"MOST SIN IS ENJOYABLE..."

I was listening to Gordon talk about how Nehemiah had to face the temptation to compromise his mission in the face of his enemies, and it started me thinking about how we have to do the same thing in our everyday lives. We have our own enemies to face --- our inner sin nature and Satan himself --- and constantly do battle with. Then I started to think about how we can do combat against these temptations that would have us compromise our faith and our testimonies and live lives that are not pleasing to God.

This all led me to remember one of Pastor Paul’s many, many, many, many little sayings that we’ve all heard many, many, many, many times. It’s actually my favorite one, and it goes like this: Sin will take you farther than you ever wanted to go, keep you longer than you ever wanted to stay, and make you pay more than you ever thought you could. I’ve seen this played out, up close and personal, in people’s lives, and it’s ugly. I think what happens is, we forget (or don’t think about) the consequences of what we are about to do. Human nature is to blow off the thoughts of the people we’ll hurt, or the long term suffering that we might have to endure, just so we can have our 5 minutes of pleasure, or get our way, or do what we want to do! It’s pathetic really, but that’s who we are. But we’re simply not gonna “get away” with anything. Galatians 5:6 says, “Do not be deceived, God is not mocked; for whatever a man sows, that he will also reap”. So suggestion #1 in battling against compromise is: always consider the consequences!

Suggestion #2 is a real pet peeve of mine. When you get right down to it, a large part of the reason we sin is that we like it! We enjoy it! Most sin is enjoyable at the time --- if it wasn’t, it would be much easier for us to resist. So my second suggestion is to pray on a daily basis that God would give us a heart that we would hate sin, and love righteousness. Let’s be real, we just don’t hate sin very much. Oh, you might hate my sin, I might be disgusted by your sin, but we generally don’t hate our own sin very much at all. At least not until we have to suffer the consequences! Am I right? We need the Lord to change our hearts towards sin because, in and of ourselves, we’ll never get to the point where we hate sin like we should. So once again, suggestions #2 is: pray for a heart that hates sin and loves righteousness!

By no means am I trying to say that these are the only ways to battle compromise and temptations in our lives, but these are the two that jumped out at me and I just thought I’d throw ‘em out there for you all to think about.

By Dave Thompson