One of the most amazing wonders and beauty of being in relationship with God is that He believes in us. He believes in you infinitely more than you believe in yourself. He has given us this earth experience to discover with each passing day how much He loves us and wants us to be our highest and greatest self. When we are happy and all is going well, He wants us to remember that He has made that happiness possible. When we hit rock-bottom and seem to be facing crisis after crisis, He wants us to cling to Him and dig deeper to live by His strength, love, and power in a greater way. He wants us to know that when we search the deepest part of our beings, we will find the love that He alone has placed there. The foundation of Jesus Christ is at our very cores, and if we live by his truth, life will be a continual journey that moves us from faith to greater faith in God.

1Thessalonians 5:23(NLT) tells us, “Now may the God of peace make you holy in every way, and may your whole spirit and soul and body be kept blameless until our Lord Jesus Christ comes again.” This verse gives us some tremendously good news. It tells us that our Heavenly Father, the God of peace, can make us holy! He can do for us the thing that is impossible for us to do ourselves. He can make us holy through Jesus Christ, and this takes failure completely out of the picture, because if God makes us holy, we are holy indeed.

Our responsibility as followers of the Lord Jesus Christ is to allow Him to do what only He can. Romans 12:1-2(NLT) tells us how to do that. It says, “1 And so, dear brothers and sisters, I plead with you to give your bodies to God because of all he has done for you. Let them be a living and holy sacrifice–the kind he will find acceptable. This is truly the way to worship him. 2 Don’t copy the behavior and customs of this world, but let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think. Then you will learn to know God’s will for you, which is good and pleasing and perfect.” God never intended us to operate without His love and guidance. His Will is to expand through us. As we present ourselves to Him, we all must do so with all our faults, warts, and all. He is the One who transforms us into the person He wants us to be, and our responsibility is to be humble, obey His Word, and let Him to do the work He wants to do.

Someone asked me, “How do I control that side of me that wants to do wrong? I know that God doesn’t like it if I sin, but the urge is sometimes so strong, and I’m not sure I can control it.” If it was possible to do this on our own, Jesus Christ would not have had to die. If we could control all our sinful desires and never sin again, we would not need a Savior or the indwelling Holy Spirit. The reality is that we desperately need salvation and we desperately need to be led, guided, and directed by the Holy Spirit that lives inside every born-again believer.

One of the reasons that many single people are terrified of marriage is because they either fear they can’t be committed a lifetime, or they fear their partners can’t be committed for the long haul either. Humans don’t trust themselves and they don’t trust one another because human history demonstrates a lack of trustworthiness has been an issue for us since Adam and Eve. On our own, there’s no possible way for us to stand on a solid foundation of trust, but Ecclesiastes 4:12 says, “a threefold cord is not quickly broken.” When a man and woman come together and put Jesus Christ in his rightful place as Lord over their marital union, that’s the strongest cord that exists.

The sacrifice and resurrection of Jesus Christ changed things for us. He has given us victory over sin, and if we abide in him, we have the strength to overcome any obstacle or adversity. He said in John 15:5,7(NLT), “5 “Yes, I am the vine; you are the branches. Those who remain in me, and I in them, will produce much fruit. For apart from me you can do nothing. 7 But if you remain in me and my words remain in you, you may ask for anything you want, and it will be granted!” Philippians 4:13(NLT) tells us, “For I can do everything through Christ, who gives me strength.” When we try to do things on our own, we mess up, because it isn’t God’s Will for us to do things alone. His Will is that we do as Proverbs 3:5 says and trust in Him with all that we are and do not depend on our own understanding. Again, God created us specifically to walk and lean on Him for everything. He’s the One who directs our paths.

Abiding in Christ means that we do the things that Christ did to love God and love God’s people. We have a responsibility to keep our whole human-spirit, human-soul, and human-body holy. We can’t do that without keeping our relationship with God strong by #1 reading and studying His Word, #2 praying earnestly and often, and #3 surrendering to the guidance of His Holy Spirit. These three will help us to resist the urge to sin. This is not to say that those urges will not occur, but if we renew our minds and hearts to God’s Word and seek to please Him with all that we are, we will resist the devil and stand strong in Christ as we humbly walk by the Spirit in faith.■

Scripture quotations marked (NLT) are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Wheaton, Illinois 60189. All rights reserved. 

“How Do I Resist the Urge to Sin?”, written for Springfield Fellowship © 2023. All rights reserved. All praise and honor to God through Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior.