Okay, the title of the handout is What to Do When You Can't Seem to Overcome Whatever That Sin Is, and there is a fundamental flaw, I think, in the title, and that is that to approach killing sin as an isolated phenomenon, as if we have a particular area of habitual sin, and perhaps we do. But as we'll explore this along the way, it becomes very obvious that we can't compartmentalize sin. We can't simply say, I want to tackle this particular area of besetting sin or this particular area of habitual sin. It really is, as we'll see, a whole-of-life undertaking. We have to be aggressive and comprehensive and dependent upon the Holy Spirit to really kill sin. But it's imperative that we do that. That's what we're called to do in order that we can grow in our likeness to the Lord Jesus Christ and the power of the Holy Spirit. But first of all, words of overview or introduction. The first few quotes really deal with the prevalence of sin. John Calvin, no one knows the 100th part of the sin that clings to a soul. And Jerry Rags says something very similar to that. He says, the moment we imagine that we have exhaustively assessed the sin of our hearts, we have planted, watered, and harvested a crop of pride. We really don't know how much sin is going on in our lives. We have the ability to isolate these things and to compartmentalize our lives and to live in denial as to the sin that's in our lives. It is ubiquitous. It is serious. Paul tripped, sin plays havoc with our spiritual vision. This is the reason that I think, for the most part, we are not even aware of how prevalent and how severe the issue of sin is in each of our lives. He goes on to say that we tend to be blind to our own sin. And that's why the scripture says that we need to take the log out of our own eye before we look at the speck in someone else's eye. It's part of our very constitution that we have an acute ability to identify sin in someone else's life and yet have glaring blind spots in our own lives. I know that's true for me. It has been true over the years. It's true for all of us. We have blind spots in our lives. We simply don't know. Ed Welch, only when we don't see sin should we be suspicious of our hearts. So it's a sobering subject. I can't think of anything more important for the life of the Christian than to deal with the subject of mortification of sin. But the gravity of sin, William Bridge, an older commentator, talks about the guilt of sin and the filth of sin. And the guilt of sin and the filth of sin are so momentous that only the blood of Jesus Christ shed on the cross for his people could really deal with those issues. That's how severe the issue is, the guilt of sin and the filth of sin. Brian Chappell said, more than the arguments we can muster about the awful consequences upon us, we tend to focus upon the consequences in our lives, either the discovery of sin by someone else and the embarrassment that that might cause, the shame that that might cause, or the discipline that the Lord might bring into our lives and will bring into our lives if we don't deal with the sin. But the real impetus for killing sin is not primarily the consequences in our own lives. what it does to the Lord Jesus and the price that he personally paid for our sin in our place on the cross, suffering the wrath of a holy God, so severe that before he went to the cross, he prayed, Father, be your will, take this cup from me, yet not my will, but thine be done. He knew what was coming. And on the cross, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? The fact that he suffered the infinite wrath of a holy God on our behalf testifies to the gravity of sin. It couldn't be more serious. So we go to page two, what I call the insidious nature of sin. And sin counterfeits its way into our lives. We often don't even realize what we're doing, but J.C. says we're too apt to forget that temptation to sin will rarely present itself to us in its true colors, saying, I'm your deadly enemy. I want to ruin you forever. That's not the nature of sin. It tends to disguise itself, to cloak itself in something attractive, something beautiful, something pleasing, something gratifying. But it's none of those. It's not beautiful. It's ugly. It's not satisfying. It ultimately results in pain and anguish. Jerry Bridges, our minds are mental greenhouses where unlawful thoughts once planted are nurtured and watered. He goes on to say that the thought life then is our first line of defense in the battle for self-control. And the point that he's making is that external reformation, trying to sort of shine up our lives and deal with the behavioral aspect of what we see will never root out sin. It's always inevitably a matter of the heart. It starts in the mind, it starts within, and it ultimately manifests itself either in an attitude or an action, something that we omit to do that we should do or something that we do that, frankly, we know better. but it's a grievous thing. Well, the consequences, and by the way, and that's why we're told in Proverbs 4.23 to guard our hearts, to be watchful of our hearts, for from within are the wellsprings of life. Sin is always an internal issue. It ultimately manifests itself for the most part externally, not always, it could be just strictly an