Five Reasons to Fight Sin

Five Reasons to Fight Sin

Recently I have been reading a book written by Wayne A. Mack and Joshua Mack called A Fight to the Death: Taking Aim at Sin Within (Phillipsburg, NJ: P & R Publishing, 2006). They wrote the book out of three convictions:

1.       Continuing in sin is both serious and dangerous.

2.       Believers hate sin and desire to master it.

3.       Believers actually want to kill sin in their lives.

In the first part of the book they give reasons why believers need to fight sin. In the second part they spell out how believers must actually fight it. This week I want to summarize the reasons they give for fighting sin. Next week I will summarize the strategy they suggest for battling sin.

1. We need to fight sin because if we don’t we won’t understand the things that matter. Sin infiltrates every aspect of life. We simply can’t understand God, the Bible, ourselves, others, the world, or salvation if we don’t understand sin because sin impacts everything in profound ways. In short, sin messes everything up, therefore we need to fight it for the sake of putting everything back in order.

2. Sin is our enemy. Sin is dangerous and toxic, something we would never play with if we truly understood it. Mack and Mack define sin as “any failure to conform to God’s holy law” (p. 26), to “twist and distort something that is good into something that is not” (p. 27), “spiritual adultery” (p. 29), “wandering off God’s way…crossing over boundaries He has set for our good and for our protection and trespassing in forbidden, dangerous territory” (p. 29), “doing the exact opposite of what God wants. It is doing that which God hates” (p. 30), and “doing what the devil desires” (p. 30).

3. Sin is worse that any evil tyrant. It deceives us into thinking we can indulge in it without consequences. It creates in us a capacity for greater and greater expressions of wrongdoing. It commits more evil than all the world’s worst leaders combined. It wreaks havoc on our relationship to God and others by bringing shame, hindering prayer, and choking off our desire for God’s word. When we sin, we hurt others as well as ourselves, and we even make it easier for others to sin when they see us sinning. And on top of all that, sin has no mercy. As Mack and Mack put it, sin “laughs at our pain and delights in our misery” (p. 40).

4. Sin is just plain stupid. It’s the way of an unbeliever, not a believer. It simply does not work. When we face temptation, however, “sin often appears to be pretty smart. And that is exactly when we need to remember that sin is a liar. It is not telling us the truth. To sin is always stupid” (p. 49).

5. If we don’t fight sin it means we have a very serious problem. It could mean we are not truly born again. It could mean we have fooled ourselves into thinking we can hide our sin.  It could mean we think we are less sinful than we really are. Or it could mean we don’t take God’s judgment seriously.

Mack and Mack give a helpful illustration about the futility of sin:

Sinning is like getting into a bathtub filled with water, grabbing the sides, and then trying to lift the bathtub to the ceiling. Obviously, this would result in nothing more than wasted energy because it is ultimately pointless to even attempt such a thing. Likewise, the sinner chases after the wind, pursuing something he will never catch (p. 28).

Think about these five reasons to fight sin and let them encourage you to go to war to put sin to death in your life.