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You Must Kill Your Sin, Part 7 "How the Spirit Kills Sin"

Mon, 2010-06-07 10:55 — Jacob Mentzel

“He is the fire which burns up the very root of lust.” – John Owen

Killing sin is the work of the Holy Spirit, and a gracious gift of Jesus Christ, purchased by Him with His blood. God promised to give us the Holy Spirit for this very purpose. How does He do it?
 
1. He makes our hearts abound in grace and in the fruit of the Spirit. Sin is not destroyed when its fruit is merely absent. Sin is destroyed when its fruit is replaced by the fruit of the Spirit. The absence of pornography does not mean the absence of lust. But the presence of love means the absence of both. (Galatians 5)
 
2. He really destroys our sin. He really does the work—supernaturally—in the same way that He takes out the heart of stone and gives us a heart of flesh. His presence destroys the power of sin.
 
3. He gives us faith in Jesus and communion with Him in His death. We’ll have to deal with this more intensely in a later post.
 
Now, if the Holy Spirit does the work, why does God tell you to do it? Answer: For the same reason that God commands us to do anything. Every good work that we perform is ultimately the work of the Spirit that “works in us to will and to do His good pleasure” (Phil. 2:13). God works in us in such a way that we don’t lose the essence of obedience. He teaches us how to think, opens our eyes to see and believe the truth, and He changes our hearts and our desires. But He doesn’t do the work for us, as though we had no part in it. As Owen says, “He works in us and with us, not against us or without us.”
 
If God is not at work in us, we can fight sin, but we cannot conquer. We can spend our strength waging a losing battle against ourselves. And what progress we seem to make will prove to be hypocrisy. We will either become so debilitated that we will give up the fight and plunge headlong into hedonism, or we will lower the bar, reduce sin to a few mere outward acts, and spend our lives maintaining our self-righteousness.
 

On the other hand, the fact that the Holy Spirit is at work in us should never debilitate us. It should encourage us to fight our sin. If we’re on our own, we’re powerless. But if His power is behind us, we will overcome our sin. We will overcome our lust, because God Himself is at work in us and for us. And if we know Him, trust Him, and walk with Him, we can and will see our lust trampled under our feet. And so we work, knowing that it is His power that sees our work to the end, and we give Him all the glory for every bit of fruit we see

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