attitudinal issue or a disposition, but it always begins internally. What happens if it's left unchecked? Ian Duguid said, sin has a powerful vortex effect. Getting out is much harder than getting in. And he's talking about you're caught in a torrent of sin and left unchecked, it never goes unabated. It just continues to magnify its impact on our lives if we don't deal with it aggressively. Earlier in one of the two o'clock sessions I dealt with, Saul in 1 Samuel 15, that was when he was told to kill Agag, and he didn't, and he was told not to save any of the booty from the nation that had been subjugated, and he justified his sin, his rebellion, with some very sanctimonious language that, no, we're going to use these for sacrifices. And then Samuel said, no, what's this bleeding of the sheep, this lowing of the oxen that I hear? We have an amazing ability to sanctify sin in our lives and to paint it with pretty colors and to justify what we do with religious language sometimes. But the issue in 1 Samuel 13 was when Saul was impatient because there was a battle waging, and he was told to wait for Samuel because only a priest could offer a sacrifice. And Saul was deathly afraid that if there was no sacrifice made, that Israel would be suffering great loss, if not total loss. And so he took matters into his own hands. That's the essence of sin. It's rebellion. It's insubordination. It's taking matters into our own hands. It's not trusting God that what He has told us to do is always the right thing to do. And when we begin to second-guess God and begin to take things into our own hands and rationalize our sin, it progresses. It becomes an ugly, ugly thing. And so we have this ongoing battle, all of us do, with indwelling sin. Sam Storms says this. Remorse, regret, sorrow, and the pain provoked by sin will only increase and intensify the longer we're Christians. Maturity and faith does not lead to less sorrow over sin, but more. And the point that he's making, this is the same thing that you read in Romans 7, when Paul, in Romans 7, verse 24, writes, wretched man that I am. I mean, Paul, the apostle himself, wretched man that I am. Who will deliver me from the body of this death? He saw in his own life the prevalence of sin, the ubiquitous nature of sin, and it troubled him deeply, but a godly, godly man, and yet he's wretched man that I am. And the more mature we grow in Christ, the more cognizant we are, the more cognizant we should be of the nature of sin and how ugly it is, which leads us to page three. The only appropriate response to sin is to hate it, is to literally despise it. not primarily for its consequences in our lives, not simply because we fear detection, not simply because we find it personally distasteful, but because it offends God, because it is direct rebellion against God Himself. Jerry Bridges says, as we grow in holiness, we grow in hatred of sin. And then Richard Sibbes, it's evident that our conversion is sound. In other words, we're really growing in Christ, he says, the Puritan Richard Sibbes, when we loathe and hate sin from our hearts. That would be a prayer. It says, God, may I hate the things that you hate? And what does God hate? He hates sin. And that would be a godly prayer. God, would you implant in my heart a passion to love what you love, which is obedience. and worshiping the Lord Jesus Christ and seeking him with all of our heart, soul, mind, and strength, and to hate what he hates. What he hates is rebellion. He hates insubordination. He hates taking things into our own hands. He hates when we don't trust him because he's told us what to do, and we think we've got a better path. We think we've got a different approach to things. Thomas Watson, the Puritan, till sin be bitter, Christ will not be sweet. And at the liberty of paraphrasing Thomas Watson, I'll actually turn that around and say, till Christ be sweet, sin will not be bitter. If we want to hate sin, we have to love Jesus. We have to see Jesus for who he is and see him in all of his glory and his purity and his majesty. And the more we behold Christ, the more sin will become detestable in our own hearts. Well, John Owen, arguably wrote the magnum opus on this whole subject, The Mortification of Sin. This is a Banner of Truth edition. It's abridged. It's somewhat modernized, but there's no compromise in the essence of what's been said. But if you wanted to find a treatise, and it's actually quite readable, you can look at the heads and the paragraphs and you can get through it without too much trouble. The original Owen can be a stretch, quite honestly, but this version is very readable and it's eminently helpful. But this classic treatise by the Puritan John Owen, The Mortification of Sin, he talks about how sin has to be awakened if we're going to kill it. What he means by awakened is the fact that we have to submit our hearts to the law of God. He's not simply talking about the Ten Commandments, although the Ten Commandments are the moral law of God. He's talking about the total teaching of Scripture. And there's a reason that the psalmist in Psalm 119, thy word have I hid in my heart that I might not want sin against thee. And so there are many, many passages that we could turn to. The law of God, the word of God, the