Victory Over Sin – A Personal Account
Unknown
I don’t think most people know how to change because they have never gained the victory in certain key areas. No matter how you look at it, if there is a known sin in your life it has to be dealt with before you can progress in your walk with Christ. If you do not gain the victory over that sin it gains the victory over you and begins to push you back. God wants you to gain the victory, and you have to want to gain that same victory.
When we repent (being sorry enough to quit cold turkey) we ask forgiveness, accept forgiveness and a clean slate, and trust in His strength to keep us there. If we fail (and you cannot think about failing when repenting or you have not repented; repenting is reliance on the power of God to keep you clean and to change your desires), we have an intercessor who gives us an opportunity to repent and continue on.
I failed for years because I repented knowing I was going to commit the same sin again. I actually never repented. I never had FAITH (extreme confidence) that God could overcome the sin if I would ask His help every time. Often when I would pray, the thoughts would come, but I hated the thoughts so much I would pray anyway. I was tired of being filthy. God did not want me to be that way, he wanted me to trust in Him every time and stop thinking I could make up my mind to fix the problem. “Greater is HE that is in you than he that is in the world.”
Satan cannot win unless we let him. He does not have power over our lives unless we give it. I cannot say that I never have sinful thoughts, but I can say that they no longer dominate my life like they once did. I had to give up TV, secular music, and situations that brought on the thoughts. I give God all the credit. I know I could and cannot do it alone.
You have to use the Sword ~ The Bible. You have to memorize key verses to quote when you are in the heat of temptation (temptation is not sin, but indulging in the temptation is sin). He will not take away the temptation. You must have the choice in the matter or you would be a spiritual robot.
Gal 5:16-18 But I say, walk {and} live [habitually] in the [Holy] Spirit [responsive to {and} controlled {and} guided by the Spirit]; then you will certainly not gratify the cravings {and} desires of the flesh (of human nature without God). For the desires of the flesh are opposed to the [Holy] Spirit, and the [desires of the] Spirit are opposed to the flesh (godless human nature); for these are antagonistic to each other [continually withstanding and in conflict with each other], so that you are not free {but} are prevented from doing what you desire to do. But if you are guided (led) by the [Holy] Spirit, you are not subject to the Law.
You need to be connected to a caring church. You cannot win as quickly alone. You need an army of many, not one.
Gal 6:1-6 BRETHREN, IF any person is overtaken in misconduct {or} sin of any sort, you who are spiritual [who are responsive to and controlled by the Spirit] should set him right {and} restore {and} reinstate him, without any sense of superiority {and} with all gentleness, keeping an attentive eye on yourself, lest you should be tempted also. Bear (endure, carry) one another’s burdens {and} troublesome moral faults, and in this way fulfill {and} observe perfectly the law of Christ (the Messiah) {and} complete what is lacking [in your obedience to it]. For if any person thinks himself to be somebody [too important to condescend to shoulder another’s load] when he is nobody [of superiority except in his own estimation], he deceives {and} deludes {and} cheats himself. But let every person carefully scrutinize {and} examine {and} test his own conduct {and} his own work. He can then have the personal satisfaction {and} joy of doing something commendable [in itself alone] without [resorting to] boastful comparison with his neighbor. For every person will have to bear (be equal to understanding and calmly receive) his own [little] load [of oppressive faults]. Let him who receives instruction in the Word [of God] share all good things with his teacher [contributing to his support].
You will win. If God is for you, who can stand against you? I kept repenting, hating myself, and over the process I shared with you I gained the victory. I still have battles in other areas. I hope there is something here you can use.
