A Sticker Sermon, or 6 Things You Need to Know About Sin.
And
to Adam, he said, “Because you have listened to the voice of your
wife and have eaten of the tree of which I commanded you, 'You shall
not eat of it,' cursed is the ground because of you; in pain you
shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it
shall bring forth for you; and you shall eat the plants of the field.
By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to
the ground, for out of it you were taken; for you are dust, and to
dust you shall return. – Genesis 3:17-19 (ESV)
The
curse placed upon Adam upon his disobedience shows that thorns and
thistles are in some sense a product of the Fall of man into sin. In
this passage, thorns are the result of sin, and no doubt intended to
remind the man and woman of the consequences of rebellion against
God. Thus, in the mind of Adam there would have been a fundamental
connection between thorns and sin, not only as cause and effect, but
also a type and anti-type. Thorns remind us of sin, not only because
they are the product of sin, but because in many ways thorns resemble
the sins of which they are a product.
I
was reminded of this recently in doing yard work. We recently bought
a house with a yard full of stickers. I hate stickers. It's like
growing legos in the yard that you can't play with. Step on one and
you will know what I mean. So I am determined to root them out.
Thing is, they are just as determined to stay. I have probably spent
10 hours so far in the past couple of weeks trying to dig these
little beasts out. There is still a long way to go, though after
digging up half the yard, I have made some progress.
In
the process of digging up stickers and getting stuck by thorns,
however, I have been struck by the similarity between sin in my life
and these plants we call stickers. I suppose it has therefore been a
profitable exercise in more than one way, for it has reminded me
again just how devious, bad, and intractable sin is in my heart. It
has also reminded me that I don't hate sin as much as I ought. If I
hated sin as much as I hate stickers, I would probably have a lot
less trouble with it in my life. So if I can get myself to see sin
in the same way as I see stickers, it would move me further along the
road to sanctification.
What
I want to do is to draw six analogies between stickers
and sin. Sin is a thorny weed in the heart, and if we do not wage
war against it, it will take over our hearts. So in delivering this
message, my aim is to help us hate it more, and prepare ourselves to
better fight it in the heart. And surely this is what the Lord wants
for each of us: “O you who love the LORD, hate evil!” (Psalm
97:10). “Abhor what is evil; hold fast to what is good” (Rom.
12:9). “Abstain from every form of evil” (1 Thess. 5:22). “My
little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not
sin” (1 John 2:1).
The following lessons or analogies are not in any particular order. They are all, however, related to the central theme of why we should hate sin, and how to fight it.
Analogy
#1. Just as stickers can
grow almost anywhere, even so sin can find root in any heart. No one
is immune from sin, no matter how good they think the soil of their
heart is. There is no part of my yard that is completely free from
stickers. Because the yard was neglected before we moved in, the
result is an almost complete infestation. Even so, not even the
holiest man or woman is free from danger. There has only ever been
one heart in which sin did not find a place to grow – the heart of
Jesus Christ the Son of God.
There
are many examples of this in the Bible. King David sinned after a
lifetime of walking with God. After
slaying Goliath. After being
chosen by God as “a man after my own heart” (1 Sam. 13:14).
After defeating the
enemies of Israel. After writing
dozens of Psalms. What a lot of people probably don't realize is
that David was an older man when he fell for Bathsheba. He had a lot
of experience of loving and serving and following God, but he fell
nonetheless. The soil of David's heart, rich with the spirituality
of the Psalms, was nevertheless susceptible to the sins of murder and
adultery.
Or
consider Abraham. The father of the faithful doubted God and lied
about his wife, putting her at jeopardy and risking her purity to
save his own neck. Or Peter, who walked three years with Christ, was
chosen as one of the twelve original apostles, and who later
spear-headed the advance of an infant church into a Gentile world.
This man cursed the name of Christ out of the fear of men. No one
is immune from sin.
Perhaps
more fearful are the many examples of those who started well but did
not end well. David, Abraham, and Peter repented. But not all do.
Some are like Demas, who loved this present world more than the world
to come and forsook the work of God to seek the wealth of this world.
Some are like Alexander and Hymenaus, who began as faithful elders
at the church of Ephesus, and ended up having to be delivered over to
Satan on account of the lies they were teaching in the name of truth.