more it's implanted in our heart, the more the Spirit of God writes that word upon our hearts, the more we see who we are. And once we see who we are, we see not just the bad, we see what God is doing in our lives. We praise the Lord for the growth that we have, for the progress that we're making. And yet, if we're honest, we see how much further we have to go. We see the battles that we have to wage if we're going to honor Christ with the totality of our lives. And that's what the Word of God will do for us as we look at the Scriptures and as the Scriptures read us, as well as us reading the Scriptures. But there's six motivations from John Owen for dealing with sin and hating sin in our lives. And these deal with the negative consequences of sin. I'm just going to touch on them briefly. There's 15 pages in the handout, so obviously I can't cover all of this, but I will hit on what I think are the most salient points, and I'll refer the rest of it to you for reading later this week. But we should fear the deceitfulness of sin. And the point that he makes is that when you practice sin, you become incapable of spiritually evaluating situations properly. This is the point that was made earlier in the quotation by Paul Tripp, that we have the amazing ability, the sinful ability to recharacterize sin, to rationalize it, to deny it, to relabel it, to minimize. We do all of those things to make sin more palatable, to make it more attractive for us. But we need to realize that we can't be dabbling with sin. We can't be trifling with sin. It's deadly. It's ugly. It will destroy our spiritual lives if it's left unchecked. Secondly, top of page four, avoid the hardship of correction. And the point that Owen is making is that God loves his people so much that he will not allow abated sin to progress and to go undealt with in our lives. Hebrews 12 says that no discipline for the moment seems pleasant, but we have fathers who disciplined us as seemed best to them, but our Heavenly Father, He doesn't punish His children. Please understand that. He punished Christ in our place. God does not punish His children, but He will sternly discipline and chasten His children, not out of hatred for the children, but out of hatred for the sin that indwells their hearts, and for the defilement that it brings to His name, and to the wreckage that unabated sin will bring in our lives. And so He disciplines us, and sometimes it can be extremely painful. There's any number of ways that the Lord will discipline His people. In 1 Corinthians, He took literally some of them home prematurely. Well, from a human standpoint, prematurely. And some of them were sick. Some of them fell asleep. They died. There are any number of instances. Sometimes the providence of God is painful indeed. There are dark providences that the Lord brings into our lives to get our attention. He will not allow sin to continue unabated because He loves His children. And no father looks at the life of a child and says, I'm just going to let them go their own way. No, I love them too much. I want to I will inevitably discipline them because they will be conformed to the image of my Son, and I cannot simply stand by and allow unabated sin to wreak havoc in their lives and to bring dishonor to my name. So we look at Hebrews 12, and it's a sobering passage. It ultimately yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness, the writer of Hebrews says. And that's the goal of discipline. It ultimately results in the peaceful fruit of righteousness. But the process itself can be quite painful. Spurgeon said, when we deal seriously with our sin, God will deal gently with us. I think you can probably flip that around and say when we are indifferent towards our sin, God will not deal gently with His children. That's not a threat. It's just, it's the reality. And again, he's not punishing his children. God never punishes children. All of the punishment took place at Calvary when his wrath was poured out on his own beloved son who took the wrath that we deserve. Third, the loss of peace. We should covet a clear conscience before God. There's nothing more troubling than to have unconfessed sin, sin that continues to just fester within our lives. And you know, perhaps from your own experience, the discomfort that that brings in your own heart, the sleeplessness at times. David writes about these things. When I get silent about my sin, my body wasted away through my groaning all day long, and day and night your hand was heavy upon me. We want to avoid that, if we can avoid that, by dealing with our sins. Any number of people have said, we need to keep short accounts with God. We need to keep short accounts with God. And what we mean by that is when the Holy Spirit brings sin into our awareness, then we need to say, thank you. Thank you for making me aware of that. It's painful for me to see this. It is saddening for me to see this. But you have not left me without a means for me to deal with this sin. Thank you for alerting me to this. If you go to a doctor and he gives you a very sobering diagnosis, the immediate result could be anxiety, it could be a painful expression, but you say, man, wouldn't I rather know that I've got this, and to know that it's treatable, and to know that this