The following excerpt is from a message that was delivered at
Grace Community Church in Panorama City, California, By John MacArthur Jr. It
was transcribed from the tape, GC 80-88, titled "Victory in the Spirit." A copy
of the tape can be obtained by calling, 1-800-55-GRACE, or by writing, Word of
Grace, P.O. Box 4000, Panorama City, CA 91412.
I have made every effort to ensure that an accurate transcription of the
original tape was made. Please note that at times sentence structure may appear
to vary from accepted English conventions. This is due primarily to the
techniques involved in preaching and the obvious choices I had to make in
placing the correct punctuation in the article.
It is my intent and prayer that the Holy Spirit will use this transcription to
strengthen and encourage the true Church of Jesus Christ.
How to Overcome Sin
by
John F. MacArthur, Jr.
All rights reserved.
Copyright 1991
The question is, "How do I kill sin in my life? How do I do
it?" Let me give you some little principles--very basic, very straightforward.
If you live by the Spirit and are headed towards eternal life because of your
salvation, the Spirit in you gives the power to be killing the deeds of the
flesh. The question is, "All right, how do I do that? I agree that the power is
there, that's the bent of my life, that's the way I am going, I want to see the
Spirit do more and more and more of it. How do I get to that point? How do I get
that victory? How do I get that pattern established?
How can that become habitual? What do I do?"
1. Recognize the Presence of Sin in Your Flesh.
Do you know (I believe with all my heart) why most Christians are most commonly
defeated by sin? It is because the sin has so totally deceived them, that they
never really get to the point where they honestly evaluate its reality. They are
not dealing with the issue. You spend so much of your life justifying your sin
as a quirk of your personality or a product of your environment. You spend so
much time sugar-coating your habitual kinds of sins as simply idiosyncrasies of
individuality, or some prenatal predilection that your mother had, or whatever.
You have become so good (we all have) at coating over the reality of our sin
that we don't see it, so we don't deal with it because we "flat out," number
one, don't even recognize it for what it is. Any kind of spiritual victory
begins when you identify the enemy. I
mean that it is the same old story, "If you don't know what you are shooting at,
how are you going to hit it?" How am I going to eliminate from my life what I
don't even identify as needing to be eliminated?
Sin is not only wicked, it is deceitful. It is deceitful! And it's there,
believe me it is there. John Owen was right, he says [of sin],
It has no doors to open.
It needs no engine by which to work.
It lies in the mind and in the understanding.
It is found in the will.
It is in the inclinations of the affections.
It has such intimacy in the soul.
It's there! But inevitably it's covered up. Do you remember when David said,
"Protect me from secret sins, hidden sins?" And to kill it you have to recognize
it, you have got to search it out. Psalm 139 is a good verse, verse 23 (Psalm
139:23), remember this? "Search me, O God, and know my heart; Try me and know my
thoughts; and see if there be . . . " what? ". . . any wicked way in me." Help
me see my sinfulness. I want to recognize it for what it is. I want to get to
the root of it. That's what is so fallacious about contemporary psychotherapy,
it's that instead of having to deal with the reality of your present spiritual
condition, it wants to drag you in the past and find somebody else who is
responsible for your problem. You must deal with whatever is debilitating your
life--that is you. And don't be deceived about how good you are. Believe me,
your sin is there, and it is wretched and it spurts forth between the cracks of
your supposed righteousness. It comes out in anger and bitter words, unkind
thoughts, criticisms, self-conceit, lack of understanding, impatience, weak
prayers, immoral thoughts, and even overt sins. You have got to know your
weaknesses.
Haggai the prophet, chapter one, twice, verses 5 and 7 said, "Consider your
ways! Consider your ways!" Take a good deep look at yourself. 1 Kings 8:38 says,
"Know the plague in your own heart." Know the plague in your heart! And Paul in
Ephesians 4:22, talks about deceitful lusts. You have to begin by examining your
own life to see the reality of what is really there.
