Why We Sin and Why We Need to Stop
From the moment we believed the Gospel, we were given a regenerated heart. That heart loves God, desires to please Him, longs to be with Him, and is willing to sacrifice for Him. However, the regenerate heart is “encased” in sinful flesh. The flesh hates God, wants to please anything other than Him, is self-focused, and wants comfort, ease, and the removal of godly suffering.
Romans 7:21-24 is right. It accurately says, “So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God, in my inner being, but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?” It is like we have multiple personality disorder. We can have a fantastic time connecting to Christ and, like Peter, swear we are going to be faithful no matter what. Yet very soon after, even minutes after, we can give in to one of the worst sins we’ve ever committed. It is sick, wrong, disturbing, and at times it feels like we are so hopeless.
When we most want to sin, we actively ignore Christ, which means that we are at the height of being deceived and think the consequences of sinning will be manageable. This is partly because in the past we have felt consequences that seem “manageable”: emptiness, regret, malaise, and/or fogginess.
However, there have also been times when the consequences were different and we experienced a deeply painful, long-lasting, and unexpected consequence of the sin we indulged in. In this case, the consequence of our sin was beyond what we could manage. It rippled across others. We felt humiliated. We may have even felt somewhat traumatized by what we did. This consequence may have lasted for years. It may have changed the course of our lives. We don’t ever want to experience that pain again.
Even if we haven’t experienced a tremendous consequence for our sin, we can still understand the gravity of our sin through others. We may have been impacted by someone else’s sin in a devastating way, or we may have seen others experience huge consequences for their sin that we don’t ever want to experience.
Therefore, we need a way to stop ourselves from sinning when we most want to sin because we don’t know if this next time will be the time that we face that overwhelming pain.
Overwhelming Consequences Can Restrain Us
Countries who institute and enforce tough laws on crime dramatically lower their crime rates in relatively short periods of time. Most people in those countries did not believe the Gospel, so it wasn’t their closeness to God that led them to obey. Rather, it was the consequences of breaking the law that deterred them from committing crimes. They knew that if they committed a crime, there was a strong possibility they would be caught and punished in a way they did not want to endure.
We should obey Christ because of how much he loves us. We should obey out of gratitude. He gave all He had and was for us. The least we can do is give all we have and are for Him. However, when we most want to sin, we circumvent this by trying not to think of Him or even how much He did for us. Instead, we need something that first gets us to wake up and help us think rightly and soberly so we can walk with Him.
Step 1: Think About The Times When You Experienced Really Hard Consequences For Sinning That You Could Not Control
What if we spent some time thinking about the times we experienced really hard consequences for sinning? What if we thought about it now when we are not overwhelmed with the desire to sin? Thinking about these things helps us remember that we are not in control. If we indulge the flesh, there will be a time when God may allow great pain to discipline us. This discipline won’t be Hell, but it will sting. His kindness of not giving us Hell may help us fight the flesh by getting close to Him when we most want to sin.
Step 2: Come Up With A Mantra That Restrains You
Since when we most want to sin, we are actively ignoring God, we need a mantra that stops us from continuing to suppress the truth and instead to wake up from the deception we are in. I have chosen the mantra, “Is this the time?” That mantra helps me to remember that at some point, out of God’s jealousy and love for us, there will be a super painful, long-standing time of pain that will have ramifications I never intended. Just saying, “Is this the time?” helps me remember deep regrets. Even though I have forgiven myself for those regrets, I never want to bring that pain upon myself or others again.
This mantra needs to be repeated frequently when we are in our sober minds so that we can easily recall it when we are tempted.
Step 3: When You Come To Your Senses, Honor and Thank Him
In Romans 1:18-21 we see that one of the first things that happen when we suppress the truth is that we stop honoring Him as God and stop thanking Him. Now that we are in our sober minds after completing steps 1 and 2, we need to get back to fixing our eyes on Him and abiding in Him. We need to find tangible ways to honor and thank God. We can praise and thank Him in prayer, tell another person about how gracious He was in helping us not give into sin, actively do the next task we have to do as an act of worship to Him, etc.
The idea is to remember who He is, what He’s done, and what He will do. It is also important to remember our true identity, which includes not being the masters of our lives. We are dearly loved slaves, and our Master adopted us, called us friends, loved us from all eternity past, and gave us a ton of unilateral, unconditional promises from the moment we believed the Gospel. When we remember who He is and who we are, we start to live how we were designed to live, bringing life and the fruit of the Spirit.
Step 4: Fight Temptation As Early As Possible
James 1:14-15 states that our sins come from our desires. As we indulge in thinking about those desires, the desires increase, and then we indulge the flesh and sin. That sin produces death in us. That gives us certain principles no matter what sin we indulge in. We have to fight the sin at the level of the desire. For me, that means when I get the fleeting thought of wanting to indulge in some sin, I can use a mantra like “Is this the time?” in combination with remembering times when I did not indulge in sin and how close I felt to Christ afterward. I play out the details in my head of times when sin was costly and when choosing Christ over sin brought fruit, which helps me to see through the delusion that sin is weaving.
When you aren’t being tempted, spend even more time thinking about who God is, what He’s done, and what He will do. We have to be captivated by Him. We need to have Him be our focus. That helps us to walk with Him. Our primary focus should never be avoiding sin, avoiding the consequences of sin, ourselves, or anything other than God himself.
Target False Beliefs to Avoid Future Temptation
This is a tool to help us fight when we most want to sin.
I wish I could tell you this was THE foolproof way to stop sinning and love obeying God all the time on this side of Heaven. Although not fail-safe, this has helped some clients and myself to get more and more distance from once-cherished repetitive sins that we had no business indulging in. This is also not a substitute for getting to the root of the beliefs that fuel specific sins and replacing those beliefs with the truth. It’s important to replace false beliefs with the truth, or the same temptations will keep cropping up.
Chew On This:
What were some times when indulging sin cost you way more than you expected?
