You don’t have to sin any more
It was one of those eye-popping moments, when the truth suddenly dawned and you found yourself saying, “Yes, of course! Why didn’t I see that before?” It was during the How People Change course, when we reached the point where we were told, “So, you don’t have to sin any more.” In Christ, God has set us free from the power of sin, so that we are now able to please him. We no longer have to do what ‘sin’ says; we are now free to do what his Spirit leads us to do instead. Of course, sadly, we can still choose to follow where ‘sin’ leads, but we don’t have to.
So, when we heard the same things again at the church weekend away, a number of us exchanged knowing glances. What we were hearing is the glorious truth of Romans 8, that we now “live in accordance with the Spirit”, that our minds are “governed by the Spirit” and that we are “in the realm of the Spirit” (verses 5, 7, 9). In other words, we now have the power of God himself in our lives, in our very selves, and he is way more powerful than anything the world around, or our sinful flesh within, or even Satan himself can throw at us. Truly, “the one who is in you is greater than the one who is in the world” (1 John 4:4). Naturally, the devil does not want us to know, let alone to believe, these wonderful truths: that we really can fight sin, that we can hope to win, and that one day we will be totally victorious over sin, even as Christ himself is.