It
is so easy to read the warnings in the Bible and think that they do
not apply to us. But nothing could be farther from the truth. After
speaking of those who perished in the Old Testament narrative because
of their disobedience, Paul writes to the Corinthian Christians, “Now
these things happened to them as an example, but they were
written down for our instruction,
on whom the end of the ages has come” (1 Cor. 10:11). Likewise,
such warnings are written down for us. Beware of presumption.
Beware of the sin of thinking you cannot sin: “If we say we have no
sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us” (1 John
1:8). The ground of your heart may have been made good by the Holy
Spirit, but the fact is that such ground is still fertile soil for
the thorns of lust, greed, and pride. What the new birth does is to
make the ground of our hearts able to produce good fruit, but until
we are in the next world, sin can still find root in our souls, and
will – unless we are always vigilant.
A
hymn, written by George Heath that we occasionally sing, puts it
well:
My
soul be on thy guard;
Ten
thousand foes arise;
The
hosts of sin are pressing hard
To
draw thee from the skies.
Ne'er
think the victory won,
Nor
lay thine armor down;
The
work of faith will not be done
Till
thou obtain the crown.
Analogy
#2. Stickers, like sin, grow best in untended ground. Stickers
have taken over my yard because for some time it was not tended to.
In the absence of such care, the thorns thrived. Now I am paying for
the lack of aggressive attention to the yard. In the same way, sin
thrives in the hearts of those who do not guard their hearts.
On
the other hand, one of the best ways to keep stickers back is to have
a healthy yard. To get the good grass to choke them out. Even so,
we fight sin best by cultivating the opposite graces in our hearts.
Covetousness is best fought by cultivating contentment in the Lord.
Pride is best resisted by humbling ourselves before Almighty God.
The problem is that contentment and humility don't just happen; they
have to be planted in our hearts, first by the Holy Spirit in the new
birth, and then by the daily process of sanctification, in which we
play an integral part.
Holiness
is not automatic. As another hymn puts it, we have to “take time
to be holy.” All the exhortations to holiness in the New Testament
assume that we are waging vigorous assault upon the bastions of sin
in our heart. Paul writes to the Roman believers, “Let not sin
therefore reign in your mortal body, to make you obey its passions”
(Rom. 6:12). We are the ones
who are to prevent the reign of sin. How are we to do this? Paul
tells us in Romans 8:13, “For if you live according to the flesh
you will die, but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the
body, you will live.” Who is putting to death the deeds of the
body? The believer is. And if the believer is not doing this, sin
is not going to die. Like thorns in a vacant lot, sin will thrive in
the absence of opposition.
In
order to fight sin and cultivate holiness in our hearts, we have to
speak to God and hear God speak. The way we do this is to hear God's
word in the Bible and share our needs and wants and worship him in
prayer. His word is the sword of the Spirit, and prayer the attitude
in which all Christian warfare is to take place (Eph. 6:10-18). We
have to sow the seed of the Word in our hearts and then pray for God
to send the blessing of his Spirit to make the seed grow and bear
fruit. In other words, holiness is not going to happen unless we are
consciously seeking the Lord in a life of consistent prayer and
meditation on his Word.
The
danger is, of course, for these practices to grow into mere
formality, so that we are praising God with our lips when our hearts
are far from him. But that does not make these things any the less
necessary. You don't avoid the danger of hypocrisy by fleeing into
the danger of spiritual negligence. You simply will not grow
spiritually by winging it. You have to be intentional about seeking
God in his Word and prayer.
If
you do not feel like seeking the Lord, you should do it anyway. The
farmer may not feel like getting up long before dawn and getting in
the fields to sow the seed. But if he doesn't do it, he isn't going
to get any crops. I certainly didn't want to get out into the yard
and pull stickers. But I did it anyway, because it wasn't going to
happen by itself! And you're just going to keep sliding down into
deeper and deeper ruts if you are not willing to put the effort into
pulling weeds and sowing good seed in your hearts. Just waiting for
God to do something isn't going to get you anywhere. Just as Paul
encouraged Timothy, so also, God says to each believer who feels the
fire growing cold in his/her heart “to fan into flame the gift of
God, which is in you” (2 Tim. 1:6).
