Verse: Against You, You only, I have sinned and done what is evil in Your sight, so that You are justified when You speak and pure when You judge. Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin my mother conceived me. Psalm 51:4-5
There is a doctrine called total depravity. By ourselves, we are totally and utterly depraved. Isiah 64:6-7 says, “We have all become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a polluted garment. We all fade like a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away. There is no one who calls upon your name, who rouses himself to take hold of you; for you have hidden your face from us, and have made us melt in[c] the hand of our iniquities.” We can do nothing righteous on our own because we are conceived in sin.
You may say, “I know people who do good things all the time and they are not Christians.” But to God’s standard, no one is righteous without His Spirit. James 2:10 says, “For whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles in one point, he has become guilty of all”. Breaking God’s perfect and Holy law in any way makes you guilty of violating His standard and therefore not “good”. Another verse to prove this point is Romans 3:10-12 “as it is written, “There is none righteous, not even one; there is none who understands, there is none who seeks for God; all have turned aside, together they have become worthless; there is none who does good, there is not even one.”
So why do I labor this point? Why do I want to make sure that you know that you by yourself are not good, not righteous? Because that is the enemy. The enemy is your sinful flesh, and no matter how much you want to tell yourself that by your own power you can be righteous, you cannot.
It is important to understand this point. So many times, we are tempted or confront sin and think that by some merit of our own or some “powerful statement” that we can come up with, we can equal what God does in our life. This is wrong. Without God, we cannot please Him and do right. Sure, we may get one or two victories with pure discipline, but it is the Lord that changes the heart.
We are our own worst enemy. Our flesh knows the most about tempting us so it will move us in a way to tempt us to sin against God. Resist this. Do not buy into the lie that you must please yourself. Do not love the slavery that comes with the passions of the flesh rather turn to our Lord.
Do not buy into the lie that on your own you can fight off temptation. You are born in sin because of the fall of Adam. Through Adam sin entered the world and now all of us are born this way. You are not strong enough to resist, you need the power of God. You need to be in His word and call upon the Spirit in times of need. Remember these words from Jeremiah 17:5, “Thus says the Lord: ‘Cursed is the man who trusts in man and makes flesh his strength, whose heart turns away from the Lord’”.
Written By,
John Cooper Jr.
Godly Grunt 6
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