Two questions arise when I read the last half of James 5. First, will God answer the prayers of Christians who harbor sin? Secondly, what is the relationship between sin and sickness?

Let’s look at the first question. James tells us that the prayers of the righteous avail much. This implies that the prayers of the unrighteous avail little. Let’s step out of James to see what other New Testament writers say about this.

John tells us that God answers prayer because we keep His commandments and do what pleases Him. 1 John 3:22.

Jesus tells us in Matthew 6:15 that God forgives us only if we forgive others.

It seems plain that God answers the prayers of the righteous. Those who sin, though, separate themselves from God.

Likely, your heart just sunk. Mine did. I may never be righteous enough that God will answer my prayers. My actions may never please God.

God knows that. From the creation of Adam to today, there has been only one person whose actions entirely pleased God. There has been only one who is righteous: Jesus Christ.

God knows that we were born with a sinful nature. That is why He replaced it with the nature of Christ when you were saved. If we have faith in Christ our sins are forgiven and we are washed clean by the blood of the lamb. To ask God to forgive our sins because of our faith in Christ and His sacrifice, and for God to count the righteousness of Jesus as our own righteousness… Well, that is the only way our prayers will ever be heard.

Why, then, do we feel condemned and unworthy when we try to pray? That, too, is human nature. Read what John says about sin and prayer in context (1 John 3:20-24 NIV):

This is how we know that we belong to the truth and how we set our hearts at rest in his presence: If our hearts condemn us, we know that God is greater than our hearts, and he knows everything. Dear friends, if our hearts do not condemn us, we have confidence before God and receive from him anything we ask, because we keep his commands and do what pleases him. And this is his command: to believe in the name of his Son, Jesus Christ, and to love one another as he commanded us. The one who keeps God’s commands lives in him, and he in them. And this is how we know that he lives in us: We know it by the Spirit he gave us.

God is greater than our deceitful hearts. He knows everything. Just believe in Jesus, and love one another and we will be counted as righteous.

If we have believed in Christ but continue living in sin, then we make God out to be a liar and our prayers are gibberish. We should confess our sins to God and our brothers and sisters in Christ before expecting them to be answered. Again, only if we confess and put our faith in Christ and love one another will we be considered righteous (because of His sacrifice on the cross). Hard words to hear, harder yet to obey, but they are the words of God.

If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness. 1 John 1:9 NIV

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I love the sentiment from this Catholic prayer of contrition. It indirectly points to the Good News: We don’t have to die rather than sin again. Jesus has died for us, paid the price, and won victory over death. Because of His sacrifice, God forgives us of our sin, all of it. Our only duties are to repent and believe in (put our trust in) Jesus Christ, God will forgive us of all sin and unrighteousness. And, He will give us the power to find victory over sin so that we do not have to live as a slave bound in darkness. We are free indeed.

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Early one morning, Jesus walked from the Mount of Olives to the Temple where He began teaching. He was interrupted by a group of Pharisees who presented to Him a conundrum: a woman caught in the act of adultery. What should be her punishment, they asked Him. You know the story.

It was a trick question, designed to discredit Jesus, whose popularity scared the Jewish leaders. According to the Law, she should be stoned until dead. According to Jesus’s own words, He did not come to condemn. If He commanded she be set free, He would break the Law. If He commanded that she be stoned, He would not be true to His teachings.

Jesus ignored their question, stooped to the ground and began to write in the dirt. After a few minutes, He rose to His feet and addressed the men. “Let he who is without sin throw the first stone.”

He knelt and again wrote on the ground. One by one, the Pharisees and scribes left. When Jesus looked up, He asked the woman, “Where did everyone go? Is no one left to condemn you?”

She was, perhaps, afraid to look up, and, when she did, she was astonished. Only Jesus remained. “No one, my Lord,” she said, voice quivering.

“Neither do I condemn you,” He said with the faintest of smiles. “Go and sin no more.”

