How to Overcome Sinful Bondage

Posted On October 4, 2021

The Fight of Sin

No true believer enjoys failing God.

Anyone with the Holy Spirit of God inside their heart wants to fall into temptation. Although, in the very moment of temptation, your flesh craves to chase after it, it longs for what is contrary to the Lord. But when you find yourself in a place of constant failure you are let down to a great degree because you love the Lord.

You love Him and do not want to fail Him. You have great reverence for the things of God, perhaps even have a very strong prayer life. You have strong habits of reading the Bible even, but you are still having trouble keeping your nose clean from that one pesky sin.

“The sin that so easily besets us” the writer of Hebrews calls it. Thankfully you and I are not the only Christians to have ever felt this way. If you’ve ever read Romans 7 you know that the Apostle Paul felt the same exact way.

Paul’s Fight for Victory

One of the greatest reliefs to my personal walk with God was finding out that I wasn’t the only one struggling as bad as I was. Satan had gotten me to a point where I felt so isolated and alone that I was the only believer dealing with the amount of sin that I was.

In my younger years of serving Christ I possessed so much zeal it was uncontainable. All I wanted to do was talk about the Lord. I read my Bible every day, sang to the Lord in worship and often even fasted to grow closer to Him.

I later came to realize while walking through the book of Romans that I identified perfectly with the struggles the Apostle Paul had dealt with in His faith.

Romans chapters 1-3 will knock you in your teeth. You can feel pretty good about yourself and then read those 3 chapters and honestly feel pretty bad about who you are as a Christian.

See, the Holy Spirit is so strategic. The Lord intends for us to have illumination to the fact that there is truly NOTHING good inside of us. We are fallen, wicked, desolate creation without Christ. We are guilty before a Holy God. There’s hardly a place in Scripture that opens your eyes to that more than Romans chapters 1-3.

Walking about to Romans 7 we see salvation for the believer in 6 and then we find a perfect description of what it means to struggle as a Christian.

Romans 7

Romans 7 in its nature is so deep and heavy that some have claimed there was no possible way that Paul could have been saved as He recalls this experience. But I would suggest to you that Paul was absolutely saved being that He gives the very correct doctrine of identification in Christ in just the previous chapter with not definite divide from His discourse in 7.

In fact if you read Romans 7 in succession with 6 you’ll find that this is an extremely accurate portrayal of what it looks like for a believer to begin dealing with a faith change.

What I mean here is Paul’s experiencing salvation but He found as He began living for the Lord that He could not perform the keeping the law within HIs own strength. He had to rely on the Spirit of God even after salvation for Him to overcome sin.

He goes into great detail to reveal how He was struggling. It seemed like a painful and long experience for Paul to be honest.

I, in every way of Romans 7 can say that I have lived that way for a number of years. This is what I call miserable Christianity. Attempting to live for God but not knowing how to perform it.

You know it’s wrong to get drunk, but you find yourself doing it, you know fornication is wrong but you can’t help yourself, you know gossip is sinful, but you have to continually keep talking bad about people.

Reality

The truth is, this is sadly a great deal of Christians nowadays. In this ever changing and secular world this is exactly what Satan is attempting to do in our lives. He wants to discourage you to a point of not even trying anymore. And that’s exactly where sin can very well take you.

I covered depression in another article but that’s where sin ultimately brings you. It makes you feel empty, it corrupts your joy, it steals, kills, and destroys.

Satan has tried to conceal the truth of how to live for God for so long. Directly after the book of Acts you see the Apostle Paul and various New Testament authors all refuting false doctrine on how to live for God. Satan is trying to rob the church of the simplicity of the gospel.

Most Evangelical Christians would not profess with their words they believe the way to live for God is through their own strength but by default because of a lack of knowledge that’s where they end up. We assumer after we come to Christ it’s now up to us to make right choices to live for Him.

That’s just a partial truth.

The full truth is we have to have the Holy Spirit to get saved and we must ever trust in Him to continue to be saved. The fact is Christ accomplished the victory over sin on the cross. He already has won. Our only job is to place our hope, trust, belief on Him and He will perform the good works in us.

The How to do the What to Do

In Romans chapter 7 we find Paul has a struggle between the law and the flesh. He says, “I know the good I want to do, but I find not a way to perform it.” What he is declaring is something we have all experienced. How many times have you promised the Lord that if He would forgive you of a particular act of sin you would never commit it again?

And then the next moment you had the opportunity you failed Him miserably…

That’s what Paul is referring to. We cannot commit to the law as to uphold it within ourselves. Christ must do that work inside of us. Ultimately what Christ wants to do is sanctify us by changing our desires. He cleanses us in order to have a will that lines up with His will. Staying anchored to Christ will produce a desire to live for Him inside your soul.

The key is to keep the main thing the main thing. It is God’s will for us to be conformed into the image of Christ. Lord help us to keep our faith ever anchored in you dear Jesus.