So
fan the flame! Fan it by prayer. If you don't feel like praying,
that's okay: pray anyway. Tell the Lord the reality of your
condition. Look into his Word and wait for his voice. Seek him.
The great thing is that there are promises all over the Bible that
God will not forsake those who do seek him through the Lord Jesus
Christ.
Analogy
#3.
Sticker plants can sometimes be hard to spot, unless the stickers
themselves are showing. A few days ago, I was trying to weed out all
the sticker plants I could see before mowing the yard. But the grass
was so tall, I was having a hard time seeing them. They were not
obvious. It seemed like they were intentionally hiding from me.
Even though, after hours and hours of spending time weeding them out,
and having become pretty adept at spotting sticker plants,
nevertheless sometimes I still have a hard time distinguishing weed
from good grass.
Even
so, sin is not always obvious. Sin often masquerades as something
good. Isn't this what Paul means when he says “to put off your old
self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt
through deceitful desires” (Eph. 4:22)? Here Paul describes sin in
terms of “deceitful desires.” How are they deceitful? Sin lies
to us by telling us it will bring us good and happiness and joy.
Sin
unfortunately has an ally in our heart, and too often they agree.
That is what makes it so easy to be baffled by sin's lies. It feels
so good to do it, and so we do. With such help, sin can creep upon
the soul unseen. It is like a sniper hidden camouflaged and in the
bushes right beneath our feet, ready to take us out.
This
is why it is so necessary to be constantly vigilant against sin, and
to constantly be bathing in the reality that is God's Word. If you
follow your feelings, you will almost certainly go wrong. Feelings
are no guide – God's Word is the only sure map to the path that
will lead you into the blessing of God and into a life that honors
him. You're heart is “deceitful above all things and desperately
wicked” (Jer. 17:9); it is a hopeless guidepost.
During
the Battle of the Bulge in the Second World War, English-speaking
German soldiers dressed in American uniforms in order to sneak behind
Allied lines to take down signposts and misdirect traffic. And they
were partially successful in their mission. The only way they were
found out was by asking these so-called American soldiers questions
that only a true U.S. Soldier would know (like “Who won the World
Series last year?”). In the same way, sin dresses up in the
uniform of obedience to God and misdirects us to paths that will
bring us into sin's bondage. And the only way we will be able to
detect the deception is by comparing what it is telling us to the
Word of God.
Analogy
#4.
It takes hard and constant and sometimes painful work to root
stickers out of the yard. If you've ever had to do this, you know
what I'm talking about. Working under the hot sun with sweat rolling
down in buckets is bad enough, but then on top of that you are
constantly getting stuck with these thorns. Even with gloves on, you
are not exempt from getting a beating from these pugilistic plants.
In
the same way, the fight against sin is just that – it's a fight.
As we've already seen, the efforts of believers against the sin
still in their mortal bodies is described in terms of warfare, in
terms of killing, and mortification. We have to be willing to die to
ourselves if we are going to serve Christ. The road to glory is not
an easy one. Despite what the health, wealth, and prosperity
preachers might say, a Christian is not guaranteed the American
Dream. Faith does not bring with it material blessing, but
justification and assurance of eternal glory.
Jesus
described the Christian Way in the following terms: “Enter by the
narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to
destruction, and those who enter by it are many. For the gate is
narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it
are few” (Matthew 7:13,14). It has always been this way. The way
is hard. Sometimes the hardness comes from within and sometimes it
comes from without. But we all need “to endure hardness as a good
soldier of Jesus Christ” if we are to be in his army and wage war
against sin.
Of
course, this is not the whole story. Every soldier fights on, often
in the midst of tremendous obstacles, because they believe they will
win in the end. Once hope is drained from a soldier, it is almost
impossible to get them to carry on. However, for the Christian, the
end is sure. The victory not only will
be
won, in a very real sense it is already won. Christ has risen, he is
seated upon his throne, he is coming again. So let us endure
hardness in the cause of Christ. He is the resurrection and the
life; though we die we shall rise again.
Analogy
#5.
Stickers spread easily. They spread from yard to yard like
wild-fire. Whenever I would spot a sticker plant in the yard, I
would immediately look around it expecting to see others. And you
know what? I almost always found another sticker plant nearby.
