Stopping Sin Before It Starts

Christians define sin differently (e.g. missing the mark, wandering from the path, violating God's law) but we all generally agree that sin is bad for us and bad for our relationship with God. That's the easy part. The question is, how do we get rid of sin? It's not hard to figure out where sin goes: Romans 6:23 tells us that the wages of sin is death. Even the most confident "eternal security" Christians can't deny the surfacing of a kind of temporal death when they willfully sin. Actions have consequences. Sin causes things to die, whether it's relationships, dreams, or even our physical bodies. (We certainly can't avoid physical death, but with our bad choices I believe we can speed up the process!)

A passage in James tells us a lot about where sin come from and where it leads:

But one is tempted by one's own desire, being lured and enticed by it; then, when that desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin, and that sin, when it is fully grown, gives birth to death. (James 1:14-15)

This passage is in agreement with the Romans passage that death is the result of sin. But the first part of the passage is what really gets my attention. It says that desire gives birth to sin. So sin comes from something else! (Hold that thought.)

If you've ever lived in an older house and experienced problems with mice, you know that one of the keys to getting rid of the pests is figuring out where they came from (or actually, where they entered). A couple of years ago, my house experienced such an invasion, and I finally figured out that the mice were coming in through a crack under the garage door. So, I fixed the problem, and I discovered that mouse traps and poison aren't nearly as effective as stopping mice at the source! That's the way sin works, too.

Sin is born because our own evil desires give birth to it. And that only happens after we get "lured away" by these desires. There are a couple of things worth noting here: (1) We don't have the luxury of blaming the devil or demons here. It's on us. In fact, when evil beings are involved in tempting us, I believe they're usually exploiting the evil that's already there. (2) As with any pregnancy, sin's conception can be avoided by not having that "roll in the hay". For all practical purposes, we need to experience victory inside our heads before we'll see victory in our actions. All sin can be traced back to those little trysts we have with our desires on the mattresses we call our minds.

In an episode of the new Twilight Zone, a lady goes back in time to kill Adolf Hitler when he's an infant. Her reasoning is that she can stop his atrocities if she can keep him from growing up to commit them. While that example presents its own moral dilemmas, in a spiritual sense, we need to do that to sin, except we need to go back to the point of conception. The James passage says that when sin grows up, it gives birth to death. The underlying Greek word translated "grows up" implies a mission accomplished, or something being brought to an end. We can't get rid of sin if we're busy nurturing it. And the best way to keep from nurturing it is to never let it be conceived or born in the first place.

It all keeps coming back to the role our minds play in all this. I'll save that part for another essay (or two or three). For now, understand that the key to spiritual success is learning self-control when it comes to our thoughts. We have no obligation to grab hold of every thought that flies through our minds. Scripture tells us that we can take every thought captive so that it is obedient to Christ (2 Corinthians 10:5). I'll leave it there and elaborate on that in a future post.