What to Expect When Battling Sin
While the battle is long and fierce, “He who is in us is greater than he who is in the world.” Therefore we should expect to see frequent successes shown in significant and measurable victories over our sin. “Frequent success against any lust is another part and evidence of mortification. By success I understand not a mere disappointment of sin, that it be not brought forth nor accomplished, but a victory over it and pursuit of it to a complete conquest.”
To become a Christian is to accept the lifelong challenge of becoming who you are — of putting sin to death and growing in holiness. Today I want to channel a little John Owen and tell you three things you ought to expect when battling sin.
Expect that the Battle Will Be Long
Owen says that putting sin to death consists of “a habitual weakening of sin,” and I take this to mean that over time and through our habits we chip away at our sin bit-by-bit and day-by-day. Rather than expecting sin to be destroyed in a moment, we expect that it will take time and focused effort. In this way putting sin to death is relative to our maturity as Christians and to the amount of time we have dedicated to battling a particular sin. He says, “The first thing in mortification is the weakening of this habit of sin or lust, that it shall not, with that violence, earnestness, frequency, rise up, conceive, tumultuate, provoke, entice, disquiet as naturally as it is apt to do.”
He has this amazing quote that is quite an indictment of humanity: “The reason why a natural man is not always perpetually in the pursuit of some one lust, night and day, is because he has many to serve, every one crying to be satisfied; thence he is carried on with great variety, but still in general he lies toward the satisfaction of self.”
He also makes a very helpful comparison between putting sin to death and a man being executed on a cross:
As a man nailed to the cross he first struggles and strives and cries out with great strength and might, but, as his blood and spirits waste, his strivings are faint and seldom, his cries low and hoarse, scarce to be heard; when a man first sets on a lust or distemper, to deal with it, it struggles with great violence to break loose; it cries with earnestness and impatience to be satisfied and relieved; but when by mortification the blood and spirits of it are let out, it moves seldom and faintly….
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We Need Encouragement in Sermons, not Only Challenge
We need to be challenged and encouraged. We need hope as well as conviction of sin. Let’s do all we can, if we formally teach the Bible or informally meet with other Christians, to share the hope that we have. We need to hear the wonder of the gospel regularly to keep us going in a world where we don’t see a lot of hope anywhere else.
What do you expect from a sermon when you go to a church service? What is it that you need to hear, and what is important to be included?
I have been listening to sermons my whole life, preaching for over 15 years, and now help to teach others how to preach as well. I have also been visiting churches from other traditions and denominations in the past few years to get a sense of the variety that is out there. Of course, every preacher has their own personality and style; there will always be a large variety in how sermons are delivered. There is no one way to preach faithfully.
When Christians come to listen to a sermon, we need to be fed from the word of God. This means that the sermon needs to be based on the Bible (and not in a loose ‘this is a proof text for what I wanted to say anyway’ kind of way). It needs to explain how that particular Bible passage applies to the lives of those present.
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Sisyphus Just Keeps Rolling Along: A Review of Scott Yenor’s “The Recovery of Family Life”
Written by C.R. Wiley |
Tuesday, August 31, 2021
Some limits find their origins in human society—we can call them “positive law”, or perhaps, “social convention”, but whatever we call them, we can change them because we made them up. But there are other limits—limits that are simply in the nature of things. And those are the limits that we can’t change. While that may seem like common sense to the likes of you or me, many modern ideologues believe that the reason we think so is merely because we’ve been raised to think so.Nearly everyone says that progress is a good thing. But one of its ironies is that it makes revolutions possible. A revolution is a turning, or perhaps better, an overturning. But for a turning to be progress, it has to get you closer to your goal. Without that, things just revolve in place: it’s the same old thing, over and over again. Things seem to change, but not really.
We’ve been going through a sexual revolution for a while now, and things have certainly changed—standards have been overturned—but is this progress? Or is this just the same old thing we’ve seen before? (History-a-plenty indicates that it is.)
Which brings me back to where I started: where are we supposed to be going anyway?
Scott Yenor is not squeamish about asking delicate questions. His latest book, The Recovery of Family Life: Exposing the Limits of Modern Ideologies raises questions about progress, among other things.
