On Fighting Sin

Why it’s necessary and how to do it biblically

The flu is spreading…Piper has it still and now my wife has it. Jovi and I are the only ones untouched. Hoping it stays that way, but if I don’t happen to post any blogs Wednesday or Friday, you know what happened! Pray for us.

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Photo by Green Liu on Unsplash

I have the horrible habit of not cleaning my Blackstone griddle after I cook. Each time I cook on it, my objective is to get all the food and materials inside and worry about cleaning later. Then I don’t clean it, whether by neglect and laziness and forgetfulness. (Mostly neglect.)

Then the next time I cook on it, before I do anything else I have to heat it up and scrape off grease and residue from the last time. Then I can cook again—and go through the same cycle. One time I cooked bacon, forgot to clean it for a few months, and it took way too long to get all the grease and grime off the surface. It was absolutely disgusting and took a lot of effort to get everything off.

Honestly, as I was scraping everything off—and cleaning the outside of it, too—I couldn’t help but think about the sin we allow in our lives. We deal with sin daily, and it’s incumbent on us, by the power of the Holy Spirit, to deal with the sin in our lives. And yet, too many times we allow sin to fester. We leave it sitting in our hearts and, the longer we let it sit, the harder it is to kill. We neglect to fight it, ignore its damning effects, and struggle against it.

So what do we do, friends? How can we ensure we staying on top of the sin in our lives?

First, address it—don’t be scared to talk about sin.

Many Christians are timid talking about sin because it feels so negative. And can we be honest? It is negative! Sin is deadly, spiritually damning. It’s not a pleasant topic. But just like a good doctor will tell you about the cancer inside your body, we should feel fine talking about the sin in our flesh and its effects.

Part of the problem is that many pastors don’t talk about sin because they don’t want to offend their congregants. And, to be sure, we should want to offend anyone. But we also shouldn’t go out of our way not to offend, either. A bad doctor is one who would purposefully not tell you about the cancer just because it’s horrible news.

Again, friend, let’s talk about sin. Let’s discuss its ravaging impact in our lives. If we want to have a fighting chance against killing our sin, we must look at it for what it is: a virus in our flesh that is waging war within us and needs to be destroyed.

Second, learn how to biblically fight against it.

We don’t defeat sin by white-knuckling it. Nothing is going to happen if we just focus on physically resisting temptation. In fact, that’ll just lead to more sin. Why? Because we can’t fight sin on our own power, by our own strength. We need God.

Here’s how we biblically fight our sin—by believing the promises of God more than the promises of sin; by believing that there is infinitely more satisfaction in obeying Jesus than sin. To fight, friend, is to believe. To wage war is to trust that God is more satisfying.

Here’s John Piper:

Saying ‘no’ will not suffice. You must move from defense to offense. Fight fire with fire. Attack the promises of sin with the promises of Christ ... We must stock our minds with the superior promises and pleasures of Jesus. Then we must turn to them immediately after saying, ‘NO!’”

We must kill sin before it kills us (Romans 8:13). The only way we do that is by trusting God’s way is better.

Third, keep your eyes on Jesus.

Even as we fight each each day we must remember that Jesus fully and completely defeated sin through his life, death, and resurrection. Yes, we must contend with sin on a daily basis, but remember that the war has already been won. So we need not despair when we struggle—we fixate our eyes on Christ. We don’t lose sight of the ending. We never take our eyes off of glory.

As we fight our sin, we remind ourselves of the glory we will share with Christ in Heaven—with no more sin, no more death, no more anything bad. We can fight sin today because of what the future looks like for us. We can look sin in the face for what it is because Jesus’ finished work. There’s no need to sugarcoat or dance around it—sin (within us and outside of us) is a menace. But Jesus won for us.