2. A Heart Fixed on God.
Second step. In order to gain this victory, its triumph, and to see the power of
the Spirit of God begin to give you the power over the unredeemed flesh that you
desire, that God desires, you must have a heart fixed on God. A heart fixed on
God. The Psalmist said in Psalm 57:7, "My heart is fixed, O God, my heart is
fixed." What do I mean by that? Undivided devotion to God! That's that wholeness
in spiritual life where I am given wholly to God. What do I mean by that? What I
am really saying in this context is, you can't have sin in one area. You can't
just sort of clean up a lot of it but leave it in one area. You can't starve it
out and kill it in one spot and feed it so it lives in another spot. If it lives
anywhere it will crawl all over everywhere. It is the most noxious, fastest
growing weed in existence. It will not confine itself to one flower bed, it'll
be everywhere. The Psalmist said in Psalm 119, verse 6, "Then shall I not be
ashamed." When? When will you not be ashamed? "When I have respect unto all thy
commandments." My life isn't going to be right, my life isn't going to be
without shame until I give proper respect to every command of God. And that is
to deal with every issue of sin in my life. The only unashamed life is the life
of one who is totally fixed on God; everything has been dealt with.
3. Meditate on the Word.
Meditate on the Word. The filling of the Spirit is equated in Colossians 3, to
letting the Word of Christ dwell in you richly. When the Word controls you, when
it controls your thinking, when it is there as the Psalmist said, "To meditate
on day and night," when it is there hidden that "I might not sin against God,"
then you have a control factor in your life. The way to kill sin in your life is
to feed it Scripture. It's a poison. It'll poison sin. Just feed a sinful life
Scripture--it will poison it! Whatever really controls your mind, controls your
behavior; so you learn to close out the garbage and you feed the sin, the
remaining sin, in your life a steady diet of God's glorious truth and it poisons
sin. And so you must give yourself to the Word. You must saturate yourself in
the Word. You must hear the Word preached and taught. You must learn it yourself
and you must meditate on it day and night.
4. Commune with God in Prayer.
These are so very basic. Fourthly, and very important, commune with God in
prayer. Commune with God in prayer. This sort of circles back around to the
first point that I gave you. True prayer gives the heart a sense of its own vile
character and renews the hatred of sin. True prayer does that. John Owen said,
"He who pleads with God for the remission of sin also pleads with his own heart
to detest it." Somewhere along the line, in your own prayer life you need to get
honest. You need to get honest. And you need to begin to say to God, "I want you
to reveal my sin, I want you to stir it up in me. I want you to show it to me. I
want you to blow away the dust that is covering it. I want you to peel off the
things that have been hiding it away in my life, so that it becomes manifest and
visible to me. I want to see the reality of my sin. I want you to show it to me
just the way it is." That's part of your communion with God.
When you pray to God--that is an honest confession. You can say you confess your
sins, but until you pray, "God show me all the sins of my life, reveal all of
them, uncover every little corner of my life. Bring it up and may it become as
detestable to me as it is to you, and may you give me the strength to see it go
away." Those are the kind of prayers that are the true prayers of repentance. I
have always believed that when you really confess your sins there is a little
P.S. that you add to the end of it, when you say, "Lord please forgive me for
that sin," and you always add, if your confession is true, "and Lord may I never
do that again." That's my heart's cry. And then prayer exposes secret sins.
Prayer weakens prevailing sins. Prayer finds strength in fellowship with the
Holy God to kill sin in our lives.
What must I do if I am to know victory over sin? First, I have to recognize the
sin in my life. Don't kid yourself, don't gloss over yourself, don't
underestimate your wretched condition as Paul didn't in Romans, chapter 7. And
then fix your gaze wholly on God and become totally devoted to Him, so that
everything in life, center and circumference, is Him. As the Psalmist said in
Psalm 16, "I have set the Lord always before me," and that is the only way to
live. And then it is also equally essential that you cultivate a knowledge and
understanding, and a deep comprehension and application of Biblical truth, and
that you spend time in honest prayer before God, bringing the truth to life in
His presence. And in those kinds of simple spiritual exercises comes the death
of sin. Then there is a fifth and last in this little pattern of victory.
