Throwing in the towel

I look forward to those nights where I can share with my Leadership team at school what I have been reading in God’s word. I get so excited! I also look forward to the day when I can be in a Church to teach on a consistent basis to a more spiritually diverse group. In spite of this excitement, I also have fears, mostly of myself. Will I have some integral failure that will discredit my work and put an end to my ever doing ministry again? That is scary and even now, I see the possibility. I am a man, sinful, often driven by my urges and slow to say “no” so often, even with little temptations. What if a gigantic heavyweight temptation comes to challenge, will I be able to fend it off let alone have victory? Knowing my record (2-1,323,234) against lightweight temptations, Las Vegas would predict me to lose.

However, in Romans 6, Paul tells us that we have power over sin in Christ and that we are free but enslave ourselves to sin by obeying it. So is Paul saying, that I actually could have won those fights, that I was psychologically a loser when, in sheer (spiritual) athletic comparison, I had overwhelming odds to win? Wow, I am an idiot.

Imagine Fezzik from "The Princess Bride", literally a giant of a man, say when asked to fight a small pudgy, balding middle aged peasant, “I give up, this man has already won…” in a pathetically sorrowful, yet powerful bass. That is what we do when we give in to temptation. We look back, and exclaim in sorrow “oh, I’ll never succeed!”

Christians, we are better fighters (cliché as the phrase may be) because we have Christ in our corner…And really not even that, we actually have the heavy weight champions belt because Christ defeated sin and death and since we were buried and raised with Him, we were raised to victory over sin as well. That is crazy stuff right there. It is so good to know that in the face of sin I am already the champ. For so long I have been throwing in the towel before the fight even starts and by default sin has won, not by any advantage of its own but because I just forfeit. It’s psycho-spiritual, we have been thinking we are spiritually powerless when in fact we are the most powerful (because Christ’s power to defeat sin is within us). Let’s loose control of the thought process that we have to struggle with sin…Do we really have too? If we have been justified in Christ, hasn’t He already defeated the power of sin? By the Holy Spirit’s indwelling, don’t we have all the power to defeat sin, that by just thinking we are the victors we will be lining our thoughts up with reality? I think that is what Romans chapters 6, 7 and 8 tell us. What do you think?

I guess practically when it comes to temptation, when that desire for whatever we struggle with comes, we should first acknowledge that acting on the temptation is sin and then in our minds acknowledge that we have victory already. Then we should physically move away from that temptation. We should tell a brother or sister with what we are being tempted. The fight is already over, we (thanks to Christ’s amazing power) are more powerful than the sin nature within us (which is completely powerless), it really just comes down to continually being reminded of this truth:

Christ has beaten sin and death, I am victorious with Him.

Easier said than done but still it must be done.


Soli Deo Gloria