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My war against lust
Unknown
The day I was born again, I became a new creation. It was like love at first sight with Jesus (2 Cor 5:17). When the congregation was singing in the Spirit, I saw a bright light shine upon me, heard God’s voice and felt God’s love. Conviction broke my heart to repentance and tears. That love burned my heart with a passion to stay in His presence. Then seeing heaven and God’s Throne, hearing God’s voice, and seeing his angels in visions and in dreams became a common experience. I was totally transformed. The desire to sin was gone. I felt totally pure and holy, free from any form of sin in thought, word or deed. As I devoured the Bible and pondered on every truth and principle, God showed me the things that I must get rid of. Repentance and renunciation of sins since childhood were the main events all through the weeks that followed.
The first two years of my conversion was a sweet and awesome daily experience with God. Then one day, a brother confessed some sins of lust, asking for prayer. After praying for him, a lustful feeling stirred my body. A familiar fleshly desire stuck on my spirit and I did not know how to handle it. I attempted to drive the spirit of lust and whatever spirits were around tempting me to commit lustful acts. But my prayers seemed futile. The spirit had gripped my body and it felt as if I was losing control and going crazy. Because of that lust, the door was opened for the devil to taunt and defile me. He dug up my past pains and bitterness. They were terrible and awful situations my wife and I had to overcome. I was oppressed and became oppressive to my wife. Due to the daily pain and rejection resulting from our petty conflicts, our marriage was terribly affected. My fellowship with the Lord waned. I drifted to self pity, depression, and more lust.
In spite of my frequent falling, the Lord faithfully lifted me up when I responded to the Spirit's conviction. God never grew tired of forgiving me even when I sinned against Him "seventy times seven a day" (Matt 18:21, 22 NIV). The lustful experience that had become frequent dried my spirit quickly, making me struggle, longing for the presence of God and His anointing which I had enjoyed in earlier years. One day, the devil showed himself to me, jeering and saying " Hahaha, you sinned again! You will never get out of it!" Then he left. I was stunned because I had no authority to rebuke him. What I did was ask forgiveness of God and declare an all-out war against lust.
I refocused my spirit on God: praying, reading the scriptures, meditating, listening to His voice, praying in the Spirit - a non stop activity as long as I was awake. It was tough discipline but it paid off. I saw quick victory which I thought was the result of persevering prayer. Yes, praying against lust powerfully drives lust away. But it was just as Jesus said: the spirit will leave the house empty, and when it comes back, he brings other demons stronger than himself (Matt 12:43-45 NIV). But one early morning while I was taking my children to school, the Holy Spirit told me that perfect love will cast out lust from my desires and feelings. When lust comes back, it has no room because love occupies the entire house.
A breakthrough against lust took place in my life when the Holy Spirit led me into the powerful knowledge and experience of loving Jesus with all my heart. I reoffered my life to God, refreshed my covenant, and devoted most of my time in an intimate fellowship with Jesus, a love affair in His holy chamber.
As the Lord of your life, God must be the most important person in your heart and mind. He must be enthroned there and take charge of your affairs, little or big. He must be the God who is real and awesome in your spirit, the God that you worship, adore and love above all things. You must give everything of your life to Him, your needs, concerns, wants, desires, dreams, visions, plans and everything, because this is love. Pray out these things to God now because He must be the foundation of your warfare against lust. Your victory against lust is possible only when you are intimately relating with God who must occupy your mind, heart, and body.
Love is enough to overcome lust, but such love must be that of God, not of this world (1 John 2:15, 16 NIV). Love is pure because it does not lust. The desire to be intimate with a girl or guy is very dangerous when one's heart is not under the kingship of Jesus. Such desires must be surrendered. In fact, everything must be surrendered to the Lord (Luke 14:33; 2 Cor 5:15; Gal 4:20). A Christian must master his heart to be intimate with Jesus. He must develop his love affair with Him by submitting every thought, feeling, desire, plan, and action to God. Everything that concerns you, your breath, your fear, your faith, your lack, your plenty, must be brought to God. Let Him speak. Let Him rule over you and you will find out that that is intimacy. God is not a hard taskmaster. When He requires total submission to Him, it is meant for us to enjoy that intimacy because His requirements are meant for an intimate relationship wherein love, peace, and joy abound. Some Christians cannot appreciate the idea of submitting to God every plan and action in one's personal affairs. They cannot appreciate the talking and asking relationship with God. These people cannot appreciate this because they cannot hear God. But if you are desperately looking for answers, do it and you will enjoy the love of the Lord. How wonderful it is to hear his voice!
