Saint and Sinner at the Same Time
You are not a sinner working toward becoming a saint. In Christ, you are already both — and that changes everything.
Scripture: Romans 7:15–25; Romans 8:1; 1 John 1:8–9; 2 Corinthians 5:17; Lamentations 3:22–23
There is a version of the Christian life that goes something like this:
You were a sinner. Then you became a Christian. And now the goal is to become, over time, less and less of a sinner — until eventually, if you’re doing it right, you arrive somewhere close to sainthood. Maybe not perfect. But better. Noticeably better. Better in ways other people can see.
In this version, spiritual maturity looks like diminishing struggle. The further you get from the beginning, the less sin should be a problem. If you’re still fighting the same battles you were fighting five years ago, something has gone wrong. Either your faith isn’t working, or you aren’t trying hard enough, or both.
A lot of people have absorbed this version without ever being taught it explicitly. It’s just in the air — the assumption underneath the encouragement to grow, to improve, to press on. And it turns the Christian life into an exhausting performance review in which you are perpetually behind.
The Christian tradition has a different account. A better one.
What the tradition actually says
The Latin phrase is simul justus et peccator. It comes from Martin Luther, and it means: simultaneously saint and sinner.
Not saint in one moment, sinner in the next. Not partly saint and partly sinner, as if grace had covered fifty percent of you and the rest was still a work in progress. Fully both. At the same time. All the time.
That sounds like a contradiction, but it isn’t. It’s a description of something real — the actual condition of every Christian who has ever lived.
Here’s what it means.
You are a sinner. Not in the past tense — in the present. Sin is not primarily a list of things you’ve done wrong. It’s a condition you were born into and have never entirely escaped. Christians have long heard in Romans 7 the description of normal Christian struggle: “I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate” (Romans 7:15). Paul finds a law at work in him — when he wants to do right, evil lies close at hand. Whatever the precise context of that passage, the experience it describes is recognizable to every honest Christian who has ever tried to follow Jesus.
Sin is not a problem Christians graduate from. It’s a condition they carry.
And: you are a saint. Not aspirationally — actually. Not because of what you’ve managed to accomplish but because of what God has declared. “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Romans 8:1). The key word is now. Not eventually. Not once you’ve improved enough. Now. In Christ, you have been named, claimed, and declared righteous — not because the declaration matches your performance, but because it rests on something outside your performance entirely.
“Saint” here doesn’t mean an exceptionally holy person or religious hero. It means the one set apart by God, claimed by God, belonging to God. That’s what baptism does — it names you as God’s own, before you’ve done anything to deserve it.
Both of these things are true at the same time. The sinner is real. The saint is real. Neither cancels the other.
Why this is not an excuse
The first objection is obvious: doesn’t this just give people permission to sin without worrying about it? If I’m going to be a sinner regardless, why try?
Paul anticipates this in Romans 6 and answers it directly: “Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? By no means!” (Romans 6:1–2). The point of simul justus et peccator is not that sin doesn’t matter. It’s that sin’s power to define you and disqualify you has been broken. Those are very different things.
Sin still matters. It damages real people in real relationships. It keeps us from the life God designed us for. It contradicts the identity we’ve been given. Christians are called to take it seriously, to confess it honestly, to resist it actively. The ongoing struggle against sin is not optional for the Christian life.
But the struggle happens from a different starting position than most people assume. You don’t fight sin in order to eventually become acceptable to God. You fight sin because you already are. The saint doesn’t perform holiness to earn standing. The saint pursues holiness because the standing has already been given.
That’s not a small distinction. It changes everything about what repentance feels like.
What repentance actually is
When you believe the performance-review version of the Christian life, repentance feels like damage control. You failed. God’s assessment of you has dropped. Now you need to bring it back up — through sufficient remorse, through promising to do better, through demonstrating that you’re serious. Repentance becomes a bid to restore the standing you’ve lost.
But if you’re simultaneously saint and sinner — if the standing is not based on your performance in the first place — repentance looks completely different. It’s not a bid for rehire. It’s a return. You come back not as someone hoping to be let back in, but as someone who already belongs, who has wandered from what is true and is finding the way back to it.
The father in Luke 15 doesn’t wait for the prodigal to complete his apology speech. He runs. He restores. He celebrates. Not because the son has demonstrated sufficient improvement, but because the son has come home. That’s the shape of grace — and it’s the shape repentance takes when you understand what grace actually is.
What this means for the ongoing struggle
The Christian life is not supposed to feel like a straight upward line.
It isn’t. It never has been, for anyone.
The experience Paul describes in Romans 7 is not unusual. The mystics wrote extensively about seasons of dryness and failure. Luther himself — the man who articulated this doctrine — described ongoing spiritual battle as the normal condition of the Christian, not a sign of insufficient faith. The promise of new life in Christ is real. Growth is real. But the flesh — that persistent bending toward self and away from God — doesn’t disappear this side of death. It remains, and it fights.
For people who are convinced their faith must be broken because they’re still struggling, please pay attention here. The question isn’t whether you’re still fighting. Every honest Christian is still fighting. The question is what you do with the fight.
The wrong answer is to hide it. Don’t perform a progress you don’t actually have in order to manage the appearance of sanctification while the real battle happens behind closed doors. That produces exhaustion, shame, and eventually collapse.
The right answer is to bring it. To confess it — to God, and in appropriate measure to other people — without catastrophizing and without minimizing. To return, again and again, not as someone whose repeated failure disqualifies them, but as someone who belongs to a God whose mercies are new every morning.
Lamentations says exactly that: “The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning” (Lamentations 3:22–23). Every morning. Not once you’ve proven you learned your lesson. Every morning.
A word about the mirror
One of the strange gifts of this doctrine is what it does to how you see other people.
The performance-review version of Christianity produces a constant, usually unconscious comparison of who is further along, who is struggling more visibly, whose sins are more respectable. Churches organized around visible progress tend to produce people who are very good at hiding the wrong things and very quick to judge the people who can’t.
Simul justus et peccator levels all of that. Every person in the room is simultaneously saint and sinner. The person whose life looks most together and the person whose life is visibly falling apart are standing on exactly the same ground of grace before God, which has nothing to do with the appearance of progress.
That’s not comfortable if you’ve been using your relative respectability as a measure of your standing. But it’s incredibly freeing if you haven’t been able to keep up the performance.
What remains
The Christian life is not a performance. It’s not a progress report. It’s not a long audition for a standing you haven’t quite earned yet.
It’s a life lived in the tension between what you are and what you’ve been declared to be — between the sinner who keeps failing and the saint who keeps being claimed. That tension doesn’t resolve this side of death. The battle continues. The flesh persists. And the mercies are new every morning.
You don’t have to pretend the sinner isn’t there. You don’t have to perform a progress you haven’t made. You don’t have to earn what’s already been given.
You are a sinner. You are a saint. You are both, all at once. And the one who declared you saint knew exactly what he was declaring when he said it.
Prayer: Lord, I am not yet what you have declared me to be — not in my lived experience, not fully. But you declared it anyway, knowing that. Teach me to live in that tension without despair and without pretending. Where I have used my relative progress to feel superior, correct me. Where I have used my ongoing failure to feel disqualified, remind me what you have already said. And in the middle of the battle, which is not over and will not be over soon, keep me close enough to you to keep returning. Amen.
