WHEN SIN WON’T STOP

It is my experience that we give too much credence to the sins that plague us by amplifying them. What we must do is worship God not simply in heart and body but also in mind. We tend to think that victory in Christ means the removal of sin in our lives. But if this were true… sin is still around us all. Instead, we must pray to be able to walk through the valley without fear of the evil that surrounds us. Victory isn’t in the removal of the plague of sin, it is in the stripping of its power. We need not remove these things to overcome them. We can diminish them from our lives until they no longer plague us. This means dissecting them in our minds. Often we don’t do this because we are still afraid of them and what it says about our hearts or our bodies. But we must change our relationship with sin in all three areas, not just two. After all the mind is the entry point for revelation. It is through God’s word into our intellect and our natural senses that he is revealed to us. These words come into the mind, become cultivated in the heart, and bloom in our bodies. Therefore to attack a persistent sin, it is always helpful to conquer a sinful thought by deconstructing it before God, before tackling its presentation in your life. With your mind turned on, and with the help of a scripture-laden, trustworthy support system, place that sin on an operating table and dissect its messaging about you and God and people as you take away its power. Sin is like cancer. Cutting it out may kill it at great cost, but it is most likely to grow back with a fatal vengeance. The scripture has another way of dealing with it. If we can stop feeding the sin by turning our minds to Christ, the sin’s power will effectively lose its hold upon us. Our relationship with it will eventually fade into a mild annoyance at its worse until it too is destroyed in judgment. In this life, we can be sure that our enemy will seek our destruction, but the scripture tells us a stronger truth. The plans of the devil will not prevail. When Christians encounter sin, they tend to feed it their fears as they feebly resist its temptations. Instead, we must feed it the revelation of God’s truth, and then resist. Too many believers walk in fear of their sin taking hold again because they have not dominated it with God’s truths. But truthfully, the next time our sin tries to attack, we can truly fear no evil because the staff of God… his word protects us as a measuring rod by which we have already understood his victory over this enemy. It is, in those moments, now, our responsibility to boldly inform our demons and their temptations of God’s truth. It is a sad truth that many Christians will never claim victory in Christ because they have a stronger faith in the enemy than in God. But our sin is not a boogie man to be feared. It is merely a worm before an infinite God. We should view it as such. We must begin to play its cat-and-mouse game offensively.