One time Jesus said to the crowd, "I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven." Matt 18:3 (NIV). He spoke of children as the illustration of humility and openness. Children are honest. They inquire and ask many questions. They ask many what’s, how’s and why’s. I believe that God wants us to be inquisitive like children. God wants to talk to us, teach and train us to move and have our being in the Lord. Adults do not ask questions even when they need to know something because they don't want to expose their ignorance and lack of knowledge. Such an attitude is pride. Children don't have this hang up. They ask when they do not know. Be like children; ask God when you don't know. You used to go into your thoughts squeezing your intellect to provide you answers; but in the Lord, you connect to God and let your intellect seek the mind of Christ. Now your intellect and God's intellect merge. They become one. That's powerful. The devil cannot win in such a situation. Lust cannot come in.
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Claiming Victory Over Sin
Josh Downing
Last night I was reading some stuff I downloaded back in 2005 about resisting temptation [Victory Over Sin – A Personal Account and My War Against Lust], because back when I first downloaded and read it, it was a big revelation and extremely powerful. It talks about what repentance really is, and confirms Christ's victory that's already been won for us. All we have to do is claim it. People say they know that over and over, but you'll rarely find people who actually put it into practice: claiming Christ's victory over temptations or strongholds that Satan holds in their lives, with the knowledge embedded in their hearts that they will not fall again. And I think people fail to claim and live in that victory because they forget that they're really in a spiritual battle over their own souls. Many churches and a lot of Christians downplay the fact that angels and demons are real and are extremely active in battling for the salvation/damnation of the world. Specifically, they downplay the role that demons play in our temptation and sins. They go around with the attitude that if they're saved, demons can't touch them. Yeah, right. If that were true there would be no reason for claiming victory in Christ, and resisting temptation would be simple.
Another thing some of the things I read talked about was something I'd heard and been taught years ago, both in church and through reading some of Corrie ten Boom's excerpts from her ministry overseas. When you gain the victory over a sin in your life (i.e., truly repenting with the knowledge that you won't fall again because Christ has sealed the victory for you, and going about your life by actually turning away from the sin and resisting the temptation), you have to fill that void left by the sin/evil spirit with your relationship with Christ--more importantly, His love. In Corrie ten Boom’s account, she and another minister had cast an evil spirit out of a person, but the evil spirit kept coming back and inhabiting the person again and again. God finally revealed to her that what was happening was what Christ talked about in Matthew 12:43-45: the person had never fully repented for the sins in which he was living and had not filled his life back up with God (seeking Him, praying, communing, etc). Because of that, the evil spirit was able to come back continually, even though the man had been forgiven.
I have been challenged a lot lately by my pastor and a guy named Jeb Kolby last night at dinner. Jeb went to A&M, class of '04. He is on staff at our church now. He and his wife are going on mission to Kyrgyzstan in September. They are going to "teach" at a school there. He was telling me how the pastor at our church FORCES everyone on staff to spend an hour a day with Jesus. If that is while they are at the office at church, then that is ok. Jeb said the mission leader of the school he is going to spoke to Jeb about this in order to prepare for his year of ministry. This is what he said:
People (Christians) can't commit to getting up early to spend an hour a day with Christ usually for three reasons:
1) They are too tired or lack of sleep
2) They don't have the desire
3) They don't see the relevance in doing so.
He said that if you are too tired then it is going to take a change in your lifestyle. If you have to go to bed an hour early so that you can get up an hour early, then do so. If you have to cut out watching David Letterman at night, then do it. David Letterman is not the King of the World, and he is not your savior. If you have to cut out spending time on the computer at night then do it. He said that if the President of the United States asked you to meet him at 5:00 am tomorrow morning, you would definitely make the time. What about Jesus?