sin can actually be addressed in my life, and it will be addressed. The Holy Spirit enables us to deal with those things. But a clear conscience before God is a wonderful thing, and we need to really avoid any kind of sin that disturbs that peace. Fourth is to shun a fruitless existence. And the point is, there's actually a passage in the psalm, if I regard sin in my heart, the Lord will not hear me. That doesn't mean he, obviously the Lord hears everything. He is omniscient. But there is a distance that comes into our lives when we have sin that is unconfessed. When it says, regard sin, when I don't deal with it, when I let it incubate in my life, that separates our fellowship with God. It causes the coldness to come into our spiritual lives. And number six, grieve not the Holy Spirit, pardon me, number five, it is possible, brothers and sisters, to grieve the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is a person. And unabated sin offends the indwelling Holy Spirit. And we don't want to do that. You don't want to grieve the Holy Spirit. And in a related note, Owen writes, when we sin, Christ's new creature in the heart is wounded, his love is foiled, and the enemy is gratified. When he says the enemy's gratified, is that when we don't deal with sin in our lives, then the devil's just rejoicing. The devil's really happy about that. And God is saddened by that, because we're bringing dishonor upon him and we're rebelling against him. And so we need to recognize that we don't want to bring unhappiness to God. He will deal with that in our lives. So all of that said, page five, what do we do? And now we deal with the mortification of sin. That term only appears twice in the Scriptures. Romans 8.13, which was actually the theme verse for the mortification of sin. If by the Spirit you're putting to death the deeds of the body, you will live. Romans 8.13. And then Colossians 3.5, another passage where we deal with the killing of sin. That's what mortification means. It means aggressively killing sin, going after it. John Owen says, if sin be subtle, strong, and always at work in the business of killing our souls, and we are slothful, negligent, foolish, and proceeding to the ruin thereof, can we expect a comfortable event? There is not a day but sin foils or is foiled, prevails or is prevailed on, and it will be so while we live in this world. And the point is, we're in a battle. We need to recognize that. We need to embrace that. We need to understand that. and to grasp the fact that every day we're in the process of either killing sin or sin will be festering within our lives. Because we have indwelling sin. We need to see where it is. The psalmist says in Psalm 139, Search me, O God, and know my heart. Try me, and know my anxious thoughts. See if there be any hurtful way in me, and lead me in the everlasting way. In Psalm 19, May the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, my rock, or my strength, and my redeemer. Those are prayers that we can pray. God, would You cause the disposition of our heart to be pleasing to You, not only our outward behavior, but certainly our heart, our mind, our inner being. And search me, O God, and know my heart. Try me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there be any hurtful way in me, and lead me in the everlasting way. And He will. Psalm 23, the psalmist says, He leads me in the paths of righteousness for His name's sake. And He will do that. God is always in the business of discipling His children and growing His children up. And we need to be active participants from our standpoint in that as well. But what we do, the key in mortification is looking to Christ. And Owen writes this, how can you look longingly upon Satan's offerings when the cross of Christ is in front of your eyes? And the point that he's making, that John Owen is making, is how can we be indifferent? How can we be cavalier? How can we be accepting of rebellion against our sovereign God, the one who redeemed us and delivered us from the domain of darkness and brought us, as Colossians says, into the kingdom of his dear son, knowing that it was our sin, our personal sin, that resulted in Jesus Christ suffering the wrath of father in our place. Physical pain, but absolutely a horrendous, torturous pain. But even much more momentous is the wrath of God that He personally suffered. We can't be indifferent to that. That's literally the cost of sin. That's the penalty of sin suffered in our place. Ian Duguid says, only a deep grasp of the gospel has the power to bring about deep change in our hearts. It's knowing the terrible price that has already been paid for our sin that enables us to say no to sin. Charles Spurgeon, look to the cross and hate your sin, for sin nailed your well-beloved to the tree. Look up to the cross and you will kill sin, for the strength of Jesus' love will make you strong to put down the tendencies to sin. Particulars, before we get to particulars, we're going to look at sort of an overall view of mortification of sin, and I say that because The premise of the title that I was given to address is, what do we do when I can't seem to deal with that sin? And there is implicit in that that we can compartmentalize sin, that we can somehow attack a particular area