Just Saved Sinners?

Just Sinners Saved by Grace?

So Great a Salvation — and the New Man It Creates

NOTE: this study is adapted and greatly expanded from Elwin R. Roach’s original article, “Sinners Saved by Grace?” I discovred many years ago, but it was short and a bit lacking in New Testament references so I reworked it and added many scriptural references. 
The opening insight — that the slogan we are just sinners save by grace is found nowhere in Scripture — is his. The Scriptures, are the answer he never gave, and the witness of other writers have been added here. Take your time on this one since it probably witnesses against what you've been taught.  John 8:31 states the Principle "If you continue in my word ..."

The Slogan No One Can Find

Brother Roach began with a simple and unanswerable observation. The phrase “I am just a sinner saved by grace” has been trumpeted from pulpits with all the confidence of John 3:16. It is repeated, sung, cross-stitched, and preached as though it were the settled summary of the Christian life. So he went looking for the chapter and verse. He searched, and he searched again, and he came up empty-handed. Not one passage says it. It belongs to the same homeless category as “God helps those who help themselves” — a saying everyone assumes is in the Book, and no one can find.

That ought to give us pause. If the most repeated description of a believer cannot be located anywhere in the New Testament, perhaps the New Testament is describing the believer some other way. And it is. The slogan is not merely missing; it is contradicted. What the apostles actually wrote about those who are in Christ is something far higher, and far more dangerous to neglect, than the diminished thing the slogan offers.

What Grace Actually Came to Do

The verse most often pressed into the service of the slogan is the very verse that overturns it. Roach opened with it:

For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God.  (Ephesians 2:8)

Read the next breath. Paul does not stop at “saved.” He says why we were saved:

For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them.  (Ephesians 2:10)

Grace does not leave a sinner a sinner and merely cover him over. Grace makes a new workmanship — a fresh creation “created in Christ Jesus.” To say “grace saved me” and then add “but I am still just a sinner” is to receive the gift and deny the result the Giver intended.

Paul says it again, and unmistakably, to Titus. Notice what grace teaches:

For the grace of God that bringeth salvation hath appeared to all men, teaching us that, denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly, righteously, and godly, in this present world… who gave himself for us, that he might redeem us from all iniquity, and purify unto himself a peculiar people, zealous of good works.  (Titus 2:11-14)

Grace is not a permission slip to remain in sin; it is the schoolmaster, a Teacher of holiness. It redeems us from all iniquity and purifies a people unto Himself. A doctrine that turns grace into a covering for an unchanged sinner has not merely lost a verse — it has reversed the whole purpose for which grace appeared.

The Great Exchange: the Old Man and the New

The New Testament is, from beginning to end, the account of a transition — a transformation — of the natural man into a new man. This is its single, sustained theme, and it is stated so plainly that it can only be missed on purpose.

Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.  (2 Corinthians 5:17)

The word is new creation — not a renovated sinner, but a new thing that was not there before. Paul lays it out as a deliberate exchange, an off-and-on, a stripping and a clothing:

…ye have put off the old man with his deeds; and have put on the new man, which is renewed in knowledge after the image of him that created him.  (Colossians 3:9-10)

That ye put off concerning the former conversation the old man, which is corrupt according to the deceitful lusts; and be renewed in the spirit of your mind; and that ye put on the new man, which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness.  (Ephesians 4:22-24)

The old man is not refurbished. He is put off, like a filthy garment, and a new man is put on — one “created in righteousness and true holiness,” after the very image of God. And the old man’s end was not gradual improvement but a cross:

Knowing this, that our old man is crucified with him, that the body of sin might be destroyed, that henceforth we should not serve sin… Likewise reckon ye also yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord.  (Romans 6:6, 11)

I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me.  (Galatians 2:20)

This is why the apostles reached for an entirely different vocabulary than the one our pulpits use. They called believers born again, sons of God, partakers of the divine nature, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, and — most tellingly of all — saints. Paul opens nearly every letter the same way: “to the saints which are at Ephesus,” “to the saints… at Philippi,” “to the saints and faithful brethren in Christ which are at Colosse.” He never once wrote, “to the sinners at Corinth.” The word saints — holy ones — falls on the church roughly sixty times in the New Testament. The settled name of those whom grace has saved is not sinner. It is saint.

“Such Were Some of You”

When Paul does reach for a catalog of sins — fornicators, idolaters, thieves, drunkards, extortioners — watch the tense of the verb he attaches to the Corinthians:

And such were some of you: but ye are washed, but ye are sanctified, but ye are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God.  (1 Corinthians 6:11)

Were. Past tense. That was the old man’s portrait. The present-tense reality is washed, sanctified, justified. Paul says the same of the whole congregation in Rome — a change of ownership so complete that the old servitude is spoken of as finished:

But God be thanked, that ye were the servants of sin… Being then made free from sin, ye became the servants of righteousness.  (Romans 6:17-18)

A slave of sin made a servant of righteousness has changed masters and changed names. To insist on the old name after the change is to argue with the very Spirit who made the change.

