God Without Religion_ Can It Really Be This Simple_ - Andrew Farley [42]
If not, then the thought is from a third party.
If we accept those calls as our own and go ahead and pay the bill, we’re buying a lie about the type of people we are. We’re children of the living God. We’re not of this world. We are a people of God’s own possession. When we give in to the calls of sin, we’ve failed to realize that someone is tapping our line.
The “Other” Sin
Most of us think of the word sin as a verb, an action. But Vine’s Expository Dictionary of Old and New Testament Words reveals a second use of the word sin that has a meaning all its own. According to W. E. Vine, sin is a governing power that operates through the members of our body. Vine also asserts that this governing power carries person-like characteristics. Here sin is a noun, not a verb. God is telling us that there’s a personified power called sin that acts through our bodies.
In short, someone is tapping our line.
The first we see of this personified power is when God warns Cain, “Sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must rule over it” (Gen. 4:7 TNIV). Then, in Romans 6 and 7, we see this word sin (Greek: hamartia) popping up all over the place. Paul tells us that sin is housed within our bodies, right under our noses (not literally), and causes us to do what we don’t really want to do:
Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body so that you obey its lusts. (Rom. 6:12 NASB)
So now, no longer am I the one doing it, but sin which dwells in me. (Rom. 7:17 NASB)
But if I am doing the very thing I do not want, I am no longer the one doing it, but sin which dwells in me. (Rom. 7:20 NASB)
Did you notice to whom the lusts belong in that first verse? Romans 6:12 says, “its lusts.” Paul is claiming that something in us, that is not us, is the source of temptation. And the lusts we so often struggle with belong to it!
Note that the power of sin resides in our physical body. At salvation, nothing happens to our bodies. Therefore, sin’s ability to tap into our minds remains the same.
The Romans 7 experience of “doing what I don’t really want to do” will be ours any time we give law-based religion our best shot. God introduced the law so that we might discover the presence of this rogue agent within. If we choose law religion, it will inevitably dawn on us, “No matter how hard I try, I find that I’m addicted to sin.”
The power of sin thrives under the law. But, in God’s wisdom, he caused us to die to the law, and we therefore simultaneously die to sin. The heart surgery we received at salvation cuts our ties with sin and allows us the freedom to finally choose something else.
But if we don’t understand what happened to us at salvation, we may mistake the messages of sin for our old self. Instead of calling ourselves critical spirits, we need to recognize the critical thoughts as coming from sin. Instead of calling ourselves dirty or perverted, we need to know that lustful thoughts have an organized power called sin as their source. Instead of calling ourselves (or others) gossips, we can realize that it’s this sin principle within that would have us act in such a way.
Recognizing the source of temptation is a big deal. It enables us to see how we can be new creations at the core but still struggle with sin. It also helps us understand why a rule-based religion always results in failure as it only excites this power called sin. We’re meant to be motivated by grace from deep within our human spirit.
We’re meant for God without religion.
19
One winter we went away on vacation and came home to a very cold house. Both the upstairs and the downstairs furnaces appeared to be broken, so we called a professional. Within a few hours, the repairman was at our front door. After a few minutes of inspecting our heating systems, the