Stop the Victim Mentality

I came out of a fugue today, a fog caused by my own self-pity and a lack of seeking God. I'm not even sure when it began, or how long I've allowed it to beset my mind. God just showed me that I should never grow weary of doing good (Galatians 6:9).

The more we focus on our issues, the problems, the "waves", the more we sink into the water and start drowning. We swim and fight against the waves through constant spiritual activity, and God is with us when we ask Him for help, under-girding us with his guiding touch. In fact, we can walk on top of those waves the more we focus on Him, like Peter with Jesus - walking on water through faith. 

How does that evidence itself in real life? I'm not exactly sure. But simple obedience and simply walking with Him are a good start. Just a child-like faith that everything is going to be OK because daddy (Abba) is present and He's not going to let us down. Sometimes He reassures us, but sometimes we just need to keep fighting, reaching out to God and asking for His help and continuing to worship Him and shout from the rooftops about His Lordship. Even when our minds are darkened and all seems fruitless and hopeless. Our hearts can never grow dark or weary, and we need to keep going, keep giving our lives over to Him.

And at the right time, in His own time, He will lift us up and bring us to exactly where we are meant to be.

Lord, thank you for being my rock, my strength, my salvation, my fortress, my shield. You are my everything. I pray that I would learn what it means to love you with everything I am, everything I have. Please continue to strengthen me, that I might glorify you, and please wrap me and my family in your warm embrace, protect us all so that we can serve each other and others in your name. Set the captives free, Lord, and we will worship in your throne room forever!

Ready for Battle

As I mentioned in my last post about fleeing from sin and fleeing to God, our Lord equips us with the full armor described in Ephesians 6 - Salvation, Righteousness, Truth, the Gospel, Faith, and the Word of God.

Finally, be strong in the Lord and in his mighty power. Put on the full armor of God, so that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes. For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. Therefore put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand. Stand firm then, with the belt of truth buckled around your waist, with the breastplate of righteousness in place, and with your feet fitted with the readiness that comes from the gospel of peace. In addition to all this, take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one. Take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God. (Ephesians 6:10-17 NLT)

These should all be ready in our arsenal as we go about our days. Find ways to pray for those who are close to you, and those that you meet for whom God gives you a heart. Meditate on God's word. Bring God into every situation and ask Him to show you how to glorify Him as you go about your business, as you shop, as you socialize, as you do everything. Pray without ceasing. Treasure His word in your heart. But most of all, ready yourself for battle.


Never forget that Satan prowls like a roaring lion, ready to devour the weak. Be on guard, and realize that we are in a war that will not end until Satan and his followers are thrown into the lake of fire. Always be vigilant, and never allow laziness to overtake your mind as you live your life. That may mean changing your habits, finding ways to be honest about all of those things that may lead to sin - triggers, pathways, etc. Remember, if you are on the battle field, you're not in the act of compromising with the enemy - your complete purpose is to kill the enemy and not allow them any foothold in your camps, no stronghold in your realms. Same thing as you battle for ground in your heart and in your mind. You do not want the sin nature that is evident in your flesh to gain any ground - you want to pummel it into submission and put to death the deeds of the flesh.

Just as much as sin chips away at the man that you were meant to be (until you become a wraith-like shadow of what you could have become), becoming more Christ-like will enable you to be everything that men were ever meant to be - sacrificial, protective, undeterred by evil, and focused on doing the Father's work and being champions for His kingdom.

Though we shouldn't be completely obsessed with fear for our enemy, we should be aware of his snares, traps, and lies, and be ever vigilant to meet them head on with all of the full arsenal of our Lord.

Flee From Sin, But Don't Stop There

For those porn addicts, the bible is pretty clear that we are to flee from sexual immorality, from the porneia that can so easily settle into our hearts. I think the basic video that starts off the Covenant Eyes 40-Day Challenge (http://www.covenanteyes.com/challenge/) is very astute that you can't just stop there. They prescribe the following:

1. Run FROM
2. Run TO
3. Run WITH

First, you should flee sexual immorality. This particular sin joins the Holy Spirit to the body of a harlot. If you think that avoiding full coitus will keep you from dragging the Holy Spirit through your sinful acts, think again. Your body's chemical reactions are virtually the same in reaction to porn as they are with a full sexual act with a real woman. And if you think that you do not grieve the indwealt Holy Spirit with your eyes and hands when you perform sexual acts with yourself, you are deceiving yourself altogether. So, run AWAY from sin. Get away from the computer, out of the house if you need to. Create the hard-line boundaries in your life, no matter how important the object that you may need to cut from your life...   "If your right hand should cause you to sin, cut it off". Install filters, or at least accountability software (Covenant Eyes is great, and there is a link to it in this blog). This is where victory begins, but you cannot merely empty a household of demons and not expect them to come back stronger than before. Your household, your temple of the Holy Spirit, needs to become a stronghold for God. That is accomplished in the next steps...

