Guest post today by my son Everett, age 17
Today, I want to talk to you about overcoming sin, but so we are all on the same page before we get into the details of how we do that, I want to tell you a Bible verse I don’t think many people know. In Matthew 5:28, Jesus says, “Therefore you shall be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” I’m sure you’ve heard it said before that nobody’s perfect. (Except for The Lord!) But believe it or not, Jesus actually commands us to be perfect.
That leaves me feeling confused. Don’t most Christians have the worldview that says, “no one is perfect”? I know I’m not perfect. I know you’re not perfect. So why would Jesus tell us to be perfect, as our heavenly Father is perfect? Either Jesus knows something we don’t, or He has unrealistic expectations. Since Jesus always knows what He is talking about, He must have made a way for us to be perfect. That means He must have made a way for us to resist and overcome sin. I think there are three steps we must take to overcome sin. The first step is to give God our entire lives. The second step is to reject the temptations of the enemy. And then the third step is to ask God to change us and replace our worldly desires with desires to do His good works instead.
Now, then, the first step is to give God our entire lives. We do that by becoming born again. We are reborn as children of God when we believe in Jesus, and accept Him as our Savior. He washes away all our sin, cleansing us and forgiving us. He declares us spotless and perfect in His sight. The Blood of Jesus covers us: He rescues us from our sin. He does this for us because God can’t allow us into His presence while we’re in sin. Josh McDowell, the author of More Than A Carpenter, puts it this way. “Most people understand God to be a loving God, but they don’t go any further. He is not only a God of love but also a God who is righteous, just, and holy. He cannot tolerate sin in his heaven any more than you would tolerate a filthy, foul-smelling, diseased dog to live in your home.”
So, we need to let God cleanse us of our sin. He does that through His offer of salvation, but salvation isn’t just accepting that God exists. I was reading something of A. W. Tozer’s and his thoughts on salvation made me think. I can rephrase his and my thoughts this way: People love to say that salvation is free. They go on about how very free it is to become a Christian, but there is a problem with that. While we could never pay the price that Jesus did on the cross, He does have a rather large cost for us to pay for salvation. He will save us, but we must give Him our lives. The Christian punk rock band Scaterd Few put it nicely in a song called “Self.” The lyrics are, “Understand that who you are when you’re sitting by yourself is the you you need to sacrifice and not somebody’s else.” That means we have to give Him our very selves, and it has to be our whole and true selves.
That’s why salvation is more than just accepting that God exists. The proof of our belief in God lies in obedience. God wants all of us, not just our Sunday mornings. We need to think about God, and pray to God, and talk to Him, and try to be like Him all the time. And we can’t give God a godly-acting persona that we invent to look good on the outside, or a mask we put on for socializing to be popular. He knows us better than we do; but if we surrender our real, true selves to Him, we can count on Him molding us into something better than we could come up with on our own.
That leads us to the second step in overcoming sin, which is to reject the temptations of the Enemy. We all know that us human beings are limited in what we can accomplish by our own power. That is why the first step had to be taken initially. We need the Holy Spirit to empower us to resist temptation. Because of what Jesus did on the cross, if we believe in Him and repent of our sins, He will adopt us into His family. And when we are adopted into God’s family, the Holy Spirit comes and dwells in our hearts. We then, in this second step, need to resist sin as much as we can and obey God’s will for us by working in sync with the Holy Spirit.
We need the Holy Spirit because we’re mortals, and our senses don’t go beyond the physical realm. In that same sense, by ourselves we can’t resist supernatural power. We have free will because God gave it to us, but demonic forces don’t ask permission to influence us. When we come under demonic attack, there’s only so much we can do to fight back by ourselves. We need supernatural help to defeat supernatural enemies. While we need supernatural help to overcome sin, we still have to do our part to resist the temptations. If we want to commit sin, God gave us the free will to make that choice, so we have to reject sin if the Holy Spirit is to help us.
You might ask, “If God will keep forgiving me, why should I worry about sin at all?“ But let’s define exactly what sin is. I’ve heard people say that Christianity is just a bunch of rules and restrictions. That God says, “don’t do this and don’t do that,” to everything that those same people think is “fun.” I would say that God only has His restrictions to protect us from sin. Sin is any action that goes against God’s law. He defines what is sinful in the Ten Commandments, and He also does so exhaustively in Leviticus. So, then you might argue back that God is unreasonable since He decides what is right and wrong. I would say that He’s the only judge I’d trust with that decision, but also that all the rules He presented to Israel, way-back-when, are actually totally reasonable, and they all make sense. Generally, people regard things like murder and theft to be wrong because God has written those convictions into our hearts, and He said those things are wrong. The other laws are also logical. For example, He gave them sanitary techniques for washing dishes and killing bacteria that would have gotten them all sick. And he gave them instructions for their appearances, like men not shaving their beards, or women dressing modestly so they wouldn’t look like prostitutes, and to set them apart from other people. And He gave them social laws to settle feuds and give fair treatment for wrongdoings. The thing about sin is that it hurts everyone involved in it, so He forbade them from things like murder, adultery, stealing and lying to save them from themselves. Today, even as little as people want to admit it, sin is still harmful to us.
So we know that sin is wrong. It should be easy not to sin, right? The problem is we rarely sin just for the sake of sin. Think about it this way: Let’s say you or I felt really anxious, or depressed, or scared. We might look for an escape from those feelings, and the Enemy wouldn’t hesitate to seize his chance to attack us. If I sound paranoid, know that 1 Peter 5:8 warns, “Be of sober spirit, be on the alert. Your adversary, the devil, prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour.”
