“Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, to make you obey its passions.” Romans 6:12
August 5, 2022
A young man teaches a Sunday School class. He is faithful in preparing for his class and loves to study the Bible, but that love is fading. There is a problem. Our young Christian friend has fallen back into internet pornography. He thought he had broken free but the images on the computer screen have swept him up into disguises, deception, and a road to death. Yes, exactly that. Sin serves meals that will kill you, making promises that it cannot provide. As one writer has put it, “a banquet in the grave.” Too many men and women have been drawn into the sin-enslaving, demonic paradise of sin without consequences. The way off the road to death is bound up in the truth of Romans 6:11. No matter what sinful addiction has wound itself around your soul, read the sign: Counting ourselves dead to sin and alive to God is knowledge that must be embraced by faith. This has to do with reality, not fairy tales. It is not pretending something to believe that is not really true. Would a freed prisoner return to his prison cell? The off ramp on the road to death doesn’t deny the pull and power of sin. An addiction is enslavement to any desire that leads one away from the desire to love God. Stay away from the allurements on the screen, any screen. Don’t be deceived. Cry out to God for the renewed freedom that is in Christ. Sometimes it requires doing something radical about the temptations in one’s routine. Turn from the lies. Let the fear of the Lord make you run to His safety, immediately. As Christians we are crucified with Christ (freed from sin’s bondage). We are to live that way. H
A time to pray: “O Lord of all mercy and grace, make me a better combatant against indwelling sin. O that my desires would be harnessed to greater love for you.”