us recognize how much has changed.

But remembering the past and living in the past are not the same thing.

Scripture also gives Christians a category for accusation. Revelation describes Satan as “the accuser” of God's people. At the same time, I have to be careful not to blame every unwanted thought or painful memory directly on Satan. My own mind is perfectly capable of returning to things I regret.

What matters to me is learning where those thoughts are taking me.

Conviction brings my sin into the light and sends me toward Christ. It tells me not to excuse what I have done. Confess it. Repent. Make something right where I still can. Ask for forgiveness and change direction.

Condemnation keeps me staring backward after I have already brought that sin to Christ. It takes something I did and whispers that this must still be who I am.

That distinction matters because Romans 8 begins with an extraordinary statement about those who are in Christ: there is no condemnation for them. Later in the same chapter Paul asks who can bring a charge against God's people when God is the one who justifies them. BibleGateway

That doesn't make my past good.

It means Christ's forgiveness is greater than my past.

Sometimes I become so occupied remembering the person I used to be that I stop noticing how good God has been to the person I am now.

But What About the Sins I Keep Repeating?

The past would probably be easier to deal with if every sin stayed there.

It doesn't.

There are still things I struggle with. There are sins I have confessed more than once because I have committed them more than once. That creates another difficult tension: if I am genuinely becoming closer to Jesus, why am I still capable of returning to things I know are wrong?

I have wrestled with that question separately in Why Do I Keep Sinning If I've Given My Life to Jesus? because repeated sin can make genuine spiritual growth difficult to recognize.

What I have begun to understand is that the presence of a battle does not necessarily mean nothing has changed.

There were periods of my life when I could sin without much of an internal struggle at all. I wasn't fighting particularly hard because there wasn't much of a fight. If I wanted something, thought something or justified something, my moral compass was very different from what it is today.

Resistance makes the battle visible.

That does not give me permission to excuse repeated sin. I don't want to turn spiritual growth into a loophole where feeling guilty becomes evidence that everything is fine. If I know something is sinful, I am called to repent and fight it, not become comfortable with it.

But I also don't want to mistake the existence of temptation for proof that Christ isn't changing me.

Sometimes the reason I can see the dirt is because the light is getting brighter.

Feeling Sinful Can Make You Question Whether You're Really Saved

There is another place this can lead, and I have been there too.

Once you become increasingly aware of your sin, it can eventually raise a frightening question: If I still struggle this much, how do I know if I actually belong to Christ?

That question deserves more than a reassuring sentence, which is why I explored it separately in How Do I Know If I'm Actually Saved?

But there is something important I have had to learn.

If I make my confidence in salvation depend entirely on how righteous I feel today, my confidence will rise and fall with my performance. On a good day I will convince myself that God must be pleased with me. On a terrible day I will wonder whether I ever knew Him.

That puts an enormous amount of attention back on me.

The gospel keeps directing my attention toward Christ.

Romans 8 does not say there is no condemnation because Christians finally became impressive enough to silence every accusation. Paul's answer is that God is the one who justifies. Revelation likewise describes the accuser, but the victory of God's people is grounded in “the blood of the Lamb,” not their ability to construct a spotless personal history. BibleGateway

My sin matters enormously.

But so does what Jesus did about it.

I Don't Want to Live in the Past—or the Future

I have noticed another pattern in myself.

The past can keep me occupied with what I cannot change, while the future can keep me worried about things that haven't happened. Either one can consume so much attention that I barely notice where God has placed me today.

I don't think the answer is to forget the past. There are lessons there I don't want to lose. Nor do I think Christians should refuse to think about tomorrow. Wisdom includes preparing for what may come.

The question is where I am living mentally.

I can remember yesterday without living there. I can prepare for tomorrow without living there.

Today is where I can pray. Today is where I can repent. Today is where I can forgive somebody, ask somebody to forgive me, resist temptation, love my family, serve another person, open my Bible, correct something I am doing wrong and thank God for something He has already provided.

There is something incredibly freeing about realizing that I don't have to repair yesterday before I am allowed to follow Jesus today.

Christ has already met me here.

Maybe Feeling More Sinful Isn't Always a Sign You're Moving Backward

I still don't enjoy seeing my sin.

I don't think I ever should.

There are moments when greater awareness produces shame. There are moments when memories hurt. There are times when repeating a sin I thought I had defeated leaves me wondering how I could possibly have done it again.

But those feelings now exist alongside something that wasn't always there: a desire to confess, repent and return to Christ.

That matters.

When I spent most of my attention looking outward, the evil of the world could become evidence that I wasn't really that bad. There was always someone worse. There was always something more disgusting to point toward. There was always another person whose sin made mine easier to tolerate.

Getting closer to Jesus has made that comparison less useful.

The finger keeps turning around.

What needs to change in me?

What am I excusing?

What do I need to confess?

Where am I resisting what I already know is right?

Those questions are harder than analyzing everything wrong with everybody else, because eventually I have to do something with the answers.

I still believe Christians should care deeply about what is happening in the world. We should oppose evil, defend people who are being harmed, tell the truth, serve others and refuse to become indifferent simply because a problem isn't happening to us.

But change cannot only be something I demand from everybody else.

If I want a less angry world while protecting my anger, a more faithful world while excusing my unfaithfulness, a less selfish world while refusing to confront my selfishness, then I have created a Christianity that requires everyone to repent except me.

That isn't the Christianity Jesus is calling me into.

Perhaps that is why I feel more sinful the closer I get to Him.

It isn't necessarily because He is pushing me away. It may be because following Him is making it increasingly difficult to hide from the things in myself that need His grace.

The closer I get to Jesus, the more clearly I see my sin. But the more clearly I see my sin, the more clearly I understand why I need Jesus.