Feed a fever, Starve a sin

One of the greatest struggles that Christians face must surely be against sin. As I talked about in a previous post, we are supposed to be new creations, but the old creation sometimes is not as dead as we would like it to be. Paul illustrates this in Romans 7:15-20, where, in one of the most humourously worded passages in all of scripture, he admits:

I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate to do. And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good. As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do - this I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it.

It is amazing how accurate this passage plays out sometimes. When you are struggling with sin, and seemingly unable to defeat it, it truly feels like the sin is ‘living within you’, forcing you to obey it. It is not just a matter of deciding that you are going to get right with God; it is a war against your inner self.

And this is where a lot of people struggle, and where I myself have often struggled. You can get so determined to beat sin, that it becomes harder to do so.

It may surprise you to learn that nowhere in the bible (to my knowledge, I had better be careful claiming something like that) does it instruct people to “resist temptation.” It does instruct us to avoid sin, but not to resist it (it also instructs us to resist the devil, which forces him to flee, but that is not the issue here).

Don’t understand? The following example (from a book dealing with homosexuality: 101 Frequently Asked Questions About Homosexuality by Mike Haley,) might help.

Listen to me now: Don’t think of the number eight. Don’t think about it. Careful…don’t think about the number eight! What are you thinking about right now? That’s right - the number eight.

The point of this is that the more you try to resist sin, the more you think about sin, and therefore, the more likely you are to do sin. Instead, we are instructed not to think about sin at all, but rather the ‘focus on the things above’. The less we think about sin, the more we avoid it, and the more we avoid it the less we have to fight it, and the less chance we have of succumbing to it.

Rather than trying to kill sin in hand-to-hand combat, and ending up battered and bruised from your attempts, it is far easier to kill through neglect. Starve it to death, but feed yourself on good things at the same time. That way, if you do face off with sin, you will find that you are stronger (and well fed), while it is malnourished and able to be beaten down far easier.