If you don't have the desire, then ask for the desire!
I have committed myself to spending an hour a day at work with Jesus. From when I get to work at 10:00 AM to 11:00 AM, my door is going to be shut. I am telling my assistant not to bother me with anything at all. Luckily I have a job that allows me to do this; not everyone does. You may not, but I know you can find some time somewhere. Early in the morning or at night when you get home, before you open your computer or do anything else this should be priority. Don't take this as me preaching, because I believe we are in the same boat here. For a while I wasn't doing this for those three reasons: too tired, didn't have the desire, and didn't see the relevance in doing so. Well, I guess I knew the relevance, but didn't act like I did. While I am writing this to you I am saying it to myself just as much!
I will be praying for you about that and pray for me too.
-Kyle Webb
Even Evangelical Teens Do It
How religious beliefs do, and don't, influence sexual behavior.
By Hanna Rosin
Posted Wednesday, May 30, 2007, at 1:34 PM ET
A 19-year-old virgin walks into a bar. He's got his lucky cross in his pocket and his best jersey on. Please God, he says to himself, let this be the night. He spies a girl sitting at a table—blonde, wholesome-looking, just his type. He sidles up closer to the girl, who is chatting with some friends. Over the din, he can make out snippets of her conversation: at Bible study the other night … Pastor Ted says … saving it for marriage. Discouraged, he walks away in search of a more promising target.
Did he make the correct decision? Or did he make a hasty judgment and miss a chance for a possible love connection? The answer to such a question can be found in Forbidden Fruit: Sex & Religion in the Lives of American Teenagers by Mark Regnerus, a professor of sociology at the University of Texas at Austin. The book is a serious work of sociology based on several comprehensive surveys of young adults, coupled with in-depth interviews. But it could also double as a guide for teenage boys on the prowl (who's easier, a Catholic girl or a Jew?) or for parents of teenage girls worrying about what will happen if their daughters keep skipping church.
Regnerus goes to some length to justify his unusual pairing of subjects. Most researchers of youth behavior tend to ignore the influence of religion, he argues, and instead focus on other factors—parental input, peer pressure, race, or socioeconomic status. But sex is one area where religion has a strong impact, at least on attitudes. When academics do consider religion, they tend to make lazy assumptions that religious communities are inherently conservative, universally condemn sex, and encourage abstinence. Regnerus complicates the picture by examining the varying attitudes of different religious communities. And while sex surveys are notoriously unreliable, his great innovation is to compare conservative attitudes with actual practices.
Which brings us back to Romeo at the bar. It turns out that the answer is: He has indeed made a hasty judgment, and a common one. The girl he had his eye on is speaking the modern idiom of evangelese, and Regnerus' most surprising findings are about her type, who make up about one-third of all teenagers, but who dominate the culture's notions about religion and sex. Teenagers who identify as "evangelical" or "born again" are highly likely to sound like the girl at the bar; 80 percent think sex should be saved for marriage. But thinking is not the same as doing. Evangelical teens are actually more likely to have lost their virginity than either mainline Protestants or Catholics. They tend to lose their virginity at a slightly younger age—16.3, compared with 16.7 for the other two faiths. And they are much more likely to have had three or more sexual partners by age 17: Regnerus reports that 13.7 percent of evangelicals have, compared with 8.9 percent for mainline Protestants.
How is that possible? What happened to all those happy, young Christian couples from the '90s swearing that True Love Waits? Partly, the problem lies in the definition of evangelical. Because of the explosion of megachurches, vast numbers of people who don't identify with mainstream denominations now call themselves evangelical. The demographic includes more teenagers of a lower socioeconomic class, who are more likely to have had sex at a younger age. It also includes African-American Protestant teenagers, who are vastly more likely to be sexually active.