of our lives. And we can, and we must. We all have vulnerabilities. We all have areas where we battle sin. Perhaps we have areas that are habitual areas of disobedience in our lives. And so we must tackle that, but we can't compartmentalize sin. Owen, I'll just read this very quickly. In one of his chapters he says, God requires universal obedience. You cannot mortify a specific lust that is troubling you unless you are seeking to obey the Lord from the heart in all areas. And I think that's a very cogent, a very penetrating thought, that we can't simply say, God, I've got this problem, quote-unquote. And that's another thing we do. We euphemize sin. We call it very polite things. I'm struggling. I have wrong priorities. Well, idolatry is the wrong priorities. Struggling is I'm rebelling against you, God. I'm literally rebelling against you. I'm putting my own will right in front of yours. throwing my fist right in your face by disobeying you. We tend to say things about sin that are just simply not biblical. But before we get into that, we'll look at the big picture. And Sinclair Ferguson brings an account into an article that he wrote. He said one time at a conference, a young pastor came to him at the end as they were disbanding after the conference, and he said, can you spend some time with me walking me through the steps of how it means to mortify sin? And Sinclair Ferguson, I don't know to this day whether he was asking for himself or for his congregation or for both, but he was asking a very important question. And so what he did was, what Sinclair Ferguson did was he outlined for this dear brother who went home to be with the Lord not too long after this, this younger pastor, the main points from John Owen's mortification of Scripture. And the first thing we do, mortification of sin, is we look to the Scriptures, not human wisdom. And we're not looking at tools, we're not looking at behavior modification, we're not looking at simply trying to change the externals of our lives. What does the Scripture say? And there's actually a number of passages that deal with the mortification of sin, but the two most direct passages have one thing in common. and that is they both deal with the term mortification, killing of sin, and secondly, the entire context of Romans 8 and Colossians 3 is much broader than killing sin. It deals, as we'll see, with our identity in Christ, who we are, and until we grasp our identity in Christ and we know who we are, what's happened in our lives, if we truly have turned to Christ, who are we, then that's really the key that unlocks the door to mortifying sin, but Romans 8, 13, if you're living according to the flesh, you must die, but if by the spirit, and that's such a key point, I'll deal with this more later, but if by the spirit, it's not simply by self-reformation, it's not simply by trying harder, you're putting to death or mortifying the deeds of the body, you will live. Colossians 3, consider the members of your earthly body as dead, to immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and greed, which amounts to idolatry. And the point that he's making is that each of these passages deal not only with killing sin, but it deals with this broader context of who we are. And so Colossians 3 is really sort of the epicenter that we'll be looking at for what does the Scripture say about killing sin and living under Christ. That's in four points. just to give you a heads up of where we're going. Number one, a new identity, and this is all in the notes. Number one is a new identity, and secondly, is looking at the mortification as a whole of life undertaking, not an isolated, compartmentalized, I've got to tackle this particular area of sin, but the entirety of our lives. And number three, looking at Paul's directives, not recommendations, not suggestions, but what does Paul, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, say that we must do And number four, to be relentless, to be absolutely vicious in putting sin to death. So first of all, our new identity, top of page seven, Paul, the apostle, underlines how important it is to see our identity in Christ in Colossians 3 verses 1 through 4. Therefore, if you've been raised up with Christ, and that if is not a conditional Well, perhaps it is. You know, you have been raised up with Christ. If you are a believer, you have been raised up with Christ. Keep seeking the things above where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your mind on things above, not on the things that are on earth, for you have died and your life is hidden with Christ and God. You have died. There's one of these little booklets that has been on the rack back in the Northex. by Jeffrey Thomas, How to Kill Remaining Sin, a short piece, but it's very helpful. He makes the important observation. Paul doesn't say you must die or you should die. It's not something that we're instructed to do. He says, you have died. Realize that. You're dead. You're not the person that you once were. And so what he's saying is that sin no longer has dominion over you. So act like who you are. Why do you voluntarily subject yourself to something that has no dominion over you? What's my authority for saying that? The very Word of God. Sin no longer has dominion over