Something Is Broken Inside All of Us

Have you ever felt a pull inside you toward something wrong, even when you know better? Maybe you got angry and said something cruel to someone you love. Maybe you made a choice you are ashamed of. Maybe you just feel like, no matter how hard you try, something inside you fights against making the right choice.

You are not alone. This feeling is as old as the first family. And the Bible has a real answer for it. The story begins in a garden of Eden, with a man named Adam and a woman called Eve. The Bible also presents Jesus Christ, whom the apostle Paul calls the last Adam. The Bible tells us that the whole story of what is wrong with humanity began with Adam and that God sent Jesus to fix the problem of sin in humanity. Actually, sin broke everything. Christ restores everything in him.

The First Adam: Made for Something Beautiful

Genesis 1:26–27 says that God made human beings, men and women both equally, in his own image. Theologians call this the imago Dei, which is Latin for “image of God.” H. Orton Wiley explains that the image of God is like a coin with two sides. First, the ability to think, feel, and choose, makes us persons. Second, we have a heart full of love and holiness that is perfectly pointed toward God.

Think of a brand-new mirror, the kind you find in a store. It is clean, clear, perfect. When you look into it, you see exactly what is there. Adam and Eve were like that mirror. Everything in them reflected God perfectly: love, goodness, purity. Mildred Bangs Wynkoop, puts it this way in A Theology of Love: "Love is the essential inner character of holiness, and holiness does not exist apart from love." To be made in God's image is to be made for love, deep and real love for God and for people.

How the Mirror Broke

Then came Genesis 3. Adam and Eve were in the garden. God gave them everything. There was only one rule. And they broke it. And when they did, something cracked inside them, and inside all of us.

Adam was not just one person making a bad choice. He was the representative of the whole human family, like the patriarch of a large tribe whose decisions affect everyone who carries his name. When the patriarch falls, the whole family feels it. When Adam fell, we all fell with him. Richard S. Taylor says that Adam's sin left inside every human heart "a bias toward self and away from God, a moral bent that is not merely weakness but active opposition to the holiness of God."

Wiley points to Genesis 5:3, where the Bible says Adam "begat a son in his own likeness," not anymore in the likeness of God. The mirror got a crack right down the middle. "Every man descended of Adam," Wiley writes, "receives into himself the generic evil of original sin, which is the sin of the race in Adam." Every baby born since then has been born with that crack. That is why doing right is so hard. It is not just bad habits or a bad neighborhood. It is something deeper, something like a pandemic that continues ruining everyone. The difference is that this is a cross-generational pandemic.

The Last Adam: Jesus Changes Everything

But here is where the story becomes incredible. God did not leave us with the cracked mirror. He sent Christ as the second Adam, the new Adam!

Paul writes in Romans 5:17 that just as death came through one man, Adam, so life comes through one man, Jesus. Adam started a family of broken people. Jesus starts a new family of restored people.

Richard E. Howard explains that Paul sees all of history in two eras. The era of Adam: sin rules, death rules, everything is broken. The era of Christ: grace rules, life rules, restoration is happening. Howard writes that the Christian "has been transferred from the regime of Adam . . . to the regime of Christ, where grace reigns, life reigns, and righteousness is imparted." It is becoming free from a terrible sickness.

Romans 6:4 says that because Jesus rose from the dead, we can now "walk in newness of life." That is not just a little improvement. It is a whole new way of existing, the way God always intended for us from the very beginning.

Entire Sanctification: The Deep Cleaning

So here is a question. If Jesus saves us, why do Christians still feel that pull toward sin? Why does the mirror still seem cracked sometimes?

When Christ saves us, he reigns in us, but we do not accept his reign. When you first give your life to Jesus, God forgives all your sins. That is amazing and real. But the root of the problem, that inner Adamic bias, that crack in the mirror, is not fully removed in that first moment. It is still there underneath, still causing trouble. When we are saved, we try to live by our own strength as we’ve been accustomed to doing. We live by our own means most of the time, not by the power of the Holy Spirit.

God has an answer for this. It is called entire sanctification. William M. Greathouse wrote, "Holiness theology did not begin with John Wesley. Holiness theology began with Christ." Entire sanctification is the moment when the Holy Spirit goes deep into your heart and does something only he can do: he removes that Adamic sinful inheritance, that inner bent away from God, and fills you completely with love for God and people. The crack in the mirror gets repaired from the inside.

Taylor explains it simply: "Regeneration breaks the dominion of sin; entire sanctification removes the root. Both are essential to the complete work of grace God intends for every believer." And Wynkoop makes sure we understand what this does not mean. It does not make you a smaller, emptier version of yourself. She writes that the entirely sanctified person is "the whole self . . . under the domination of an all-controlling love for Christ, a cleansed self." You become more fully yourself than you have ever been.

Howard says the key is not trying harder. It is surrendering deeper. "The Christian is not called to accomplish his own sanctification by moral effort, but to enter by faith into what Christ has already won." You give God not part of your heart but all of it. And God does what only God can do. In our Manual, the Church of the Nazarene calls this "the act of God, by which believers are made free from original sin, or depravity, and brought into a state of entire devotement to God, and the holy obedience of love made perfect."

This Is Just the Beginning

Entire sanctification is not the end. It is the door. Taylor writes: "It is not the end of the road but the beginning of the highway of holiness." After this, you grow. You learn. You become more like Jesus every single day. Like a mango tree that has been freed from a disease at its roots, you begin to produce fruit you could not produce before. Paul describes it in 2 Corinthians 3:18 as “being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit."

And one day the restoration will be complete. "As in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive" (1 Corinthians 15:22). The same Jesus who rose from the dead will raise us too. Everything Adam broke, God will restore. "The one who calls you is faithful, and he will do it" (1 Thessalonians 5:24).

You Do Not Have to Stay Broken

You were born in Adam. Every person on earth was. You came into this world with a cracked mirror inside. But that is not the end of your story. Jesus is the last Adam, and he came for exactly this. He lived perfectly. He died for us. He rose again. And now he offers you a new family, a new heart, a new life. Not just forgiveness for what you did, but a real change in who you are inside.

This change starts when you give your life to Christ. But it goes deeper when you surrender everything to the Holy Spirit and receive entire sanctification. The cracked mirror gets healed. The image of God, the one you were always made to carry, begins to shine again. As Wynkoop wrote: "Love puts urgency into crisis." God is ready right now to do this deep work in you.

You do not have to stay in Adam. In Christ, you can be made new, really, fully, completely new. And it starts today.

Christian Sarmiento is a general superintendent in the Church of the Nazarene