If you’re a Christian, the thing that you want most in this life is strength and comfort, power and peace in walking with God. If anything troubles you in this life, you should be able to trace it back to those desires. By comparison, no other issue is worth mentioning. Here’s my contention: peace, comfort, power, strength—in short, spiritual life—depend on whether or not we’re putting our sin to death.

 

Now, I do want to make a distinction: it is possible to give yourself to killing your sin, to walk with God all your days, and to still live a life of distress and anguish. Giving peace to our souls is God’s prerogative. Just read Psalm 88. So it’s not as though killing your sin produces peace. In fact, our true source of peace and comfort lies in the fact that we are God’s adopted sons, that we have been justified and saved from the consequences of our sins. But if we do not seek to destroy the power of sin in our hearts, we can’t hope that God will bless us with any kind of peace or comfort in this life. Let me explain:

 

First, indwelling sin—especially those sins that we cherish and refuse to put to death—constantly weakens our souls. They actually shrink and shrivel our capacity to grasp spiritual things. Sin saps our spiritual strength. That’s why David says that his sins crush his bones. The more we cherish sin, the harder it is to cherish God’s grace.

 

More than that, sin grabs hold of our affections. It lays claim to our hearts. It keeps us from communion with God, from seeking God as our great treasure, because our hearts are busy treasuring the objects of our lusts. And once a sin has a foothold in our hearts, it is constantly seeking to find opportunities to bring its desires to fruition. In other words, it steals our minds away, too. Instead of setting our minds on things above, we find ourselves constantly contriving ways to gratify the lusts that we hold dear. And in this way, indwelling sin, by constantly setting our hearts on the desires of the flesh, robs us of our sense of our adoption as sons. Which robs us of our one source of peace and consolation in this life.