Second, you should run TO God. He is our salvation, our rock, our mighty fortress, and he will give us shelter from the storm and protection from ourselves and the great tormentor. We should fall on our faces before Him and beg Him for strength to resist temptation, for every temptation comes with a way out, and He can help us. Also, run to accountability partners, other strong believers that can help you get through these difficult moments. Whatever you do, get your mind off of the preoccupation of pleasuring yourself, and work to serve God and to serve others for the sake of God's kingdom and glory. Find a way to accomplish the very thing for which God made us - to glorify Him, and to enjoy Him forever. Find practical ways to get out of your isolation and serve others - widows and orphans in their distress, friends that might need you in their hour of need, or your family that very well may need any number of things done (you might have to do dishes - gasp!).

Third, you should run WITH God. True strength is not found by just avoiding sin, and not by just falling on your face before God, but in communing with and dwelling with God. God equips us with the full armor described in Ephesians 5, all elements of which are attributes that are purely provided by God; only through a full realization and full meditation of all of these attributes can we attain a renewing of our minds. Salvation, Righteousness, Truth, the Gospel, Faith, and the Word of God. These should all be ready in our arsenal as we go about our day. Find ways to pray for those who are close to you, and those that you meet for whom God gives you a heart. Meditate on God's word. Bring God into every situation and ask Him to show you how to glorify Him as you go about your business, as you shop, as you socialize, as you do everything. Pray without ceasing. Treasure His word in your heart. But most of all, ready yourself for battle.

What is Addiction, to the Christian?

There are many Christians that want to deny the wording "addiction" as it pertains to those who are caught in habitual sin altogether. As the world tends to label addiction a helpless state from which a sinner cannot pull themselves, that they were born with a propensity for a behavior (such as alcohol, homosexuality, sexual sin), and the worldly position all to often posits that addicts likely have these tendencies programmed into their bodies and brains, it's understandable that Christians would want to reject these wordly definitions altogether. I would posit that the bible does leave room for habitual sin, but defines it in a different manner: 

Because of the weakness of your human nature, I am using the illustration of slavery to help you understand all this. Previously, you let yourselves be slaves to impurity and lawlessness, which led ever deeper into sin. Now you must give yourselves to be slaves to righteous living so that you will become holy. (Romans 9:16 NLT)

Paul is here defining a life dedicated to sin, where the non-believer is a slave to their impurity, the fleshliness of their sin and the further depravity that resulted from their ongoing dedication to sin. This can also be associated with what the scriptures label as the "old man".

The question then remains, however, if a Christian is automatically delivered from this old nature and has absolutely no sin in their lives as a result of becoming saved and being in-dwelt by the Holy Spirit, the very nature of Christ. I would posit that though Christians have every tool at their disposal to defeat the old nature and resist temptation, there is a possibility that a Christian would continue to stumble in particular areas of sin:

So the trouble is not with the law, for it is spiritual and good. The trouble is with me, for I am all too human, a slave to sin. I don’t really understand myself, for I want to do what is right, but I don’t do it. Instead, I do what I hate. But if I know that what I am doing is wrong, this shows that I agree that the law is good. So I am not the one doing wrong; it is sin living in me that does it.  And I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature. I want to do what is right, but I can’t. I want to do what is good, but I don’t. I don’t want to do what is wrong, but I do it anyway. But if I do what I don’t want to do, I am not really the one doing wrong; it is sin living in me that does it.  (Romans 7:14-20 NLT)

Paul here defines for us a nature that perseveres beyond the time that we become believers, and an ongoing war that is waged between the old nature and the new nature, the "new creation" that God begins in us and has promised to perfect/complete.

I think we need to differentiate between the person that is comfortable with and dedicated to their sinful lives in a unrepentant manner (Galaltians 5:21 and elsewhere tells us that such sinful dedication is a sign that a person is not truly saved), and a person that hates sin, is actively working to combat it and moving the pieces of their lives to actively repent against sin.

For an addict, the level of habitual sin in their lives may be too much to escape, even once they become believers. There is usually no magical deliverance even for true believers, and the ongoing patterns of preoccupation with a sin, then acting out, then feeling shame, then moving back into the cycle starting with preoccupation (even if it is fought) are too much for the believer to escape if they do so in isolation and without the tools they need to be free.

But the Christian and sin can never be friends. A Christian will never live in the practice of sin and be happy with those activities. It is a bondage, a slavery to the flesh from which the Christian should desire utter freedom. If you are a believer in Christ, you should want to be free, and should be willing to "cut off your right hand" (separate from the most important things to you) to be free from your sin. If you aren't willing to separate from any given thing or situation to be free from your sin, you should then be concerned about your security as a believer. If Christ's death on the cross, your family, and all of the other holy things that God has entrusted to you are not worth enough to you to change anything and everything you possibly can to flee immorality, you may want to examine your conversion experience, and whether or not Jesus is really your Lord, or just your sugar daddy in the sky.

God is a loving Father and Friend. He desires your fellowship, your worship, your dedication. He is always willing to forgive and release you from your sin, and is longsuffering in the process. But His plan may very well involve you having to deal with the consequences of your sin, and you have to be willing to submit to His plan, His ways, and then His rewards. His way is going to be so much better than the pit of despair in which you're living.

My next posts will deal more with some of the basic steps that it takes to combat sin. I hope you'll follow me on this journey and take up the tools of warfare to be victorious once and for all over these beasts that have continued to inhibit your joy in Christ.