How could Jesus know that not a man there would be without sin? Because all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. You see, we were all born into sin. We are a fallen people living in a fallen world.

It all goes back to the beginning. Adam and Eve were created with free will. They were made innocent, free of sin, a part of God’s family. It seems that Yahweh visited with them daily in the Garden of Eden, His earthly home. They lacked nothing, and were able to eat of any and all of the fruit-bearing trees and plants in the garden. All but one. Their needs were fully provided. They had been given jobs. They were to rule over the world with their Creator.

Then the Tempter approached them, twisting and turning through the garden, just as he twisted and turned the truth. He convinced Adam and Eve to sin. When Adam sinned, all humanity was cursed.

There is no lack of evidence of man’s fallen nature. Everyone I know has sinned. My mother is a saint, but she sinned. My sister is the most holy woman I know, yet she sins. No one had to teach my children to lie; rather, they had to be taught not to lie. David says in Psalm 51:5 that he entered this world as a sinner, as do we all. Paul says in Ephesians 2:3 that we are “by nature children of wrath.” Genesis 8:21 finds God declaring that it is a human inclination to be evil, even from childhood.

Romans 5:12 tells us that both sin and death came into this world because of Adam. That is why we are unable to steer clear of sin. We are cursed.

You may be thinking, “That seems mighty unfair.” And you are right, but for three things. First, you and I would have sinned just like Adam and Eve had we been created first. In fact, I have no doubt that my sin would have been much greater than Adam’s. Second, to curse the human race because our progenitor committed a sin, seems unusually harsh, even cruel. It would be cruel had God not already provided for redemption, even from the foundation of the universe (Revelation 13:8). Last, we do not have to continue to live in sin. Just as Adam brought sin into the world, and as a result, caused all mankind to be condemned, so one man – Jesus, the Son of God – brought redemption into the world.

One righteous act, the crucifixion of Jesus, has made those who trust in him justified and made righteous. Because of the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, God washes our sins away with His grace so that we may reign with Him in righteousness eternally (cf. Romans 5:17-20).
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Holiness is, perhaps, the most misunderstood concept in Christianity. Anyone who has striven to follow the life of Christ can likely tell you that it is impossible to do. No one can match His love, His grace, or His compassion. For no one but Jesus is perfect. Once the believer is filled with and empowered by the Holy Spirit, though, he or she is filled to the brim with the love of Christ, and desires nothing more than to please God and follow in Christ’s steps. The love of sin is gone. In its place is a love and passion for others. That is Christian Holiness. This is Christian Holiness Daily.

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We have looked, this week, at some incredibly difficult passages of scripture where we find people who have presented themselves to Christ only to hear words of warning from Jesus about the cost of following Him. From those passages, we have learned that salvation does not mean saying a certain prayer and then go on like nothing has changed. If we truly believe in Jesus, we will follow Him. Believing in Him means we give ourselves to Him even into the point of death, if it comes to that. Jesus tells us there is a cost to salvation beyond the price that He paid. Now we address the question, “Why would we want to offer our lives to Jesus?” Today on Christian Holiness Daily.

Why should anyone follow Christ? Because the alternative is eternal separation from His love. Because the alternative is eternal separation from all love. Because without Christ we will be eternally separated from all that is good, all that is pure, all that is lovely, and all that is comforting.

I follow Christ because He loved me before He even set the earth spinning on its axis. Because He died for me even though I am a filthy sinner. I love God because He first loved me.

Before I gave myself to God, I lived a life of sin, but i believed I was a Christian. I had said the sinners prayer. I believed in Christian. I believed in Jesus. I knew He is God made flesh, born of a virgin, lived a sinless life, died, was resurrected, and ascended into heaven. I believed all that, but I still lived a life of filthy sin. I was on the path that C. S. Lewis called the “safest road to hell.” It is the gradual road, never too steep. It has no road signs that identify it. But the end of the road is eternal hellfire.