you. Do we battle against sin? Yes, absolutely. Even John Owen makes the point, what is mortification and what is it not? Mortification is not the extinction of sin. Mortification is not completely subjugating sin to the point where it never ever surfaces again in our lives. It's completely eradicated. That never happens, this side of glory. But it means bringing it to the point where we're not living in dominion under that sin, where it's not subjugating our lives. And so we're told, you've died. And so how often do we forget who we are? Thomas Boston, the Puritan, wrote a piece called The Fourfold State of Man, and he talks about the fact that in innocence, Adam and Eve had the capacity to sin or not to sin, and they sinned. And then that thrust all of mankind into the second state, which was, what's our condition before Christ, before we're regenerated? We don't have the ability not to sin. The unbeliever does not have the ability not to sin. That's a grim thing. What is our condition once we are in Christ? We have the capacity not to sin. Do you believe that? The scripture says that we have the capacity not to sin. Matter of fact, we're told not to let sin have dominion in our lives because it doesn't. Why do we keep acting as if sin has the upper hand, the uncontrollable upper hand, when the scripture says it does not? That doesn't mean we won't battle sin. We will. It's inevitable. If we say we haven't sinned, we lie and we make God a liar. But sin does not have to have the upper hand in our lives. And so the point that is made in the middle of the page is failure to deal with the presence of sin can often be traced back to spiritual amnesia, forgetfulness of our new, true, real identity. Spiritual amnesia, I forgot who I am. No, you're not an unbeliever. No, you're a child of God. The Holy Spirit indwells you. You have a new nature. You have indwelling sin. But you do not have to allow sin to have dominion over your lives. Matter of fact, what should we say then? Paul says in Romans 6, shall we continue in sin that grace might increase? May it never be. Strongest expression you can possibly put together in Greek, absolutely not. So we do not continue in sin that grace might increase. How shall we who died to sin still continue to live in it? That's what Paul says. And that's a great question. Why do we do that? Perhaps it's because we've forgotten who we are. And it's a wonderful ploy of the enemy just to allow us to keep wandering along in a Christian life, acting like we're unbelievers, not knowing that the bonds of sin, of dominion in our lives have been broken. Will we continue to battle? Yes, we will. Do we have to sin? We do not have to sin. The Holy Spirit enables us. We have a new nature. So as a believer, I am someone who's been delivered from the dominion of sin, and therefore is free and motivated to fight against the remnants of sin's army in my heart. So number one, be who you are. Recognize your identity in Christ. Set aside the spiritual amnesia, embrace who you are. You're not an unbeliever, you are a new child. Second, this whole of life aspect, Paul goes on to expose the workings of sin in every area of our lives in chapter 3, verses 5 through 11. Consider the members of your earthly body as dead to immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, greed, which amounts to idolatry. Will you notice something? I once heard a message by Derek Thomas on this very subject, and he said, Sin has names. We need to call sin what the Bible calls sin. It's lust. It's immorality. It's evil desire. Instead of saying, I've got wrong priorities, no, you're engaging in idolatry. Covetousness is idolatry, etc. So consider the members of your body is dead to all of these things, for it is because of these things. What a motivation this is. These very things are the things that the wrath of God will come upon the sons of obedience. Those who are not in Christ will go to hell for doing the very things that you're doing. This is not a trivial subject. Sin is not to be played with. Yes, if you're in Christ, Christ has suffered the wrath of the Father in your place. But sin is not trivial. People literally go to hell because of this. The wrath of God is coming upon people because of the very things that you're doing, upon the sons of disobedience. And in them, look at this, you once walked. That was who you were, once walked. Not that you are walking, you once walked when you were living in it. But now, but now, put them all aside. Anger, wrath, malice, slander, abusive speech from your mouth. On top of page eight, don't lie to one another. Since you what? You laid aside the old self with its evil practices. And this goes to the issue of putting off and putting on. And if put on the new self, this doesn't mean that you, You literally have a new self, a new identity in Christ. And so what Paul is doing is he's going through several dimensions of sin in our lives. In private life, he does that in verse 5. Interpersonal or public life in verse 8. And relational life in the church in verses 9 through 11. And so the point that is being made here is that mortification of sin deals holistically. It is the entirety of our lives. We can't simply partition off a particular area of our life and say, God, I've