The War Against Your Soul

Christine recommended me this incredibly encouraging sermon by Rick Holland about the seriousness of sin.

We often underestimate our sin. Daily, we are defeated by our temptations in this spiritual warfare because we glorify ourselves and minimize sin. We humanize God thinking that God will take sin lightly and He'll forgive us anyway. But the fact is, sin = imperfection, God = perfection, and thus God cannot stand the sight of sin.

What's ironic about this is that our sin has nothing to do with Satan. Sure Satan attacks us constantly through temptations, but the enemy is really ourselves. It is our sins that constantly pick a fight with our souls to prevent us from pleasing God. Our fleshly lusts are in our heart. And as Christians, we are called to fight! In 1 Peter 2:11, it says "Beloved, I urge you as sojourners and exiles to abstain from the passions of the flesh, which wage war against your soul." We are sojourners, foreigners of this world, because our citizenship is in heaven. Therefore, we must be in the world, not of the world.

So how do we fight?

There are two things that humble the souls of man:
1. A thorough consideration of God in His greatness, majesty, authority, glory, power, and holiness.
2. A thorough consideration of man in our lowly insignificance and sinful condition.

We must know ourselves. We must know our sin. By knowing the significance of our sin, we can know the significance of grace. When we know ourselves and our sin, we must ask ourselves: what associates/friends do Satan have in our hearts? When I heard this question, I couldn't help but feel so uncomfortable. Wow. What a thought. Satan, the enemy of the God, has friends in our hearts who he can call to fire up in order to go against God's will. Doesn't it make you feel so disgusted to have such things in your hearts that you want to just rip them out of your chest?

We must identify the associates of Satan, and kill them--or they will kill us. Unless you do this, you will never know the glory of the Gospel and the necessity of it. Rick Holland says an interesting quote that Piper says: "If you're fighting sin, you're alive. If not, no matter how alive the sin makes you feel, you are dead."

Supposedly, there was this woman in the safari named Ono. She did the unthinkable: she left her safari truck to take pictures of group of lions. Everything seemed fine until she turned around and had her back facing the lions. The lions ripped her apart to death. Ono was captivated by the beauty of the lions. When she least expected it, they mauled her to death. She miscalculated/underestimated. Don't be like Ono. Don't take sin lightly and be tempted by its temporary pleasures because it will kill you when you don't even know it.

It is only through Christ that we can conquer sin. Only his blood can make the foulest clean. Put on Christ and may His grace completely obliterate the sins in our hearts.

-Simon