Death by Suffocation.

Some people love plants, but they don’t have a green thumb. So they buy plants that are nearly impossible to kill. Plants bred for neglect. You forget to water them. They sit in dim corners of the house. You leave for a week, then two. Still, they live.

This is part of their appeal. They survive inconsistency and endure inattention. They seem to draw life from almost nothing at all.

Sin is like this.

Many Christians imagine sin as something fragile—something that will die if it is merely ignored. If I stop thinking about it, if I put distance between myself and the behavior, surely, with time, it will wither.

But Scripture assumes the opposite. Sin is not delicate. It is resilient. It persists even when neglected, because it does not draw its life merely from circumstance, but from something deeper—what the New Testament calls the flesh. The old self. The remnants of a nature that, though dethroned, has not yet been removed.

This is why the Bible speaks so often, and so bluntly, about death.

Not adjustment.
Not management.
Death.

Crucify the flesh.
Put to death what is earthly in you.
Be buried.
Die with Christ.

And yet, for all the violent language, believers often struggle to translate these commands into practice. We know we are called to kill sin, but we don’t know how.

The problem may not be that the language is too strong. It may be that we imagine the wrong kind of death.

We tend to picture slaying. Something sudden, dramatic, and decisive. A single act of force. One clean blow. But most of the deaths recorded in Scripture gesture toward something different. Crucifixion was not quick. Burial is not aggressive. Mortification, as the tradition understood it, is slow, sustained, and exhausting. We might prefer something easier and cleaner, but death is rarely either.

What if killing sin is less like stabbing, and more like suffocating?

Sin survives because it is fed. It draws oxygen from attention, justification, secrecy, fantasy, and habit. Even when outward behavior ceases, inward consent often carries on. The plant remains alive because something, however minimal, still reaches it—just enough light, just enough water, to keep it from dying.

The language Paul uses in Romans 8 presses in this direction. He does not say that sin disappears, but that it must be put to death. And he places that action squarely in the present tense. Ongoing. Repeated. “If by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live.” The word is not slay. It is not destroy. It is mortify. Render powerless. Make lifeless.

Not all at once—but truly, through patient and repeated denial.

Galatians sharpens the image with another word: crucified. The flesh has been crucified with its passions and desires. Crucifixion is not annihilation. It is exposure, restraint, and the gradual loss of strength. The condemned is fixed in place, unable to move freely, and slowly deprived of the capacity to breathe.

The flesh does not die because it is attacked repeatedly, but because it is denied the ability to sustain itself.

This is where many well-intentioned approaches to holiness falter. We either treat sin as something to be ignored, or something to be assaulted episodically. What Scripture commends instead is vigilance. Attention not to the spectacle of killing, but to the ordinary conditions that quietly keep sin alive.

Sin weakens when it is cut off from what sustains it.

This brings us back to Romans 8, not as a proof text, but as a landscape. The chapter holds two movements in tension: condemnation and transformation. There is no condemnation for those in Christ Jesus. But there is also no neutrality. The mind set on the flesh leads to death; the mind set on the Spirit leads to life and peace. The contrast is not between bad people and good people. It is between what is being starved and what is being fed.

This is why Paul’s command in Colossians 3 lands with such force. “Put to death what is earthly in you.” He does not say suppress it or coexist with it. He says kill it. And then, almost immediately, he shifts to language of clothing—putting off and putting on. Identity. Habitation. Practice.

Death here is not an isolated act. It is a reordering of life.

This is why baptism stands at the center of the Christian imagination. To be baptized is not merely to be forgiven. It is to be buried. The old self is taken down into the water. Submerged. Cut off from air. And what rises is not the flesh, cleansed and refreshed, but a new person. Baptism teaches us something essential about how death works in the Christian life. The old self is not argued, with the right set of facts, out of existence. It is drowned. This is where the metaphor of suffocation proves clarifying rather than cruel.

Many are tempted to think that the work of killing sin begins with studying it in detail—analyzing its patterns and learning its arguments. But this is not the spirit Scripture commends. To suffocate sin is not to obsess over it. It is to refuse to supply it. To starve it of the oxygen it needs to persist. In practical terms, it’s closing off the patterns and environments, the justifications and internal permissions, that keep it alive. This is rarely dramatic. It is often invisible. And it takes effort sustained over time.

Like the hardiest plant, sin can survive astonishing neglect. But even the most resilient plant weakens when light is withheld, water is scarce, and soil is stripped of nutrients. The stem grows brittle. The leaves crumble. And what once seemed impossible to kill no longer thrives.

This is what mortification often feels like. Not triumph, but attrition. Sin loses the weight and pull it once had. And this is why there is no neutral ground.

We are always feeding something. Either the old self is given space in our lives to grow, or the new self grows stronger. Either the mind is being conformed to the patterns of this world, or it is being transformed through renewed thinking rooted in the Word and the Spirit. The process is not optional. Moment by moment we make the choice as to which self is being formed.

To suffocate sin, then, is to practice a different kind of agency—one shaped not by violent force, but by patience. It is to believe that death can be real, even when it is slow.

And it is to trust that the new is raised only where the old is allowed to die.