If you’re struggling to break free from a sin, the Lord wants and even commands all of us to repent.
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Acts 19:19 Many of them also which used curious arts brought their books together, and burned them before all men: and they counted the price of them, and found it fifty thousand pieces of silver.
Curious arts there is sorcery. It was like voodoo; it was witchcraft, altogether demonic. The opposite of godliness.
It appears it was expensive too. It’s been said that one piece of silver was an entire day’s wages, so that’s 50,000 days’ pay.
Any sin is like that, Child of God. And, this is hard, but stubbornness and even rebellion are in the mix, with witchcraft.
1 Samuel 15:23 For rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft, and stubbornness is as iniquity and idolatry.
First, please see the reality of what sin is. It’s rebellion, it’s idolatrous, it’s witchcraft, it’s iniquity. It’s also something that a Holy God cannot look at.
Secondly, God is absolutely merciful and long-suffering.
Acts 17:30 And the times of this ignorance God winked at; but now commandeth all men every where to repent:
You know, and I know, He won’t always wink and let us by. If you’re reading this, He’s calling you to repent, as all men, every where.
We have to repent and turn from that sin. That is our own part.
Remember being a child, and learning to trim your own fingernails, cuz mom was rough. Better still, remember learning to take out your own splinters because it was better than all the painful pinching and poking from your mom.
Sin with God can be like that. It truly is far less painful for us to remove it ourselves, than let it fester until the Father deals with it. Hebrews 12:6
Unaddressed sin can also lead to spiritual, emotional, or even physical consequences (1 Corinthians 11:30 links persistent sin to weakness and sickness among believers).
I know some of you have let it get pretty stuck to you; I’ve done it too.
You must develop an exit that you can stick to, with God’s grace. Philippians 2:13: “It is God who works in you to will and to act.”
If it’s alcohol, get help if you need it. Then don’t drive the same way home after work. Drive miles out of your way if you need to in order to skip all the liquor stores on the way home. Burn the bridge to that store, at least in your mind. Don’t drive that way.
If you have trouble with pornography and your computer, have someone put safety features on your system so you can’t access it. Be bold. Burn the bridge.
If it’s food, consider hiring a private shopper or an online company that will ship your healthy food. Be drastic. Burn the bridge to your sin.
If it’s laziness, start adding one new chore every week, until you break out of it. Don’t despise small beginnings but do begin! Move the couch to another room if you have to. Start tearing that bridge down.
If you have a television problem, hmm?- yes, that too can be sin. If it comes before God, it’s sin. Set limits on the time it can be on, for your entire household if necessary. Set limits on what you will watch. Turn off subscriptions if you need to. Shut the cable off, if you have to. If you have to, move it out of the house completely until you gain victory and control. But burn that bridge down. Anything that keeps us from time with the Lord can become an idol.
Do you have a drug problem? Stop going to the dealers. Stop hanging around people who have it. Separate yourselves from people who do drugs. Cut off those relationships for good.
You may be bold enough to tell me that you “have a script.” Hmm, the very fact you would say “I have a script” rather than saying I’m “on prescription medications” raises concern to me. May I ask how you are ingesting it too? The Lord sees and you can’t lie to Him. Be brave enough to acknowledge the problem and take steps to break it off of you. (I’m not talking to everyone taking prescription medications, just those to whom it has become something else.) If you have to, confess your fault and struggle to your doctor or check yourself into a program, but if it has become sin to you, get rid of it. Destroy the path that gets you to it.
Do you have an anger problem? We all do, but is yours uncontrollable? Is yours unjust and unruly? Please, humble yourselves before the Lord, and keep taking it to Him on your humble knees, and begging Him to remove it. On this one, I would go so far as to say, don’t get up from your knees, until He has it. (Consider reading the book Gifted Hands, by Ben Carson. The movie doesn’t address his anger problem as well as the book does. But we almost didn’t know the Ben Carson that we do now and the way he dealt with it, and the seriousness of it, is well laid out in the story.) Do all you have to, to get alone with God over anger issues. Let Him help you burn that bridge.
Maybe you’re holding onto a relationship, knowing you’ll lose it, if you stop sinning. God is giving you an opportunity to trust Him with something that hurts. God is giving you an opportunity to love Him more and other things, less. It might be, you will lose it regardless and God is giving you a moment to be the one in charge of how it ends… do consider that. But if it holds sin, you know, it has to go. If you have to move, to get away from it, it would be better. If you have to change your phone number, do it. Burn the bridges of contact to that person. If they’ve been an idol to your heart, you might burn the images up too. Dump your phone, don’t keep looking. Burn the bridge to lust and immoral relationships.
Precious one, if you will take your steps and do your part, He will help you. He will strengthen you.
Allow your heart to be broken over this thing that certainly is between you and the Lord. Don’t relent in prayer and do not give up in efforts, even if you fail the first few times. Keep asking, keep knocking, keep seeking. Keep hammering on that bridge. Ask for His help in completing its demolition, but you do your full efforts. He will not reject a broken heart over sin.
If you were here, I would pull you in closer, pour you another cup of coffee, and I would kneel down on the floor in front of you, and lean in and beg you to listen to this next part, likely in tears, because it certainly isn’t pleasant and it isn’t what I would prefer to be discussing.
When you were a child, if you didn’t cut your own fingernails when mom said, did she not come to cut them and painfully close to the quick, at that? When you were young, if you didn’t get the splinter yourself, would your mom not come and hold you down and extract it herself, seemingly deaf to your cries of pain? Your mother loved you but intervened knowing what was best.
Your heavenly Father loves you more than your earthly mother and whom the Lord loves, He chastens.
He loves you too much to let it go without His action. The Bible lists several ways of how He might do that.
Child of God, I beg you, if you’re playing with sin, please get it out of your life before your Father gets to it with that holy rod of correction.
Psalms 7:11 God judgeth the righteous, and God is angry with the wicked every day.
If you are His child, He is going to judge you in righteousness, and that must come from Christ. If you are continuing in stubbornness and rebellion, by playing with wickedness, you should expect Him to eventually get angry, because you are in effect rejecting righteousness. Again, whom the Lord loves, He chastens. It’s one of the ways that we know we are His.
I truly wish I could stop here, but I can’t because I don’t know which warning you’re on. Here’s what I mean by that:
Matthew 18 gives instructions for how sin is to be handled. The first warning is private, usually between two people. If the person in sin, doesn’t listen, the other brings in one or two others, so that every matter may be established by the testimony of two or three witnesses. If the person still doesn’t listen, the matter is brought to the church and begins to go public. If the church as a whole isn’t successful in trying to convince the wayward to repent, they are turned out and to be treated as a pagan or a tax collector.
This is how God instructs His people to deal with sin. Even if you’re not in a church, His justice and love will still call you to repentance.
I had been saved about three years when the Lord taught me the harsh Truth about “whatever you sow, you will reap” and not only that but also “whatever is done in secret will be shouted from the housetops.” The lesson was so harsh, it still hurts my heart and makes me bow my head.
I don’t want that for you, but only you can prevent that. But I beg you to understand, He is faithful to His Word, all of It, not just the parts you want Him to be faithful to. Please don’t tarry so long as to have your sin “find you out.”
Beloved, He said, no other gods before Him.
Please “come out, and be separate” and “be made whole.”
If you need help, guidance, prayer, or just anonymous accountability, we would love to help you if we can on a path of repentance. You can feel free to reach out to us on any of our platforms, at Patriots Under God. We care about you and know; we’ve had to repent as well. We aren’t here to condemn you but rather encourage you to live for the Lord. He loves you so much. He’s waiting to celebrate your full return to Him.
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