Heath Lambert: We love to answer your questions on Truth in Love and this week we are answering a question from a listener about combating sinful desires. And the question specifically has to do with how you respond when someone you’re helping seems stuck in a sinful struggle and what do you say. It’s a good question, but it’s a broad question because the reality is people could struggle with a sinful desire in a number of different ways. And so, what I want to do is break that out into three different categories.
It’s possible that someone could struggle with a sinful desire and not be experiencing the kind of progress that they would like to see or that you would like to see because maybe they don’t have the kind of help that they need. In Galatians 6:1-2, we’re told that people who are caught in a transgression need spiritual people to restore them in their time of weakness. What this means is that people who are struggling with sin need relationship. They need a wise and growing community of Christians to help them. And so, if you are finding that you are stuck in a sinful struggle, you might need to look around and see whether you are in the right church. If you are not in a church that is committed to raising up other Christians to have advice for you and counsel for you that is full of truth and full of love, then you’re in the wrong place.
Now there are a couple of things you can do about that. The first thing you ought to do is in a commitment to your local church, you ought to look around and try to find the help there and you ought to talk to your leaders and see if there is a way that your church can grow in its commitment to providing that kind of counsel, but honestly, if you look around and if you try and you can’t find that help, then you’re going to be duty-bound to find another community of believers that can really help you to grow in this way. We are simply not designed to solve our problems on our own and we are not designed to solve our problems with others that don’t have wisdom to offer us in our difficulties. And so, one reason why you might be stuck or somebody you care about might be stuck is because they need to be surrounded with a better, wiser, more loving community. And so, that’s one reason.
Another reason why you might be stuck is because you or the person you’re concerned about is not trying hard enough. Now, I want to be really clear about this because we believe, as Christians, that we need Jesus to change. And our change is not first and foremost about our effort, our exertion of moral energy, but is about the work of Jesus Christ on our behalf. And yet, the Bible encourages us to add work to our faith. This is in 1 Peter, it’s in the Gospel of John. One place where the Apostle Paul talks about this is in Romans 13:14. It says, “Put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh in regard to its lust.” You have a theology of change right there. You’ve got Jesus first, put on Jesus, look to Jesus, and then make no provision for the flesh. If you’re a person who’s struggling with sin, it could be because you, having come to faith in Jesus Christ, you’ve made provision for the flesh. To think about Jesus’s words on this, He tells us that when we struggle with sin, we’re supposed to gouge out our eye and cut off our hand if it causes us to sin. And so, we are to be serious. We’re to be radical in shutting the door on sin and gouging out our eye and cutting off our hand. And it could be that if you are continuing to struggle with sin or, again, if you know somebody who is that you’ve not been radical enough in uprooting this from your life and you need to go back to that community, back to those people that you’re walking with that I talked about at first, and be more honest, be more earnest, be more eager, and find those places where you’ve made provision and slam the door.
There’s a third reason why you or somebody you care about might be struggling with sin and it could be that you’re struggling with sin and you’re in a good community of people that want to help you and people that know how to help you. It could be that you’re struggling with sin in the midst of that community, and you have been honest, and you have slammed the door on sin, you’ve cut off your hand, you’ve gouged out your eye, you’ve made no provision, and yet you still are struggling with sinful desires. And this is where we have to be really honest and admit that we struggle with hard problems in this fallen world because some problems are really hard. It’s important for biblical counselors to say this because we spent a lot of time talking about the sufficiency of the Bible for our problems in living, we spend a lot of time talking about the sufficiency of the grace of Jesus for our problems in living, and as true as those things are none of them mean that problems are easy. We live in a world where there are a lot of hard problems. We live in a world where all of us will struggle with difficulties until the day we go to be with Jesus and for some of us those problems are going to be the same consistently through our life. And that is not a statement that you don’t love Jesus, that’s not a statement that you’re defective in some way that makes you different than any other Christian, it’s a statement that we live in a fallen world, it’s a statement that our redemption is not yet the fullness of what it will be, and it’s a statement that we need to keep pressing into Jesus Christ and keep looking to Him.
The idea here is the idea of 1 Timothy 6. And in 1 Timothy 6:12, it says “Fight the good fight of faith; take hold of the eternal life to which you were called, and you made the good confession in the presence of many witnesses.” This struggle, this ongoing struggle that lasts until we arrive at eternity with the Lord, is what the Apostle Paul calls here the fight of faith. I’d want to say to you if you’re listening to this right now, I don’t know who you are, I don’t know what you’re struggling with, but I know there’s somebody who saw this show up on iTunes, you saw this show up on social media, and you’re thinking, ‘Oh, I got to hear that because I’m stuck and I want out.’ If you’re checking the box on your communities in good shape, if checking the box on you have been earnest and eager to get rid of sin, then, I want you to hear me say that some of you need to be encouraged that you are fighting the fight of faith. That it is a fight, and it is a fight of faith in Jesus Christ, and you should not be discouraged right now, but you should be encouraged that the Lord Jesus Christ through His resurrection power is giving you ability that is not intrinsic to you to overcome difficulties that would cause you to buckle under the weight of that pressure were it not for the power that’s in you. And so, I want to encourage you that this life is hard, but Jesus Christ has made provision for that hardship with His grace and His life and His death and His resurrection and His ascension. And sometimes that grace is most clearly manifested, not when the problem goes away, but our faith endures in the midst of that problem.