In
the same way, sin is never an isolated incident. When David sinned
God in taking Bathsheba and getting rid of her husband, he must have
thought at least initially that he had wrapped up the whole incident
nicely. But even though God forgave David of his sin, he made it
clear there would be lasting consequences. The rest of David's
history is one tragedy after another, a catalog of the sins of his
sons. One weed leads to another.
Thus,
to harbor one sin and think that we can keep it contained is pure
idiocy. To save one sticker plant is to invite others into the yard.
Holiness must be entire. If it is not, sin will leak out into other
acts of sin and its consequences will haunt ourselves as well as
those whom we love.
Analogy
#6.
To really get rid of the sticker plants,
you can't just pull the stems that have the actual stickers on them,
you have to go after the roots. Even so, we can't just go after
those aspects of evil in our nature that are most visible, we must go
after the roots of those sins in our hearts and souls. If we only do
the former, we become like the Pharisees; when Jesus said, “For I
tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and
Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matt.
5:20), he was inveighing against such phony morality, and he
illustrates it in the following verses (vs. 21-48). For example, it
is not enough to simply withhold our hand from killing, we must rid
ourselves of hate. It is not enough to not commit adultery, we must
cleanse our hearts from lust.
Jesus
was constantly reminding his disciples of the imperative of guarding
the heart. In Luke 6:43-45, he told his disciples, “For no good
tree bears bad fruit, nor again does a bad tree bear good fruit, for
each tree is known by its own fruit. For figs are not gathered from
thornbushes, nor are grapes picked from a bramble bush. The good
person out of the good treasure of his heart produces good, and the
evil person out of his evil treasure produces evil, for out of the
abundance of the heart his mouths speaks.” The reason is obvious:
God doesn't look as men look. We look on the external appearance,
but God looks on the heart (cf. 1 Sam. 16:7).
Jonathan
Edwards knew this, which is why as a young teenager, he wrote this
resolution: “24. Resolved,
Whenever I do any conspicuously evil action, to trace it back, till I
come to the original cause; and then, both carefully endeavour to do
so no more, and to fight and pray with all my might against the
original of it.” Sometimes I think we are baffled in our fight
against sin because we don't pay more attention to “the original of
it.” We end up fighting with evil's offspring and don't go after
the source.
We
need the help of God here. This is why David prayed, “Search me, O
God, and know my heart! Try me, and know my thoughts! And see if
there be any grievous way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting!”
(Psalm 139:23,24). We don't know our hearts, but God does. The
question is, am I willing for God to search my heart? Do I really
want him to show me what's there? Am I really wanting to repent of
everything?
Conclusion.
We
have to fight sin because we are sinners. Thorns remind us of this.
But I am thankful that God did not leave Adam and Eve with a curse,
and thorns are not the last word. In words full of hope, God told
the serpent, “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and
between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head,
and you shall bruise his heel” (Gen. 3:15). A few verses later, we
read where God made the first animal sacrifice in order to clothe
Adam and Eve (verse 21). This word and this event pointed forward,
even if in a rather vague way, to the one who would defeat Satan and
clothe his people with righteousness. These were shadows of Jesus
Christ, the one who has for all time conquered sin and delivered
those who put their faith in him from its power, penalty and – one
day – from its very presence.
We
cannot fight sin apart from Christ. This is because unless our sins
are forgiven, such a fight is futile and useless. Our moral filth
has brought us under the just wrath of God, and until this is taken
care of, everything else is a waste of time. But this is exactly
what Christ has done – he has taken the sinner's place and suffered
the penalty of sin so that they might be forgiven. The Bible says
that those who believe in Christ have that forgiveness.
What
that means is that if you are a believer, you are fighting forgiven
sins. I used to wonder why Charles Wesley wrote that Jesus “broke
the power of canceled
sin,” but it was exactly the right thing to say. If we belong to
him and he comes to free us from the chains of sin, it is sin that
was canceled on the cross. And as we fight each day against, let us
remind ourselves of this fact. Canceled sin! The cross is written
over every victory against sin that we have, and when we shine like
the stars in heaven at the end of the age, in resurrected bodies, we
will sing, not of our prowess against sin, but of the Lamb who was
slain and ransomed us to God.
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