Habitual Sin Hamster Wheels
Have you ever been so lost in a habitual sin that you simply got to the point that repentance didn’t even happen, it wasn’t on your radar? You were so deceived in sin that you believed that this is just who I am, and it will be a part of me forever. This is where the zeal of the Lord is dying or even dead. As Pastor Jim asked recently “How do we deal with the sin that causes us to lose our zeal?”
There was a time in my past where a habitual sin was the thing leading my life rather than the power of the Holy Spirit. I did not understand the power of the Gospel. My experience was that Christ was there to bring me to heaven, and I just had to survive this existence, remain in my sin even though somewhere in me I knew that it would be the death of me. My big question of God when I did pray went a little like this: “if Your Son was so powerful to take away my sins, why is it still holding such dominion over me?”
We’ll get back to this hamster wheel of habitual sin in a moment. Something else Jim said was incredibly weighty: “We have to begin with the end in mind.” This is so crucial! What is it that God has in mind at the end of the age? To be one with us. He desires a bride that He can present to His son. He will not be unequally yoked with a bride that is not prepared for perfection. He will not compromise His character in order to give His Son a bride that isn’t ready. He will not lower His standards that end up stooping down to our level. He will empower us to experience victory over different sin areas in our lives in, He will pull us up with His power so that we can become ready. Our role is to position our hearts in a moment-by-moment basis to submit to Him. He loves us too much to keep us where we are-in reality He demands growth and maturity.
So what does that mean when we have habitual sins that, no matter what we do, we cannot seem to get away from? I think we need to understand that if we are in Christ we are no longer under condemnation for sin. Paul so beautifully says this in Romans 8:1 “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death.” This idea of no condemnation does not mean we can devalue the power of the Cross and Christ’s blood that we remain in sin. Paul clearly states that truth in this way: “What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? By no means! (Rom 6:1-2).
What does the law of the Spirit of Life look like? Well, when we think about a law, like how a law of nature relates to what we observe in nature and how it reveals universal principles: like if we drop something from a height it’s going to fall and hit the ground. Paul is saying that there is a real observation of what the law of the Spirit of life looks like and what it leads to. It’s more real than gravity. This law is that grace is power that comes from walking by the Spirit to bring us to where He wants us. Walking in the Spirit is actively listening to His voice for leadership, what He wants us to say, or to do. This holiness walk is learning Christlikeness, setting our hearts to love Him and His ways beyond anything else. Christlikeness cannot occur without Christ doing the work in us. We attempt to perfect ourselves when what we need to do is put to death our flesh and its desires so He can do Christlikeness in us. It is Christ the perfect One living through us. This walk of the Spirit leads to an outcome in which He leads us to kill our old nature which is the preparation for perfection as His bride.
Let’s go back to this idea of habitual sin. It just seems like sometimes we are on this hamster wheel, stuck in a sin pattern. It goes and goes, and we fall into temptation, and we fall into sin and then we repent (or think we do) and then 5 minutes later we find ourselves in the same pattern of thinking, of feeling, of lusting, of overindulgence, of whatever the sin is.
I firmly believe that we can step off the wheel of sin and repentance and onto the wheel of Life in the Spirit. Paul says that walking in the Spirit will lead us to not gratify the desires of the flesh. That the Spirit and the flesh are opposed to each other by design to keep us from doing the things we want to do (Galatians 5:16-17). Our flesh wants to do all sorts of things that will break down our zeal for the Lord; the purpose of the Spirit is to keep us from wanting to do all of those things.
Peter says to arm ourselves in the same way of thinking that Christ did. What was His thinking? To do only what the Father said to do, to say only what the Father said. Do you think His physical body (mind and heart) spoke to Him in the same ways ours does? Peter says to suffer in that way is to cease from sin (1 Peter 4:1-6). The truth Peter is speaking of is that victory from a sin pattern will come when our flesh suffers. A suffering flesh is one that has its desires put down and we live through Christ and His desires. We can find this kind of suffering when we submit to Christ in moments we want to submit to the feelings of our old nature.
The purpose of this human suit is to learn and experience the passions of God. We do all sorts of things to attempt to experience that passion but by our desires. Life in the Spirit sees temptation and instead of submitting to the dominion and power of our old nature and fall into the sin the temptation is producing; we submit it to Christ. We ask, what do you want me to do, what do you want me to say? This is the path of walking in the Spirit. This is the path that we can experience in order to find zeal again for the things that God is for and zeal against the things God is not for.