I have seen
many people come to God, and sometimes a person will be instantly set free from
habits like smoking, drinking, or drugs. Yet another person may spend years
struggling with sin and addictions before he either catches hold of the truth
and lives in the freedom of his salvation, or he turns loose of his relationship
with God and is lost for good. But the question is "Why?"
We know that
God is no respecter of persons, and since the same rebirth took place in both
people, why does one person live a life free of sin and addictions while the
other struggles and falls away? You see, everyone has access to the same amount
of power at their rebirth. What they do in the hours and days following their
conversion--concerning the Word they hear and the grace they establish
themselves in--determines the rate at which they become "free."
A person who
is bound by sinful habits must understand from "Day 1" of his salvation that no
matter how hopelessly overpowered he may feel or how powerful the sin may appear
to be, the power of sin has been broken over him! Sin cannot make him do what he
does not want to do!
Yet Satan
continually uses deception and circumstances to keep us oblivious to God's
truth--Sin
shall not have dominion over us! (Romans
6:14) This
deception of the enemy robs us of the faith we need to come totally out of the
world's lifestyles, practices, and ways of thinking, and establish ourselves in
God.
No matter
how much we want to say, "I could not help it," "It was out of my control," "The
temptation was much too great for me," or "The devil made me do it," we must
understand: God did not let that sin overpower us; we did. When we understand
this, we have taken our first real step into the freedom of God's Word and out
of our problem.
A great
injustice has also been done to the new believer because of incorrect teachings
about the grace of God. Instead of being taught that God's grace "frees" him
from sin, he is taught that grace "covers" him while living in sin. This
wrong doctrine makes the new believer an easy target for the devil, leading him
away from using his faith in what the Word says to overcome his flesh, and
instead, into the deceptive thinking that he can live a lifestyle of habitual
sin and still go to Heaven.
Let's
say a sinner gets born again and struggles with his conscience because the Holy
Spirit is convicting him of sin-related habits, such as drinking, smoking, and
adultery. He hears a minister teach that once you are born again, grace covers
you while you continue in sinful habits. So this newly-saved person wonders why
he should even bother to give up his cigarettes, alcohol, and women when it
doesn't make any difference. Why bother to stop if he is going to Heaven
anyway?
Yes, there
is grace for a person bound by sin. Jesus will walk through hell with a believer
trapped in ungodly habits, addictions, and lifestyles until he is totally free
from the bondage of sin, but he has to want to be free.
Whether the "getting free" process is long or short, unending grace is available
for the person who is striving for God's truth in his life. On the other hand,
when a believer begins to make excuses for his sin and to justify ungodly
actions, he removes himself from the covering of God's grace and heads down the
path of destruction.
One reason a
person will be set free from sinful habits right after his conversion is because
he has allowed the Holy Spirit to incorporate the law of the spirit of life into
those areas of his life. A reason another person will struggle and struggle with
sin after getting born again is because he is being "selective." There are
certain sins he wants to hang on to, because in his heart he does not want to
relinquish control of his sins over to the Holy Spirit.
There are
many Christians who haven't quite reached the place where they want the Holy
Spirit to break the hold that the sin has over them in order to be free. They
have erected strongholds--wrong ways of thinking--in their minds that are
reinforced by their emotions. Each time the Holy Spirit convicts the conscience
of a believer who struggles with habitual sin, his emotions go to war against
him to protect the sin and to keep the stronghold intact. The person will become
trained to believe that his freedom is not worth the effort, that it is
impossible. It becomes easier for him to believe false doctrine, like "God
doesn't really mind the sin," than to continue fighting his flesh.
However, the
problem with sin, especially the kind that the Apostle Paul classified in First
Thessalonians 4:5 as concupiscence--"sexual in nature"--is that it will
not maintain an even amount of control in a person's life. The sin will want
more and more until, eventually, the person is back in the world in a worse
state than he was before being born again.
Believe me
when I say that I am not intending to bring any person under condemnation but
merely to point out the fact that we
have been set free from sin and we can stop sinning if we want
to.
When a
person plays with sin, the enemy's intention is to leave him completely
destroyed. Yet, this doesn't mean that he can't ask God to forgive him and make
his life right again. He can ask, and
God will!
Let's take a
look at James 1:14,15:
But every
man is tempted, when he is drawn away of his own lust, and enticed.
Then when
lust hath conceived, it bringeth forth sin: and sin, when it is finished,
bringeth forth death.
This passage
clearly tells us, when sin is finished, it intends on leaving us for dead. So
the real danger of sin is that no matter what caused us to fall into it or to
permit it in our life, the end result will always be the same. Sin leads to
death!
Whether we
have been led to believe that grace covers a lifestyle of active sin or that the
temptation was too great for us to bear, we must remember what Paul said in
Romans 6:14: "Sin shall not
have dominion over us!" Ultimately,
in order for temptation to get out of control in our life, there has to be
something in us that
wants to be enticed and to yield to temptation.
The word
enticed, as used in James 1:14, means "having been excited at the
prospect of gratifying the flesh more than
wanting to resist the temptation." Whatever the cause, when a person gives
himself over to enticement, the 15th verse classifies the temptation
as giving way to lusts. And when lust conceives, it brings forth sin; and when
sin is finished, it brings forth death.
