Three steps to overcome sin? Surely it can’t be that simple? Three steps?
It is simple. It is not easy. It requires constant surrender to the victory of Jesus Christ. We may not even understand what that means. What is the victory of Jesus?
STEP 1: NAME THE THING
Determine what the sin is that you want to overcome, give it a name. The Bible says that sin is transgression of the law. (1 John 3:4) God’s law shows His character. God’s love fulfills the law. "Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore love is the fulfilling of the law." Romans 13:10 ESV The law is what love looks like in action. If sin is the breaking of the law, and the law equals love, then sin equals anti-love, lovelessness, for God and for others.
PLAYING THE NAME GAME. My thoughts about the names of the types of sin:
OUR SINFUL NATURE we inherited from Adam and Eve, which is in our DNA and will never be changed until Jesus comes again. This is the sin that originally separated us from God in Eden, and which continues to separate us from the full presence of God.
KNOWN SINS These sins may be accidental or premeditated. You behave in a sinful way in the heat of the moment from anger or other feelings. Or you may be experiencing some other emotion or desire that causes you to plan to sin. It’s usually easy to name these.
DENIAL OF A SIN implies you know it is a sin, but you ignore the promptings of the Holy Spirit. You minimize the importance and avoid facing it.
SELF JUSTIFICATION occurs when we excuse and justify our behavior. We argue that God doesn’t know our circumstances, or we have a right to do it because of something that happened.
UNKNOWN SINS are ones you don’t realize are sin until later. We can pray and ask God to reveal our unknown sins to us. He knows our deepest secret thoughts and actions even when we don’t.
ATTITUDE can also fall in this naming game. We feel superior or more important than another and act accordingly. This usually involves pride, and obviously shows no hint of meekness or humility.
OMISSION, actually called the sin of omission happens when we omit information in a circumstance so that we can have our own way, assuming it won’t hurt anybody. We allow or lead someone to think something that is not true.
REBELLION, one of the most dangerous choices we make make, and Satan’s obvious sin before the war in heaven. We know it is a sin and we don’t want to stop or confess. We want to hang onto our rights— and be “right.”
THE UNPARDONABLE SIN is against the Holy Spirit. We continue to ignore the Holy Spirit until He can no longer speak to us because we won’t listen to Him. It is an unforgiveable sin because we do not confess it.
Honesty is the precursor to victory. We must ask God to help us to be completely honest with ourselves to look clearly at our actions so that we can name our sins.
STEP 2—DECIDE TO ACT AGAINST THE THING
The only person who can make you sin is. . . look in the mirror. We can blame the devil, but he has absolutely no power to make us sin. We can blame the person in our life who creates uncomfortable and unbearable circumstances for us, and believe that if this situation weren’t happening, we wouldn’t be sinning. Not true. No one can make us choose to sin. The true force of the will is how we act against a sin.
We can mobilize our decisions and choose to say no. We can rebuild the neuro pathways in our brain whereby we commit a repetitive sin by continuously choosing not to commit the sin. The more we say no, the stronger our will becomes against that sin, and the smaller and weaker the pathway to automatically go to that sin becomes. Our habits begin to change.
STEP 3—RECEIVE THE POWER
Our work is not to overcome sin. Jesus already did that. Our work is to accept and allow the truth about Jesus’ overcoming and His power and victory to settle into our mind and become an actual belief in our belief system. We are free because Jesus made us free. Satan has no power over us unless we allow it. Here’s where Jesus’ power can keep us from choosing to sin when we allow Him to use that power. But we must surrender our right to ourselves to Him.
There is absolutely no way we can change on our own, it is not in us. Through our choice to believe and surrender, the Holy Spirit can create a new heart, and a new changed life.
Through self-talk and bombardment of our thought processes, Satan will constantly accuse us and tell us we will never overcome, and that God will not be able to forgiver us or save us because we are such failures at overcoming. This is only true if we rely on our own strength to overcome.
Jesus’ death is a substitute for the death we deserve. But His propitiation does not cover us if we will not repent and turn from our sins. He knows how hard this is, and He knows we will fail at it many times. But He never turns from us, He never says “you made your bed, now lie in it.”
Eventually God will allow us to face the consequences of our choices – good or evil. We can take the steps we do have control over to stop, such as making the choice to surrender to Christ. Power comes in full force from God when we repent and turn from sin.
Meade Macguire, (1875-1967) a Pastor and author wrote his first book in 1924 entitled “The Life of Victory.” What a wonderful book! I organized his following quotes from this book:
From the condemnation of sin as an offense against God, Christ frees us. (The Cross)
From the defilement of sin, He cleanses us. (Old life)
From the sickness and deformity of sin He heals us. (Restoration)
From the slavery of sin, He delivers us. (Victory)
From the law of sin, He frees us. (Grace)
All this He does for us by His death and by His indwelling presence. (The Holy Spirit)
Three Steps – God has set us up to succeed through His victory!
One, Two, Three—Go!
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