:: in.a.mirror.dimly ::

The last post in my Christian Survival Guide series dealt with the details of overcoming sin, and today I’ll cover the defensive measures we can take against sin in the future:

Finding a Permanent Solution to Sin

There will be times when we forget about God’s victory over sin, slip into our old sinful habits, and then repent. Sin can make inroads even after we have claimed the victory and experienced God on the mountaintops of our lives.

While we can claim the spiritual victory over sin and break its iron grip on our lives, we can still submit to our old desires. It’s like a cancer patient rushing out of the recuperation room to beg the doctor, “Please put that tumor back in, we had such a good time together!”

However, even after breaking sin’s hold in some pretty significant ways, I have learned in my experience that there is another step to the process of defeating sin. We can essentially tell sin to not only go away, but to never come back. While our ultimate victory comes when we are connected to Christ our life-giving vine, the Gospels relate stories in which Jesus not only cast our demons, but he instructed them to never come back.

In other words, Jesus took both offensive measures and future defensive measures against evil spirits. In a sense, he bound them. Now, here’s where the intellectuals such as myself can become suspicious. I know some of my friends probably think I’m full of it, and these passages have been twisted to mean all kinds of wacky stuff, but Jesus gave his followers authority to bind things on heaven and earth. That extends to the spiritual realm when we are dealing with sin.

This is a tough area to speak with complete certainty, but I do know that the light came on for me in my own struggles with sin when I realized I could not only defeat sin through the power of Christ, but also “bind” it by his authority. That doesn’t mean I’m a perfect, super-Christian now, but I have never made so much progress in my Christian life until I learned to say to my sin, “Get out, and never come back!”

I often think of this authority in terms of closing the door on sin and locking it out. However, that means we can still choose to unlock and open the door to sin. Perhaps we can reach a place where we never consider opening that door, but I can’t speak to that personally.

The next post in this series will tie all of this together to make sure it sticks…