When you are not abiding in Jesus, you will sin.

1 John 3:6 No one who abides in Him sins; no one who sins has seen Him or knows Him. The verb tenses are important to our understanding what John wanted his readers to understand. The first verb, abide is a present active participle which means the action is being done in the present. It helps me to understand John to say that no one who is presently abiding in Jesus sins at that point in time. The verb tense of sins is a present active indicative which is why I said, “sins at that point in time that he is abiding in Jesus.” Remember, he had just said about Jesus that in Him there is no sin. When we are drawing from Jesus and He is living and loving through us, there is no sin. It’s what Jesus meant when He said, “I am the vine, you are the branches; he who abides in Me and I in him, he bears much fruit, for apart from Me you can do nothing” (John 15:5). Practically it means this: It is sin to not abide in Jesus. When you are not abiding in Jesus, you will sin. When you abide in Jesus and He loves through you, God gets the glory, therefore you do not fall short of the glory of God. You do not sin. When John wrote “no one who sins,” the verb is an active participle just as “no one who abides,” which means the action is being continuously done in the present. Again, it helps me to understand John to say that no one who is presently in a continuous state of sinning has just seen Jesus or has just known Jesus. The last two verbs seen and knows Jesus are both perfect active indicatives. These perfect tenses differ from the other tenses in aspect. If the aspect of a verb is completed (often with a sense of just now completed), then in a grammatical term that expresses the relationship between the action of a verb and the passage of time. In other words, this is a completed action that has lasting results. This aspect often reflects a state resulting from past action. In this case, the person who is continuously in a sinful state doesn’t show that the action of seeing and knowing Jesus had any lasting effect. Their seeing and knowing didn’t stick, so to speak, and therefore the encounter was and is powerless and fruitless. So our encouragement today to live to love with Jesus is this: When you are loving with Jesus, which comes from abiding in Jesus, you are not sinning in that moment. Your seeing and knowing Jesus has been a fruitful encounter, and it has produced action and real fruit for the glory of God. This should encourage us to make living to love with Jesus our purpose in life. We will sin less and less! It’s the means by which we demonstrate to the world that we have really seen and really know Jesus.