It seems like all of my life I have been fighting sin. Fighting and losing. Over and over, day after day, the same old enemies seem to conquer me. I remember a long time ago this battle made me doubt if I was ever a Christian, because I thought we were supposed to be able to win this fight. I have tried everything, I have come up with tricks and strategies to resist temptation but in the end everyone of them fails. This has been my life for as long as I can remember.
While Christ has filled my life more and more, the patches where I feel completely alone remain as terrible as ever. Temptation remains unconquerable. While the beauty and power of His Gospel covers so much of my life, the periods without it actually seem worse than ever before. The closeness to Christ actually seems to stir up the old "Natural Man", that's me, to a frenzy against all that is good, a self-destructive fury where I seem to destroy all the good things in my life. And this is the way that it is supposed to be.
I have come to believe that we are not meant to conquer sin. Our willpower is not meant to resist temptation until temptation goes away. Not that we shouldn't try, but we need to understand that no stubbornness, no hatred for sin, no tricks or techniques will win this victory. Perhaps Christ lets unbelievers bring their sins under a kind of control that way, like scaring off a wild animal with fire, so that they don't go on a rampage and destroy their lives and neighbors. But He hasn't chosen that path for us. In the end, that way is worse than the sin it defeats. To conquer what seems to be a terrible sin to us by willpower and planning may actually be trading your sin for a worse one.
You see when we defeat sin, we become the hero of the story. We become the guy that killed the giant. We become strong and brave. We become holy and righteous. We become our own savior. And that is the most terrible hell that there is or could ever be.
I am sure that if you or I conquered sin we would mention God in our victory speech. He would probably even be first on the list and we would make a big show of giving Him all the credit. How modest of us! How humble of us! How praiseworthy. "God made me strong and then I killed the giant." "I couldn't have done it without Him." But that way it will always be our victory. We will be the hero. We will be the savior. We will be alone and doomed.
I don't want to be the hero of my own story. Not ever, not even a little bit. Or I guess I should say, I do want to be the hero, I want very badly to be the one who can fix things for myself and for Cheychey, I want to be the one who can deliver us from our troubles, I dream about it everyday, but I have come to believe that that is the way to death. Me being the hero is destructive, is hell.
If we defeat our will to sin, our temptation, with a will to do good then we have stolen Christ's glory. What did He fight His great battle for if not to defeat sin? That is His glory, the glory of the Only Begotten, and for anyone else to have a share in that is to steal what is absolutely greatest. It would be less blasphemous to say that we had a part in Creation, that you were His partner on the first day, than to say that you had a part in defeating sin. Because beyond all doubt redemption is more divine than creation. Our dream is to by our will(strengthened by God), our courage(provided by the Holy Spirit), our greatness(with Jesus singing backup) conquer our sin, set our lives straight, lead our families to live happily ever after. In this way, we actually provide the bulk of our salvation and Christ just signs on the bottom line. My God is NOT a spiritual ATM. I have treated Him that way, and I am not sure how to stop.
But I believe that there is another way. Rather than facing sin with guns blazing, there is a knowledge of Christ that will unravel sin, that will cause temptation to blow away in the breeze. We would not find our temptations tempting if we thought the way that He thinks. And that is what I want this blog to be. That is why I wrote it. I made the name Comfort with Truth, because the truth about who Christ is is the only real comfort available to us. It is the comfort for consciences who have lost the fight with sin over and over and are sick of it. The Gospel is the comfort for all of our pain.
1 “Comfort, yes, comfort My people!”
Says your God.
2 “ Speak comfort to Jerusalem, and cry out to her,
That her warfare is ended,
That her iniquity is pardoned;
For she has received from the LORD’s hand
Double for all her sins.” Isaiah 40
The other, and less bad, vices come from the devil working on us through our animal nature. But this does not come through our animal nature at all. It comes direct from Hell. It is purely spiritual: consequently it is far more subtle and deadly. For the same reason, Pride can often be used to beat down the simpler vices. Teachers, in fact, often appeal to a boy's Pride, or, as they call it, his self-respect, to make him behave decently: many a man has overcome cowardice, or lust, or ill-temper, by learning to think that they are beneath his dignity - that is, by Pride. The devil laughs. He is perfectly content to see you becoming chaste and brave and self-controlled provided, all the time, he is setting up in you the Dictatorship of Pride - just as he would be quite content to see your chilblains cured if he was allowed, in return, to give you cancer. For Pride is spiritual cancer: it eats up the very possibility of love, or contentment, or even common sense. Mere Christianity C.S. Lewis
