This video is for everyone who has or will struggle with sin that you just can’t seem to break free from. You and I are no match for sin. But Jesus is. How did Jesus deal with sin? That is the answer you’ve been looking for. That answer is in this video.
Several viewers have written me asking how to deal with repeated sin after they are born again. We try and try to eliminate these areas of failure in our lives using self-discipline, but sometimes we just can’t. Then, we don’t know what else to do.
00:00 A Video for People Struggling With Sin
0:39Jesus and the Woman Caught in Adultery
2:48 Jesus Introduced A New Way of Dealing With Sin
4:59 Obedience From the Heart
5: 23 Go to the Root of Your Sin - Desires
6:19 It’s Not Enough to Stop Sinning – Pull Out the Root – the Desire
8:58 Activation
For practical help applying this approach to dealing with your sin read: Tony Stoltzfus, “The Invitation: Transforming the Heart through Desire Fulfilled” https://amzn.to/3QHCTuq [This is an affiliate link.]
**How Did Jesus Deal With Sin
In John 8, the religious leaders brought Jesus a woman caught committing adultery. v7. "When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, “Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” 8 Again he stooped down and wrote on the ground.
9 At this, those who heard began to go away one at a time, the older ones first, until only Jesus was left, with the woman still standing there.”
“Jesus straightened up and asked her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?”
11 “No one, sir,” she said.
“Then neither do I condemn you,” Jesus declared.”
Today, most of us can’t imagine a culture where people were ready to pick up stones and kill someone who broke the law. But that was the culture Jesus lived in.
Jesus came for the purpose of destroying that culture by replacing the old covenant of law with a new covenant of grace. Jesus offered love and forgiveness and grace.
God sent Jesus to initiate relationship with us – to teach us how to love by loving us first. (see 1 john 4:19, 1 Corinthians 4:5)
Jesus accepted her in her sin. He loved her (love forgives), he accepted her as she was, in this, the worst moment of her life. She is guilty. Yet she is free. Forgiven. And loved. Jesus, by his action and his words affirmed her value, her worth as a woman.
Jesus gave her the very desires that drove her to adultery in the first place: desire to be loved, valued, accepted, to belong, to be significant. Jesus filled the desires of her heart.
Then, only after Jesus had met the desires that drove her to sin, did Jesus ask for obedience. In verse 11, He said, “Go now and leave your life of sin.” Jesus asked her for obedience from the heart: obedience because she felt loved.
John 14:15 NASB (Jesus) “If you love Me, you will keep My commandments.”
The new covenant Jesus gave us is relationship where He fills the desires of our hearts. And we respond by obeying Him because He loves us. We obey because our hearts are full.
**Humans try to change by changing what we do. Jesus began with the root – the desire that was driving this woman. What human desire drove her to the point that she would risk her life to fill it?
A desire for sex? Sex is the outward sin, but what would sex give her? What was the root desire?
Love, Acceptance, approval, significance, love…. These are all desires each need. And if we don’t have them, we will go to extremes to get them.
This woman risked her life to fill the emptiness of her heart – her heart desires.
**Go to the Root of Your Sin
“There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden,
What causes us to do what we do?
The truth is we often don’t know why we do things. As Paul said in Romans 7:15: “I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.”
The answer is that desires are what drive us.
**Pull Out the Root
Desires are not bad. God made us with desires. In fact, we all have the same core desires.
**What makes desires evil is when we try to fill them by human means.
When self tries to take God’s place and fill the desires of our hearts, selfishness twists God-given desires into sinful pursuits. To feel accepted, approved, worth (value) people pursue money, fame, sex, success, and power. Yet, no matter how much they achieve, it is never enough.
God made us with desires that only He can fill. We were made to be fulfilled only through our relationship with God and no other way. Colossians 2:10 BSB “And you have been made complete in Christ.”
**It’s Not Enough to Stop Sinning
Sin is the branch – the outward expression of a selfish attempt to fulfill a desire God gave us. To stop the sin action is to hack at the branches of evil, not the root.
Desires are the root. Desires drive us. They compel us to act. Human willpower is no match for human desire.
See ACTIVATION.