When a woman
conceives, it means she has become pregnant with a child, but she did not become
pregnant by herself. Usually there is a romance, an engagement, and then a
wedding. In other words, mutual cooperation on the part of both
participants.
Along the
same lines, sin--by itself--does not overpower a person. There has to be mutual
cooperation between the person and the sin to produce conception. This
cooperation begins with temptation giving way to enticement, and enticement
giving way to lust.
When a woman
conceives, she is carrying inside her womb a seed with the DNA or programming
for a human being. In the same way, when lust impregnates the human soul, it
carries within its seed the programming for a full-blown, out-of-control
operation of sin that will take over a person's emotions.
This sin
will attempt to keep that person from recognizing the grace and freedom in God's
Word until it is finished and "brings forth death." That is to say, until sin
delivers that person back into the spiritually-dead state he came out of, as
Jude 12 says, These are
spots in your feasts of charity, when they feast with you, feeding themselves
without fear: clouds they are without water, carried about of winds; trees whose
fruit withereth, without fruit, twice dead, plucked up by the
roots.
In case you
are wondering whether a man can be lost once he has been born again, notice that
the 12th verse says, "trees whose fruit has withered, without fruit,
twice
dead"!
Now, why
would Jude say "twice dead"? How can someone become dead a second time in this
life? Jude had to be talking about spiritual death. In other words, the person
is born spiritually dead, then at some point receives Christ and is born again,
and then becomes spiritually dead again. That would make him twice
dead.
I want to
make this clear: Enticement is the beginning stage of flirting with sin. It is
trying to gratify the appetites of the flesh by feeding it just a little bit at
a time. However, let me assure you once more, the devil intends on leaving that
person dead!
One of
Satan's strongest delusions concerning sin is to deceive a person into thinking
he is getting away with it, or to convince him that he will be able to stop
"tomorrow." Well, I have sad news for people caught in this deception. Those
kinds of "tomorrows" are the exception and not the rule. "Tomorrows" almost
never come. The devil wants to keep a person flirting with sin until conception,
because once conception takes place, that person will swear up and down he
cannot stop sinning; his emotions just will not let him.
It is not
that people trapped in sin will not come to church--they will. You see them at
the altar, then back in the world, then back at the altar, then back into sin
because their emotions are pregnant with sin and their will to serve God has
been outweighed by emotions that demand gratification of the flesh.
But as I
said before, I have good news for the person who is bound by sin: It is not
necessary to stay that way, "for
sin shall no more have dominion over you." Jesus has
set you free!
Let's take a
step into freedom by turning and spitting in the devil's eye and telling him
that the law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set us free from the law
of sin and death! (Romans 8:2) No matter how out-of-control we may feel or how
powerful sin may appear to be, it cannot make us do what we do not want to do.
God has not failed us. He put His nature in us that desires to yield to the law
of the spirit of life, and we can learn how to cooperate with life and not
death.
To purge our
emotions from our weakness towards sin and to fortify our will against yielding
to the temptations of the flesh, we must mortify the deeds of the body by
praying in the Holy Spirit every day. We also need to learn more about private
worship, not just praising God in a song service at church, but the kind of
worship where we are alone with God and we lift our hands and begin to worship
Him because our names are written in Heaven, and we worship Him because His Word
says we are free.
This is why
James 1:2 says, Count it
all joy when ye fall into divers temptations, because
worship and joy sustain us in the emotional realms of our soul where Satan loves
to operate.
Also keep in
mind that once sin reaches the conception stage, the devil will do everything
within his power to convince a person that unless God comes along and does
something really spectacular or "special," he can never be free.
Wrong! That
is what the devil wants us to think. The last thing he wants us to understand is
that God has already broken the
power of sin over every man, woman, and child. The devil wants us to keep
waiting for God to do something, while at the same time, God wants us to
understand that He has already
done everything! God wants
to teach us how to reconcile our whole life to the Cross, which destroyed the
hold that sin has over us.
Many
people--bound by sin--have confessed their sins, repented of them, and asked
forgiveness only to fall back into those sins again. But no matter how condemned
a person may feel, he still needs to stand up after each failure and say, "Sin
cannot make me do what I will not do because Jesus has set me free!" Then,
instead of looking and waiting for Jesus to come and do something, he needs to
turn and worship God for His Word that says
He already has. This is how freedom begins.
Find a place
that is private and start telling God over and over again how much you love Him.
Just say, "I love You, Jesus. I love You, Father God. I worship and adore You."
Keep worshipping and adoring Him like this for a while. Worship Him for who you
are in Him based on His Word--and that is free from the
dominion of sin! The more you worship your Father and declare yourself free from
the dominion of sin, the more you will be transformed into the image of who you
are as a born-again child of God, in whom sin no longer has dominion. You will
renew your mind to the truth of God's Word.
Confess
daily, "I thank You, Jesus, that sin has no more dominion over me. Therefore, I
am free. The law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus has made me free from the
law of sin and death. Therefore, I
am free!"
If you will worship and praise the Lord every day, for as long as it takes, I
can assure you that you
will be free!
Adapted from Dave Roberson
