1John 3:6 - Inconceivable!

"Every the [one] in Him remaining is not sinning.  Every the [one] sinning has not seen Him nor has he known Him."

-There is no sin in Him, our beautiful breathtakingly good Savior, Jesus Christ - thus a "sinning Christ-follower" then becomes the ultimate oxymoron.  There can be no such thing.  Sin and our Savior are incompatible.  They do not, cannot, MUST not co-exist.  Mutually exclusive, diametrically opposed, worlds apart, polar opposites.  It’s like the age-old challenge of trying to get those two little oppositely-charged magnets to try and stick together.  It just ain’t gonna happen.  Inconceivable.  And it is inconceivable that sin and righteousness, darkness and light, would co-exist.  They cannot, by their very definition.  Darkness is the absence of light.  Sin is the absence of Christ, it is casting Him out of mind.  Thus we have our next litmus test.  Every one who is remaining in Christ is not sinning, not continuing to cast Him out of mind.  Present tense - meaning sin is not an ongoing action in their lives.  They do not keep on sinning, not after receiving a knowledge of the truth, not after receiving God’s sinless Son as their Savior, because they are now God’s child (cf John 1.12), begotten from above, a brand new creation, and sin does not continue unabated in them.  They do not continue to practice it, because God does not produce sinners.  He makes people like Him.  Which, when you think about it properly (with humility), is also quite inconceivable.  Mind-boggling, that the end game here is that we will be (more and more) like Him.  That was always the plan, of course, but each one of us is a hot mess and quite a long ways away from fitting in to "like Him"... Nevertheless, having said that, things should definitely be trending upwards, heaven-wards, for the professing Christ-follower.  More like Him.  More of Him and less of me, less sin.  Sure there will be cycles of up and down, there will be the occasional slip-ups and transgressions.  But they will (should)(must!) become less and less frequent.  He must increase, I must decrease.  And so must sin.

-But so it is safe to say - John is not afraid to say it - that every one who is sinning, present tense - continuing action in the present - has neither seen nor come to know Christ.  The person who persists in doing the things which God hates, who continues in a lifestyle which is ungodly, casting Him out of mind (and life), not like Him at all - this one does not know the Lord.  Sin is the absence of Christ.  John is not talking about occasional, intermittent sin.  He’s not talking about those who actually struggle against their sin.  Remember, we’re not talking about being in a place where we have no sin, or where we claim to have no sin.  We will all still fall short this side of heaven.  Nobody is perfect.  But things should be trending down in this regard.  We confess our sins and give them to Jesus.  Again, more of Him and less of me-and-my-sin.  We’re talking about a lifestyle, a pattern, a heart-and-mindset.  And the heart-and-mind which is clearly set on sin most likely has not set their hope in Christ.  Not yet.  But it’s never too late...!