Overcoming Sin!

         The following is the sixth in a series of eight of the benefits & blessings God has bestowed upon every one of His children:

Striving to stop sinning, striving to overcome the power of sin in your life, need no longer be a concern for you because God chose to break the power sin had over you by releasing you from the Law—the Law of Moses, the Ten Commandments, the law of sin and death, the ministry of death, the ministry of condemnation (see Romans 8 & 2 Corinthians 3)—as is evidenced by these passages:

(1) For sin shall not be master over you, for you are not under law, but under grace (Romans 6:14);

(2) Christ redeemed us from the curse of the Law, having become a curse for us—for it is written, “Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree” (Galatians 3:13);

(3) For while we were in the flesh, the sinful passions, which were aroused by the Law, were at work in the members of your body to bear fruit for death. But now having been released from the Law, having died to that by which we were bound, so that we serve in newness of the Spirit and not in oldness of the letter. What shall we say then? Is the Law sin? May it never be! On the contrary, I would not have come to know sin except through the Law; for I would not have known about coveting if the Law had not said, ‘You shall not covet.’ But sin, taking opportunity through the commandment, produced in me coveting of every kind, for apart from the Law sin is dead” (Romans 7:5-8);

“The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law; but thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Corinthians 15:56).

          In light of these passages (and many others, I might add!), it is strange (and certainly sad!) that so many continue to insist that we must somehow “die to sin,” that we must somehow “break sin’s power” in our lives. On the contrary, what we must do is ask the Holy Spirit to make the truth of Jesus’ finished work real in our lives! Why, pray tell me, do we need to do what He has already done?

          Try this passage on for size: “No one who is born of God practices sin, because His seed abides in him; and he cannot sin, because he is born of God” (1 John 3:9).

         

          You think about that—

         

         

"This is the work of God, that you believe in Him whom He has sent" (John 6:29 NASB).