A preacher’s wife once told me, “If you don’t want to slip, stay off the ice.”
That has been etched in my memory since my early twenties, and it truly helped me grow my faith. As young adults, we are figuring things out and trying to make our place in this world.
There are many life lessons you will yet to learn. One of them is dealing with sin. As a person of faith, our sin will look differently the more we yield to Christ – that is, the more of us we give to Him, the sins we strive to omit from our life will have less drama.
My young faith would be solid and fervent one season, and the next, I would stray from what I knew was right. Testing the waters or taking the enemy’s punches and believing his lies.
“It’s too hard, Lord; I can’t be all you want me to be!” I felt my faith was wishy-washy.
When God’s Word says in Revelation 3:15, “I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot: I would thou wert cold or hot.” He doesn’t want us to be lukewarm, satisfied, or stagnate in our faith – we are to grow.
So maybe being hot at times and then cold, only to be hot again – my wishy-washy faith, was about me growing. I was not pretentious – I was sincere when I was on fire for the Lord. And that is why it bothered me so much when I failed. When I let sin enter my heart, it was against the new nature I received when I was saved. But that’s where satan is cunning. He will put the defeatist thoughts in our heads that we can’t be good.
The enemy tries to get us to give up, but if we acknowledge that none is righteous – not one! And that we can only be holy because of Jesus, then we can live each day knowing we are on a journey to becoming our better selves, and any failures have the promise of Roman 8:28 – God will turn it to the good. I am thankful for all I learned in my young faith, and one thing I learned was not to give the opportunity to sin. I learned boundaries. I knew what would lead me down the wrong road.
Just because everyone else is doing it doesn’t mean I should. I couldn’t allow certain things that I knew led to no good. I had to stand firm against it, and I had to be all in for Jesus. Once I surrendered everything, I thought I didn’t want to give up, drama left my life, and peace flooded in. I realized I was more free living God’s way entirely than living the way I thought I wanted.
When we turn from those sins and become absolute, God’s gifts are greater because He knows our hearts are ready to receive them. And we live a life of freedom – freedom from the penalty of sin, freedom from the presence of sin, and freedom from the power of sin.
We all will face sin in our lives even when we are mature in our faith, but as we travel that straight and narrow road, what sin we would confess is being prideful or trying to control a situation, or being fearful. And that type of sin is usually nipped in the bud because we desire to be more like Jesus. When we are young, thinking we want certain things in our life and go down wrong paths, we deal with the sins that cause drama or pain.
Are we so arrogant in our youth to believe that our life is “ours” and we will be happy living for ourselves when THE Creator has a purpose for each of us? He made our bodies, hearts, and minds to carry out the works He created in us uniquely for the Kingdom. Yet, when we don’t understand that, we try to control how our lives will go, and we mess up – we will never find peace or happiness.
My life has been full of peace, joy, and love ever since I “died” to the me I was trying to be. Though I became a Christian in 1977, the moment I gave Jesus the part of my heart that I held back, my life forever changed.
Don’t you want to live free? Don’t be a slave to sin—practice feeding your new nature and starving the old. Allow God to remove what doesn’t belong. If you don’t want to slip, stay off the ice!