From the title you can see that Yenor’s book is about limits. Modern ideologies are dedicated to removing these. In particular, feminism, liberalism, and sexual liberation contend that the family, traditionally understood, has harmed women and sexual minorities by imposing oppressive limits on them. Feminism has worked to liberate women from the limitations of gender; liberalism has worked to liberate people from moral norms that have the force of law behind them, and sexual liberation has worked to cast off whatever those ideologies have left unchanged that might hinder the pursuit of sexual pleasure.
But why all the fuss about limits? Is there something intrinsically bad about them? Can we truly live without them? True, some limits find their origins in human society—we can call them “positive law”, or perhaps, “social convention”, but whatever we call them, we can change them because we made them up. But there are other limits—limits that are simply in the nature of things. And those are the limits that we can’t change. While that may seem like common sense to the likes of you or me, many modern ideologues believe that the reason we think so is merely because we’ve been raised to think so. If they could just cleanse our minds with some sort of mind-swipe all things would be possible. (No limits!)
The Rolling Revolution
If there truly are limits, then the universe is tilted against modern ideologues. This doesn’t mean that they, like Sisyphus, won’t try to keep their revolutions rolling along.
Yenor calls this phenomenon, “The Rolling Revolution”. But unlike Sisyphus, the futility of their labors doesn’t affect them alone; they insist on making the rest of us push things along, too. Failure is never proof that their ideologies are defective or against Nature–it only means that efforts to root out resistance aren’t radical enough. (The origin of the name ‘radical” means ‘to the root’.)
Dr. Yenor’s book can be said to consist of three interrelated parts. First, he describes the ways in which feminism, liberalism, and the sexual revolution have rolled like a juggernaut over our institutions. (Although they are in many ways mutually reinforcing, nevertheless in some ways they are incompatible; for instance, sadomasochism by definition is not liberal—oppression is how sadomasochism works—sadomasochists like it that way.) Feeling-out the Natural limits of these ideologies constitutes the second part of the book (and it is the basis for the book’s subtitle). And finally, the last part of the book attempts to point a way forward, (and is the basis for the main title of the book—“The Recovery of Family Life”).
Just What is Ideology?
Defining your terms often helps your readers, and a definition of ‘ideology’ would have been helpful. (The subtitle is about the limits of modern ideologies, after all.) I don’t recall coming across one (and a glance at the index indicates that I didn’t miss anything). The closest thing to a definition that I did come across was this:
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When You’re Up to Your Neck in Mud—Sing!
I’ve heard many stories of believers being ushered into heaven with the singing of loved ones gathered around their death-bed. That’s how I’d want to go too, if I had a choice. But singing isn’t only for death, it’s also for life. When we make a habit of singing every day, whether we’re up to our necks in mud or not, God is praised and we’ll be encouraged.
Christians recognize the value of singing. God’s Word teaches us not only to praise him with our songs, but also to encourage one another with singing (Eph. 5:19; Col. 3:16). There’s just something God has put into music that it can have such a powerful positive effect on our state of mind.
This is even recognized in the world. William McRaven was the commander of US Special Force Command when he gave an oft-quoted speech at a university graduation in Texas in 2014. He spoke of his experiences in becoming a US Navy SEAL. This special forces selection and training is regarded as being the toughest in the world. Many don’t make it through and those who do are not only tough physically, but mentally.
McRaven spoke about his Hell Week at Basic Underwater Demolition SEAL (BUD/S) training:
The ninth week of SEAL training is referred to as Hell Week. It is six days of no sleep, constant physical and mental harassment and one special day at the Mud Flats. The Mud Flats are an area between San Diego and Tijuana where the water runs off and creates the Tijuana sloughs—a swampy patch of terrain where the mud will engulf you.
It is on Wednesday of Hell Week that you paddle down to the mud flats and spend the next 15 hours trying to survive the freezing-cold mud, the howling wind and the incessant pressure from the instructors to quit.
As the sun began to set that Wednesday evening, my training class, having committed some “egregious infraction of the rules” was ordered into the mud. The mud consumed each man till there was nothing visible but our heads. The instructors told us we could leave the mud if only five men would quit—just five men and we could get out of the oppressive cold.
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