somehow to get this area under control. No, once we embrace the fact that sin has to be beaten down by the power of the Holy Spirit, we attack sin in every area of our lives. It's literally a whole of life experience. And so what do we do with these directives? Number one, we admit sin for what it really is. Sinclair Ferguson says, call it sexual immorality, not I'm being tempted a little. Call it impurity, no, I'm not struggling with my thought life. Call it evil desire, which is idolatry, not I think I need to order my priorities a little better. The way we foster hypocrisy in our lives is by relabeling sin, and it makes it palatable to us. It makes it acceptable to us, and it may be acceptable to us, but it's not acceptable to God. And it's dangerous because it actually fosters hypocrisy, and it fosters self-deception, and it causes us to engage in a double life where we believe that somehow we've insulated our our souls from something that is pernicious, it's cancerous within our lives. We have to say, this is ugly. I've got to call it what the Bible calls it and kill it by the power of the Holy Spirit. He says how powerfully this unmasks self-deceit and helps us unmask sin lurking in the hidden corners of our hearts. Number two, cease sin for what your sin really is. Everything, and R.C. Sproul would often say, that we live coram deo, before the very face of God, and everything we do, there is no such thing as a secret sin. It may be secret to society, it may be secret to the church, it could be secret to your neighbor, it could be secret to your husband or your wife, but it's not secret to God. There's no private sin before God. Everything is right in the very face of God himself. So we need to recognize that. So we need to see what it is. It's on account of these things that the wrath of God is coming upon the sons of disobedience. Number three, recognize the inconsistency of your sin. This is the point that we made a little bit earlier, that you were not what you once were, brothers and sisters. You have a new nature. Sin no longer has dominion over you. Shall we continue in sin? The grace might increase, may it never be. How shall we who died to sin still continue to live in it? Romans 6. Go back and memorize that passage. Meditate on that. Those are guilt-edged verses that we need to be really committing to our hearts. But put on the new man. We're no longer the old man. Page nine. And this is number four. If I were going to maybe paraphrase this, be relentless. Put sin to death. It's as simple as that. Refuse it, starve it, reject it. Now, this is a very important point. Mortification and vivification. Vivification is bringing new life. And the point is that we have to put on the new ways. We can't just simply say, I'm not going to do that anymore. We have to live in obedience. And that's what Paul is saying in Colossians 3, put on a heart of compassion. Verse 14, put on love. Sweeping the house clean simply leaves us open for a further invasion of sin. It's not simply eradicating sin, it's replacing it with something that's more precious. And so we are engaging in this destruction of sin in our lives. Now, what I'm gonna do, in terms of specifics, page 10, and I'll just be brief about this. I thought this was a helpful observation by John Bluma, Desiring God, Now we're going to tackle that specific area, that sin, so to speak. We keep falling into the same sin when we fail to believe that holiness will make us happier than giving in again. Every sin, every wrongdoing, no matter what kind, whether acted out in behavior or nurtured secretly in some dark place of our heart, is a manifestation of something that we believe. Nobody sins out of duty. Every sin is some repeat version, some rerun of the original human sin when our ancient parents ate the forbidden tree's fruit. And why did they do it? Were they ignorant? No. God told them that eating the fruit would be wrongdoing and they would be far happier if they refrained from eating it. But Satan put a different spin on God's words and motives and told them they would be much happier if they ate. They weighed both assertions and they made their choice, a deadly choice. They didn't believe God. They believed that taking the fruit would yield more happiness than obeying God. They ate for the joy they wrongly believed was set before them. That's why we sin, because we choose to sin. We don't believe what God is saying. Page 13, I'm just going to flip over in the interest of time, because we really need to focus on just a few more points before the time is over. At top of page 13, and I can't overemphasize this, we cannot, we will not mortify sin in our own strength. It will not happen. Owen makes that point, the Scripture makes that point. Galatians 3, I often turn to this when I'm speaking with someone and they're trying to just shine up their lives by their own effort. Are you so foolish, having begun by the Spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh? Do you know what Paul is saying in Galatians 3? He said, how did you become a believer? The Holy Spirit drew you to Christ. The Holy Spirit gave you a new heart. The Holy Spirit caused you to be born from above. So how are you going to grow? By self-reformation? By some type of bootstrap religion? No, that's