Pagans are hopeless and helpless when it comes to fighting their sin. Christians are not. If you don’t belong to Jesus and you’ve been following these posts, trying to profit from them, there is only one proper response for you: despair. You need to be reconciled to God, and until you are, you will be powerless to change. There will be more on this in posts to come.

 

But if you are a Christian, you’ve been given the Holy Spirit and a new nature so that you will have the desire and the power to fight your lust. After all, opposing sin is what the Spirit does: “The desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh, for these things are opposed to each other” (Gal 5:17). He convicts the world of “sin, righteousness, and judgment.” And it’s our being born again by that same Holy Spirit and being made partakers of the divine nature that inclines us to submit to the Spirit and to put our sin to death.

 

For most of us, sin has such a strong hold in our lives that it never occurs to us to make use of God’s power. We have at work in us the Holy Spirit, working with the same power that raised Christ Jesus from the dead (Eph. 1). But we live and think like we’re still pagans. We act like we’re powerless against our sin. More than that, we grieve the Holy Spirit, we harden our consciences, we close our hearts to His convicting voice, and we refuse to make use of His power to kill our sin. The Spirit and the new nature are God’s gifts to us, and if we fail to use them for His purposes we are sinning against His goodness, kindness, wisdom, grace, and love.

 

I’m not saying we have power in ourselves to kill sin. But I am saying that God could not have given us access to greater power to kill sin than He already has. He’s not the one that opposes us in our pursuit of holiness. He wants us to be holy. He wants us to conquer sin. That’s why we have all of the power of the Godhead at our disposal. This is why He has given us gifts and graces.

 

But grace in the heart is like sin. It can be fed and nourished or it can be starved and killed. If you do not exercise yourself in God’s grace and begin to attain some measure of success in fighting your sin, the grace God has given you will wither and decay. Where grace withers, lust flourishes. And where lust flourishes, it gains a powerful hold over the lives of believers.

 

I’ve already mentioned David’s fall in a previous post. I’m sure you know others who once seemed to be Christians—men and women who appeared to be humble, tender-hearted followers of Jesus—that have been hardened in this way and have fallen into scandalous sins. Perhaps you despised them for their fall. Since I’ve been a college minister, not a semester has gone by that we haven’t lost students in our ministry because they’ve given themselves over to sexual sin. This should be sobering to each of us. This is your fate if you will not, by the Spirit, kill your lust. He’s been given to you for this very purpose.