But partly the problem lies in the temptation-rich life of an average American teenager. The fate of the True Love Waits movement, which began with the Southern Baptist Convention in the '90s, is a perfect example. Teenagers who signed the abstinence pledge belong to a subgroup of highly motivated virgins. But even they succumb. Follow-up surveys show that at best, pledges delayed premarital sex by 18 months—a success by statistical standards but a disaster for Southern Baptist pastors.
Evangelical teens today are much less sheltered than their parents were; they watch the same TV and listen to the same music as everyone else, which causes a "cultural collision," according to Regnerus. "Be in the world, but not of it," is the standard Christian formula for how to engage with mainstream culture. But in a world hypersaturated with information, this is difficult for tech-savvy teenagers to pull off. There are no specific instructions in the Bible on how to avoid a Beyoncé video or Scarlett Johansson's lips calling to you from YouTube, not to mention the ubiquitous porn sites. For evangelicals, sex is a "symbolic boundary" marking a good Christian from a bad one, but in reality, the kids are always "sneaking across enemy lines," Regnerus argues.
The results play out in the usual 19th-century way. When evangelical parents say they talk to their kids about sex, they mean the morals, not the mechanics. In a quiz on pregnancy and health risks associated with sex, evangelicals scored very low. Evangelical teens don't accept themselves as people who will have sex until they've already had it. As a result, abstinence pledgers are considerably less likely than nonpledgers to use birth control the first time they have sex. "It just sort of happened," one girl told the researchers, in what could be a motto for this generation of evangelical teens.
Regnerus' ultimate conclusion is not all that surprising. What really matters is not which religion teenagers identify with but how strongly they identify. After controlling for all factors (family satisfaction, popularity, income), religion matters much less than religiosity. Among the mass of typically promiscuous teenagers in the book, one group stands out: the 16 percent of American teens who describe religion as "extremely important" in their lives. When these guys pledge, they mean it. One study found that the pledge works better if not everyone in school takes it. The ideal conditions are a group of pledgers who form a self-conscious minority that perceives itself as special, even embattled.
I recently spent a year among some evangelical teenagers who belong to this elite minority, and I can attest to the inhuman discipline they exert over their hormones. They can spend all evening sitting on the couch holding hands and nothing more. They can date for a year, be alone numerous times in a car or at the movies, and still stick to what's known in the Christian youth literature as "side hugs," to avoid excessive touching. Muslims have it easy compared to them. At least in Saudi Arabia the women are all covered up, so there's nothing to be tempted by. But among this elite corps of evangelicals, the women are breezing around in what one girl I know called "shockingly slutty conservative outfits" while the men hold their tongues. (No, they don't hold anything else. Masturbation is strongly discouraged in the literature because it promotes selfish, lustful behavior.)
So, where does that leave our Romeo, still scanning the bar for a date? If he wanted to stick with the wholesome blonde, he would have to introduce himself and ask the relevant follow-up, namely, how often do you see Pastor Ted, or do you go to Bible study every week? If he ruled her out, here are some general guidelines: Definitely out of the question is an Asian-American who attends church weekly—84 percent of them are virgins. A Mormon is a long shot. They are unlikely to have sex and if they do, they don't tend to repeat the experience. A Catholic or a mainline Protestant teenager is a much better bet than a Jew (around 30 percent of the first two groups have had sex, compared with 17.6 percent for Jews). But a Jew could net a higher reward: Jews are more likely to say sex is pleasurable and more likely to have experienced oral sex.
Romeo's best bet confirms the conventional wisdom. From out of the millions of shy, guilt-ridden teenagers, there emerges this 17-year-old from Florida who calls herself nonreligious: "I don't see why sex is such a sacred thing to so many people," she told the researchers. " 'It's just pleasure, it's physical pleasure, and that's what it is,' said Carol, who estimates she's had 10 or 11 sexual partners."
Romeo, that's a sure thing.
-Josh D