But these attacks are rarely ever as obvious as when a lion roars and leaps at someone to devour them. The Enemy likes to be sneaky, so he might slip us an idea out of the blue. Let’s say, he tells us we could forget our troubles through food, drugs, or alcohol, for example. Indulgence in anything as an escape almost always leads to overindulgence. Then, before we realized what’s happened, we could find ourselves neck deep in gluttony, or drug addiction, or really any kind of escapism.
Our Enemy is a clever one; he likes to disguise sin so that by the time we recognize it, we’re already hooked. And new ways to commit sin are being invented by the Enemy all the time. So we should do everything in our power to resist the temptations of the Enemy the second we spot them.
But what happens if you don’t escape sin? If that last part sounded frightening, you should know I haven’t gotten to the really scary part yet. You see, it doesn’t end with being addicted to that one sin. I’m afraid that our Enemy hates us very thoroughly, and it’s because of this that he and all his demon cohorts want to see us all destroyed very thoroughly. The Enemy doesn’t want us to go to Jesus in repentance, so instead he drops more thoughts in our heads, telling us how we’re failures at following God, and how we’re worthless losers, and that frankly, God would probably be happier if He never saw us again. The real danger is that sin corrodes our minds; we can’t think clearly when we’re high on sin, and certainly not when we wallow in it. So, we might listen to the Enemy and think that we really are just worthless losers, and since nobody likes feeling that way, then the cycle repeats. We face the temptation and danger of finding something new to distract ourselves with, and you can be sure it’ll be something worse than the last one. Now, the question is, where does it end? If we never repent from sin, then it ends with us being separated from God, and being destroyed very thoroughly for the rest of eternity. And to anyone who says, “once saved always saved,” or, “we’re all God’s children,” I would ask them what they think about what Paul said in 1 Corinthians 6:9-10, when he made the statement, “Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived; neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor homosexuals, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor those habitually drunk, nor verbal abusers, nor swindlers, will inherit the kingdom of God.”
But don’t get me wrong, God is bigger than any sin we could commit; His love and Jesus’s blood could cover all of it as many times as we could need; He wouldn’t ever stop loving us. But He can’t forgive us if we don’t repent. I think it’s pretty straightforward: sin will hurt us, so we have every need to escape and avoid sin.
But the Bible gives us hope. 1 Corinthians 10:13 says, “No temptation has overtaken you except something common to mankind; and God is faithful, so He will not allow you to be tempted beyond what you are able, but with the temptation will provide the way of escape also, so that you will be able to endure it.” And James 4:7 says, “Submit therefore to God. But resist the devil, and he will flee from you.” Those verses tell us that God has given us the power to resist demonic forces, and like anything, we get better at it the more we do it.
So we see that we certainly can overcome sin through the power of the Holy Spirit, but we have to work hand in hand with the Holy Spirit and resist the Enemy with everything we’ve got. If we are overcome by sin, it’s nobody’s fault but our own. The Holy Spirit empowers us, but we still have to fight. I think sin is like quicksand: the longer you stay in, the deeper you sink, the harder it is to escape. Sometimes when we succumb to sin, getting washed clean can be a slow, unpleasant process. In my life, I’ve experienced that confession to a godly individual (in my case my mother) really can be freeing when you feel trapped by sin. We also see this in 1 John 1:9, which says, “If we confess our sins, He is faithful and righteous, so that He will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”
Last, the third step is to ask God to change us and replace our worldly desires with desires to do His good works instead. I think it’s safe to say most of us are afraid of big changes, and some people adopt a stubborn stance that says they’d rather die than change. But we can’t stay in sin, and we can’t continue wanting the sinful things in this world if we are to resist sin.
Remember how Jesus instructs us to follow Him perfectly? Why is it that we don’t think we can be perfect? And even if you don’t think we can be perfect in this world, why shouldn’t we try? I say let’s strive to be like Jesus in everything we do. Let’s try to be perfect like Him, because why should we settle for less in ourselves? The anonymous author of a book called The Cloud Of Unknowing said that following God perfectly, “may by grace be begun here, but it shall ever last without end in the bliss of heaven.”
However, I’m sure that it really matters why we want to be perfect. If we’re trying to be like God, as in equal status or holiness, then forget it. That’s how Satan became who he is. And if we’re trying to get God to love us more, then that’s impossible. He already loves us more than we can measure. So instead, we should strive to follow God perfectly, out of obedience to Him. To put it plainly, God tells us not to sin, so we shouldn’t because He told us not to. I don’t think it needs to be more complicated than that. I think we should also do good works because Jesus told us to love our neighbors, and at the same time it’s important not to do works that are evil. Our actions prove our faith. Anybody who says he’s a Christian and then turns around and follows the world in their sin wouldn’t actually have any legitimate faith, otherwise he’d be afraid of displeasing God, or at least losing his salvation. On the contrary, if someone says she’s a Christian and then does a bunch of acts of service, standing apart from the world, she probably actually has legitimate faith. Like Paul said in Romans 12:2, “And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect.”
As the common idiom says, “If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, it’s probably a duck.”
So, we need to give God our entire lives, and we have to reject the temptations of the Enemy ourselves, and then the Holy Spirit will empower us to resist them. We also need to go to God with our sin and repent from it, and He will forgive us. If we truly repent, we can ask God to change us and replace our worldly desires with desires to do His good works instead. While we may not be perfect in this world, I do believe we will begin to look more like Jesus as we fight sin and obey His will. And I really believe that we can overcome any and every temptation that comes our way if we work in harmony with the Holy Spirit.
Pray: Lord Jesus, we pray You would help us give You our entire lives, help us give You every aspect of our selves. Please empower us by Your Holy Spirit to resist the Enemy’s temptations, and please forgive us when we fail. We pray that You would renew our minds and give us Your will over our own. In Jesus’ name we pray, amen.
Komentar