5. Cultivate Obedience.
Now we go out of that private place, where you looked for your sin and where you
fixed you gaze on God. And where you meditated on the Word, and where you
communed with God in prayer, and we move into the public place and now the
pattern of your life is set on a course of obedience. Paul said, "I haven't
attained," I love this, "but," he said, "I press towards the mark." I haven't
reached the goal but I am on the path. What path was he on? The path of
obedience. Peter said, "Our lives should be characterized," 1 Peter 1:22, "by
obedience to the truth." And we walk a path of obedience. If you want to engage
yourself with a real battle with sin, just set your course, day-by-day,
moment-by-moment, one step at a time, on a path of obedience. At first it seems
hard, at first the progress seems slow, but you stay with it and eventually you
become habitually obedient. Habitually obedient. It becomes a habit! You stay on
the path that God has laid out in His Word. That path will lead you to grow in
grace, to perfect holiness, to renew the inward man day-by-day, and you'll train
yourself towards godliness.
Now, it would be fair, I think, to ask a final question, and that is, "How am I
doing on this?" How can I do a little inventory and say to myself, "Soul, Soul,
how are you doing? How's this working out? Are you doing these things?" Just ask
yourself some simple questions.
A. How's my zeal for God?
Is my heart cold towards God? Has sin made me indifferent to times of communion
with Him? Do I have little or no interest in His presence? In the glory of His
name? Do I love His Word? Do I love His law? Can I understand what the Psalmist
meant in Psalm 119:136, when he said, "Rivers of water run down my eyes, because
they keep not thy law." Do I have such a love for God's law that I am devastated
when His law is disregarded? Do I earnestly contend for the faith? Do I live to
uphold truth? To live it? To proclaim it? What level is my zeal at?
B. Do I love the Word?
Do I find myself drawn to the Word? Almost pinned to it by some divine wrestler
who has me on the canvas and I can't get up until its truths have become my own
convictions. Do I find myself indulging in the deep things of the Word? Ask
myself this, "Self, do you love the time of prayer? Do you love the place of
confession? Do you eagerly rush into the place where you can confess your sin
and ask God to do the self-examining process by the light of the Holy Spirit, so
that every dirty thing can be brought to light. Do you seek that? Do you delight
in worship? Is it your great longing to be here with God's redeemed people? Is
it precious to you to spend the Lord's Day in the church? Is it your soul's
highest delight to sing His praise and know Him better, that you might offer Him
honor?" Or do you say with the Jews of Malachi's day, "What a weariness worship
is!"
Ask yourself this, "Are you sensitive to sin in the church? Are you sensitive to
sin in the world? Does it tear your heart up when you see sin around you any
where? In your own life?"
You see those are just the basic principles I gave you, just flipped around and
turned into self-examining questions. Spiritual victory is there if you
recognize that you are not under any obligation to sin. If you recognize that
the Spirit of God has already bent you towards life, and so He's already killing
sin in your life, and the power to kill all of it is there. Then all you need to
do is tap into the means, and I gave you simple principles by which you can
begin to do that in your life, and a little test by which you can examine where
you are.
I don't know about you but I want to have a life of virtue. I want to have a
life of joy. I want to have a life of peace, and I want to have a life of
usefulness to God, and this is the path to that life. And may God give you the
strength to walk it; and may through you walking it faithfully, God bring glory
to His own name. That's the purpose of everything.
Let's bow together. Father, confirm to our hearts these truths, that we might be
all that you want us to be.
Added to Bible Bulletin Board's "MacArthur Collection" by:
Tony Capoccia
Bible Bulletin Board
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