So Great a Salvation

Here is the text that, more than any other, exposes the slogan for what it is. The writer to the Hebrews has just shown that the Son is greater than the angels, and then he turns and warns:

How shall we escape, if we neglect so great salvation; which at the first began to be spoken by the Lord, and was confirmed unto us by them that heard him; God also bearing them witness, both with signs and wonders, and with divers miracles, and gifts of the Holy Ghost, according to his own will?  (Hebrews 2:3-4)

So great salvation. Not a small thing. Not a pardon slipped to a man who remains exactly what he was. It was spoken by the Lord Himself, confirmed by eyewitnesses, and underwritten by God with signs, wonders, miracles, and gifts of the Holy Ghost. And the one danger the writer names is that we would neglect it — treat it as less than it is, leave it unopened, shrink it down to a slogan we can carry in a shirt pocket.

To call oneself “just a sinner saved by grace” is, in the language of this passage, to neglect so great salvation — to handle the gift of God as though it were a small reprieve rather than a new creation. And the writer will not let us mistake how great it is, because in the same chapter he tells us exactly what this salvation is for:

For it became him… in bringing many sons unto glory, to make the captain of their salvation perfect through sufferings. For both he that sanctifieth and they who are sanctified are all of one: for which cause he is not ashamed to call them brethren.  (Hebrews 2:10-11)

There it is, in the very heart of “so great salvation”: God is bringing many sons unto glory, and the Sanctifier and the sanctified are all of one — one family, one nature, one source — so that He is not ashamed to call them brethren. That is the salvation. To answer it with “I’m only a sinner” is to refuse the very thing for which the Son was made perfect through suffering. This is why a man may rightly say the slogan is not merely weak but anti-Christ in its working: it sets up a standing counter-testimony to what Christ actually accomplished, calling “sinner” what God has named “son.”

“But What About…?” — Handling the Hard Texts Honestly

A teaching is only as strong as its treatment of the verses that seem to cut against it. The slogan is usually defended from four places. None of them establishes “sinner” as the believer’s settled name; and seeing why makes the new-creation gospel stronger, not weaker.

Romans 7 (“What I would, that do I not”). Paul’s anguished cry is real, but read how he locates the “I.” He says, “Now if I do that I would not, it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me” (Rom. 7:20). Paul refuses to identify himself with the sin. The “I” — the new man — delights in the law of God after the inward man (7:22). And he does not end in the wreckage; chapter 8 opens with deliverance: “the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law of sin and death” (Rom. 8:2). Romans 7 is the cry; Romans 8 is the answer. The slogan stops reading at verse 24.

1 Timothy 1:15 (“of whom I am chief”). Paul calls himself the chief, or foremost, of sinners. But look at what he is doing: he is magnifying mercy by remembering what he was — “a blasphemer, and a persecutor” (1:13) — and he says plainly that he obtained mercy precisely as a pattern, “that in me first Jesus Christ might shew forth all longsuffering, for a pattern to them which should hereafter believe” (1:16). The point is the size of the grace that reached the worst case, not a doctrine that the apostle’s permanent identity is “sinner.” The same Paul addresses every church as “saints.”

1 John 1:8 (“If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves”). John is guarding against a false claim of sinless perfection — the proud denial that one ever sins at all. But the same John, two chapters later, writes, “Whosoever is born of God doth not commit sin; for his seed remaineth in him… because he is born of God” (1 John 3:9). Both are true at once: the born-of-God does not make sin his settled practice, yet he does not boast of having no sin to confess. The honest middle is the biblical one — a new man who is really new, who still walks humbly and keeps short accounts. We over-claim if we say we never sin; we under-claim, and insult the cross, if we say we are nothing but sinners.

Luther’s formula (simul justus et peccator). The instinct behind the slogan is largely an inheritance from the Reformer’s phrase “at the same time righteous and a sinner.” It captures a precious truth — our standing rests on Christ’s righteousness, not our performance — but as a permanent self-definition it has been flattened into “I’ll always be a sinner, so don’t expect change.” Scripture grants the standing and presses on to the transformation: “we all… are changed into the same image from glory to glory” (2 Cor. 3:18). Justified and being changed — not justified and unchangeable.

A Cloud of Witnesses

Brother Roach was not alone in this, and you are not alone in it. Across very different streams of the body of Christ, faithful writers have said the same thing: the gospel makes a new man, and “sinner” is not the believer’s name. You may attribute any of these as you see fit; their positions are summarized here in our own words, with a phrase quoted here and there.

Within the Kingdom and Sonship stream. J. Preston Eby, brother Roach’s close associate, built his Kingdom Bible Studies on “going on to perfection, unto the fullness of sonship” — the manifest sons of Romans 8, sanctified and brought to maturity, not believers stalled forever in infancy. George Hawtin and the Latter Rain writers (Ray and Doris Prinzing among them) labored over the same theme of the overcomer who grows up into Christ. Bill Britton’s trumpet-call, Sons of God Awake, was precisely a summons out of the “just a sinner” slumber into the dignity of sonship.

The deeper-life and holiness writers. Andrew Murray taught union with the living Christ as the secret of a transformed walk — not striving sinners, but branches abiding in the Vine (Abide in Christ). Hannah Whitall Smith, in The Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life, called believers off the treadmill of self-effort and into the rest of a life actually changed by faith. Oswald Chambers pressed Galatians 2:20 — the end of the old “I” and the indwelling life of Christ — as the normal Christian experience. Watchman Nee, in The Normal Christian Life, walked through Romans 6 step by step: know that the old man was crucified, reckon it so, and present yourself to God as one alive from the dead. Jessie Penn-Lewis preached the believer’s real death and resurrection with Christ at Calvary. And John Wesley, in his Plain Account of Christian Perfection, insisted that grace does not merely forgive but heals — renewing the heart in love — though he was careful never to claim a sinless, untemptable perfection.

Older and contemporary voices alike. Henry Scougal’s little classic gave the whole matter its name three centuries ago: The Life of God in the Soul of Man — Christianity is not improved behavior but a new divine life implanted within. Martyn Lloyd-Jones echoed it, speaking of a new disposition, the very life of God put into the believer. And the point is being recovered plainly today: Sharon Jaynes’ essay “Not Just a Sinner Saved by Grace” notes that if we keep seeing ourselves as only sinners saved by grace, we will approach the Father begging for crumbs and expecting little — when He has named us saints and bids us expect the promises fulfilled.

The Answer to the One on the Rack

Roach’s original article carried a letter from a suffering brother — a man who felt he was being chastised, could name no sin that merited it, and asked whether he should pray without ceasing, repent endlessly, or do penance. The article then wandered into the old mystics: Madame Guyon in her early years tearing her own flesh with brambles and nettles, keeping bitter herbs in her mouth, hoping to appease an angry God. Telling, then, that even Guyon herself abandoned all of it — she came at last to cease the striving and rest low in the Lord’s hand, having learned that you cannot wrench peace from God by force.

But the article never told the brother the one thing that would have set him free. The cure for the man on the rack is not more nettles, not penance, not a deeper conviction that he is and always will be a wretched sinner. The cure is revelation — to see who he now is. He is not a culprit awaiting the next blow; he is a son being brought to glory (Heb. 2:10). He is accepted in the Beloved (Eph. 1:6). The chastening he feels, if it is the Lord’s at all, is the training of a son, not the sentencing of a sinner — “for what son is he whom the father chasteneth not?” (Heb. 12:7). The rest Guyon stumbled toward at the end is real, but it is the rest of a child in the Father’s hand, not the collapse of a worm who has finally given up. “Thou art no more a servant, but a son” (Gal. 4:7).

Not Sinners — Sons Being Changed

So we return to the question in the title, and we can answer it now. Is the believer “just a sinner saved by grace”? The slogan is not in the Book, and the Book contradicts it. We were sinners; grace did not leave us there. We were dead, and were quickened; dead, and were raised; raised, and were seated together with Christ in heavenly places (Eph. 2:5-6). We have put off the old man and put on the new. We are washed, sanctified, justified, born of God, partakers of the divine nature, sons being brought to glory, saints.

But we all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord.  (2 Corinthians 3:18)

That is the true confession — humble, but not anemic. Not “I am just a sinner saved by grace,” but “I am a son of God being changed from glory to glory, growing up into the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ” (Eph. 4:13). Anything less neglects so great salvation. Anything less calls “sinner” what God, at the cost of His Son, has named “saint.”

 Sources and Writers Cited (for Attribution)

. All Scripture quotations are from the King James Version 

•  Elwin R. Roach — “Sinners Saved by Grace?” (original article), The Pathfinder. The opening observation that the slogan appears nowhere in Scripture is his.

•  J. Preston Eby — Kingdom Bible Studies (sonship, going on to perfection, the manifest sons of God).

•  George R. Hawtin; Ray and Doris Prinzing — Latter Rain / Sonship writings on the overcomer and maturity in Christ.

•  Bill Britton — Sons of God Awake.

•  Andrew Murray — Abide in Christ; The Spirit of Christ (union with the indwelling Christ).

•  Hannah Whitall Smith — The Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life.

•  Oswald Chambers — My Utmost for His Highest (identification with Christ’s death, Galatians 2:20).

•  Watchman Nee — The Normal Christian Life (Romans 6: know, reckon, present).

•  Jessie Penn-Lewis — The Cross of Calvary (the believer’s death and resurrection with Christ).

•  John Wesley — A Plain Account of Christian Perfection (grace renews the heart in love).

•  Henry Scougal — The Life of God in the Soul of Man (1677).

•  D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones — on the new disposition, the life of God implanted in the believer.

•  Sharon Jaynes — “Not Just a Sinner Saved by Grace” (contemporary essay directly on the phrase).

•  Martin Luther — simul justus et peccator (cited as the historical root of the slogan, and answered).

We know that whosoever is born of God sinneth not; but he that is begotten of God keepeth himself,
and that wicked one toucheth him not.  (1Jn 5:18 KJV)