…you are that one’s slaves
whom you obey… —Romans 6:16
“The first thing I must be
willing to admit when I begin to examine what controls and dominates me is that
I am the one responsible for having yielded myself to whatever it may be. If I
am a slave to myself, I am to blame because somewhere in the past I yielded to
myself. Likewise, if I obey God I do so because at some point in my life I
yielded myself to Him. […] yield for one second to anything in the nature of
lust, and although you may hate yourself for having yielded, you become
enslaved to that thing. (Remember what lust is— “I must have it now,” whether
it is the lust of the flesh or the lust of the mind.) No release or escape from
it will ever come from any human power, but only through the power of
redemption. […] yielding to Jesus will break every kind of slavery in any
person’s life.” CHAMBERS
(Luke 4:18) “The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has
anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim
freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the
oppressed free,” When you read the
Bible, it is always important to remember that it is a Spiritual book. Did I just
hear a “duh!”? My point is that Jesus came to do a spiritual work, although He
often healed the physically sick and fed the hungry. Before we were born again, we were hopelessly
prisoner to sin. We were blind to the
Truth. We were oppressed. But Jesus set us free. That is why Paul could be locked in a jail
cell and still be free. There is a
greater story in this world. It is a
spiritual story and can only be understood by those whose eyes have been opened
.. who have been set free. (2 Corinthians 4:4) “The god of this age
has blinded the minds of unbelievers, so that they cannot see the light of the
gospel that displays the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.”
OK, to the point. You and I both know that even though we have
been set free, we have the capacity and perhaps the inclination to continue to
yield to those things from which we have been set free. Like a moth to a flame, we are drawn to them.
Our old nature has been defeated, but
can be and often is, still an influence.
We do not live sinless lives once we are born again, but our lives are
changed forever. Day by day we are being
conformed to the image of our Lord. Every
day we are faced with choices … choices to yield to the old nature … but we don’t
have to. (1
Corinthians 10:13) We face
temptations to sin just like everyone else.
But God, who is faithful, has provided a way to resist the temptation. (Psalm 119:11, Joshua 1:8) It’s the Word of God. The solution to our spiritual problem of sin
is spiritual. Did I just hear another “duh!”? Sounds simple enough, but, as you well know,
it’s not so easy in the doing. You
cannot resist sin by will power now, any more than you could before you were
born again. It is a spiritual battle that
must be fought with spiritual weapons. But if you still think you can go into
battle, unarmed, you are naïve, in trouble and you are certain to fail. ELGIN
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