not it. We walk in the Spirit. And that's the point that Paul makes in Romans 8.13. So brethren, we're not under obligation, not under obligation to live to the flesh, to live according to the flesh. He goes on to say, but if what? By your own effort. No, no. By the spirit of God, you are putting to death the deeds of the body. You will live by the spirit of God, by the God's enablement. There's a comment that John Bloom made that was very helpful. Habitual sin is not fundamentally defeated through the power of self-denial, but through the power of a greater desire. This is the point that the Scottish theologian Thomas Chalmers made when he talked about the expulsive power of a contrary affection. He's simply saying that If you want to kill sin, you don't say, well, I'm not going to do that. You say, what do I love more? What would be the better path? What would be truly satisfying? What will I pursue? And it's a contrary affection. And the more we meditate on Christ, the more the Word of God fills our hearts, the more we see that obedience before God and submitting to His perfect rule in our lives is what will always result in true joy, and that presence is fullness and joy, and that right hand are pleasures forevermore. Psalm 16. Do we believe that? In the presence of God is true joy. Or would you say, no, in my own way I will find joy. No, you will never find joy in your own way. Ever, ever, ever. So we have to divest ourselves of the lie. And we have to say, God has told me what it means to be pleasing to Him and what true joy and happiness will be. And it comes by submitting to Him our perfect King, our sovereign over all things. Page 15, I'm just gonna go to page 15 now. And I'll just, a couple of comments because we're out of time. Without the Spirit of God, there would be neither mortification nor vivification in the life of the believer. That's the point. Brothers and sisters, go back to Galatians 3.3. Go back to Romans 8.13. Are you so foolish, having begun by the Spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh? No, that's foolish. That's ridiculous. You don't grow by the flesh, by your own efforts. Stop doing that. The Spirit of God will enable you to do this thing. He's the one that conforms us. Yes, it is a constant series of choices that we make. Paul tells us in Ephesians 4.1, to walk in a manner worthy of the calling we've been called. That's an imperative. That requires us to obey. But do we obey in our own strength? No. We say, God, would you help me? Would you enable me, the Spirit of God, to lay aside the very thing that brings dishonor to the name of Christ? and to this area of sin in my life, my rebellion against you, oh God, I want to put that on the altar and just, I want you to kill it. I want you to set it aside. Do you believe that God will honor that prayer? Yes, he will, absolutely. He's the only one that can bring it to pass in your lives. We can't do it on our own. A book that you might consider, Chris Lungard, The Enemy Within, straight talk about the power and defeat of sin. In our former church, I actually led a small group discussion on that very book years ago. It's really good. It's not a paraphrase of the mortification of sin. It's basically a 20th century, because it was written back then, treatment of how we mortify sin, but it encapsulates all of the issues about how do we kill sin. And it's easily available, but The Enemy Within by Chris Lungard. Without the spirit of God, There would be neither mortification nor vivification in the life of the believer. Never forget that. If you walk away with anything else, it's number one, never forget who you are. Sin does not have to have dominion over your lives. It should not. And then secondly, we don't grow in Christ with our own self-effort by just simply trying to muscle up and become more holy. That's not the way that it works. That's why we pray, would you fill me with the Holy Spirit? The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. Against such things there is no law. That's what the Spirit of God produces in our lives. So there's nothing more serious than killing sin. There's nothing more necessary than killing sin, but there's nothing more promising than than God's own word that we do not have to obey sin. Sin does not have dominion over us. We need to live in that light and not live based upon some identity that may have been true for us 10 years ago or 10 weeks ago, whenever you came to Christ. You were a new creation in Christ. If anyone's in Christ, they are a new creation. The old things passed away, new things have come. 2 Corinthians 5, 17. Father, I pray that you would, by your grace cause us to see sin for what it is, as ugly, as disastrous, as hateful. Lord, it brings dishonor upon You. And Lord, may we be earnest in availing ourselves of the Word of God, that Your Word would be written upon our hearts, that we would see sin for all it is, and we would behold the beauty and glory of Christ. and meditate often upon what our Savior has done and is doing. Even now, He's praying for us as our high priest in heaven, that we would avail ourselves of the power of the Holy Spirit, that we would progressively, persistently, aggressively kill sin and grow into righteousness. In Jesus' name, amen.