Don't Let Sin Take Hold of You

Romans 6:12 “Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal bodies, to make you obey their passions.”

Don’t let sin reign in our mortal bodies. Don’t let sin take hold of us to make us obey its passions. While we all have a sinful nature and can understand the temptation to do wrong, the goal in our Christian lives ought to be to subdue our human nature to the will of the Lord. Take every thought captive to the obedience of Christ. Tame our tongues. Use our bodies as instruments of righteousness.

While it may seem like an impossible feat to say “don’t sin”, here we have Paul telling the church not to let sin reign in their bodies and Jesus telling sinners to “sin no more”. While we aren’t perfect that doesn’t mean that we should give excuse to keep sinning. We can strive to be more and more like Christ.

To rid ourselves of sin, there will be hard work involved especially for those deep rooted habits and temptations. It can feel like second nature to think pridefully, to judge people, curse with our mouths, and so on. The first step to ridding ourselves of these sinful habits is to recognize them, pray for forgiveness, and humbly ask for the Lord’s help in overcoming them. Then actively try not to do the sin in question, resist the temptations. I have found having an accountability partner helpful and doing a daily a daily review with the Lord as a great way to reflect. If we still feel that we are not overcoming sin, let us look to how our Lord and Savior Jesus overcame temptations. Through prayer and fasting, Jesus resisted all of the devil’s temptations and countered him with Scripture.

The devil would have us to minimize our sins, hide our sins, justify them, or openly share them as a “that’s my weak spot” so that we don’t actively try to uproot them. Let’s not allow sin to have a seat at our table. Let’s not allow sin to take hold of us.