After I gave myself to Christ, if I strayed from the path I discovered all kinds of road signs; there was no doubt that I had strayed. God loves His children too much to allow them to wander too far before calling them back to His side.

A couple weeks ago, I talked about Hebrews 6 and said that so long as a Christian does not turn his or her back on God and stop believing, they cannot lose salvation. This is true. Now, today, I am saying that if one believes he or she will follow Christ with total surrender, counting everything else as loss. How, you may wonder do I justify that? How can both be true, you may wonder.

I think here is where we need to define what it means to believe. If one truly believes, one will follow Christ. If one then follows Christ, they get to know their Creator, walk with Him, talk with Him, then they cannot help but change. They cannot avoid being filled with His love. That doesn’t mean they cannot sin. That doesn’t mean they cannot turn back. It does mean that if they do sin, their sin is already forgiven. If they do turn back, the Holy Spirit will hunt them down and call them back home.

I willingly surrender my life to God no matter what the cost because He is a loving Father who wants to spend time with me, His son.

Monday we begin a conversation about how salvation changes our lives. Don’t miss The Best of Christian Holiness Daily tomorrow. And tune in to Christian Holiness Sunday for classic works of old time holiness preachers and writers.
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Holiness is, perhaps, the most misunderstood concept in Christianity. Anyone who has striven to follow the life of Christ can likely tell you that it is impossible to do. No one can match His love, His grace, or His compassion. For no one but Jesus is perfect. Once the believer is filled with and empowered by the Holy Spirit, though, he or she is filled to the brim with the love of Christ, and desires nothing more than to please God and follow in Christ’s steps. The love of sin is gone. In its place is a love and passion for others. That is Christian Holiness. This is Christian Holiness Daily.

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I heard all these euphemisms for death and dying when I was a boy, especially in old movies. I don’t hear so many of them today, or maybe I simply avoid the topic of death. One that I could identify with was the last one, “circling the drain.”

As a child, my brothers and I loved to swim in the Finley River which meandered through the farm where we grew up. Sometimes we would go upstream to Riverdale, an old mill and dam, and float back to our farm. On the way back, we would stop at Blue Hole and swim, for even when waters were shallow, Blue Hole always had enough water to dive and swim. It was inevitable that somewhere along the float trip, conversation would turn to whirlpools.

Whole floating we would sometimes pass a whirlpool, but never the life-threatening sink holes that one found on the James River, the larger stream that lay a few miles down from our farm. The James, it was said, was full of whirlpools that would suck swimmers and boaters to the bottom and drown them. Every year, we heard stories of new drownings.

Turns out the stories are based on facts. There were significant numbers of drownings on the rivers of Southwest Missouri when I was a kid. The whirlpools – the deadly kind – were not just turbulent eddies, but sink holes that opened into underground rivers and caverns. Get near one of those, and it would suck a swimmer straight to the bottom.

Sin acts the same way, for those Christians who are weak in their faith and still flirt with sin, it takes little temptation to lead them into sin. Sin, without fail, leads to eventual death. Sin sucks got right in and – once it has you – there is no escape. It is a bottomless pit that leads to death, a whirlpool from which the is no escape. Sin, when it claps is wicked hands around your throat, does not easily turn loose.

Only Christ can compel sin to loosen is grip on your heart. Only Christ can toss you a life saver.

At a local amusement park in Branson Missouri, there was -in the 1960s – a ride called The Float Trip. On one turn was an artificially constructed whirlpool with a manikan perpetually circling it, as if condemned to an eternity of drowning. The ride has been transformed and renamed. The lifelike dummy is gone now, but the whirlpool remains. Temptation always remains, but Christ can transform you so that you no longer dive into it.

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Holiness is, perhaps, the most misunderstood concept in Christianity. Anyone who has striven to follow the life of Christ can likely tell you that it is impossible to do. No one can match His love, His grace, or His compassion. For no one but Jesus is perfect. Once the believer is filled with and empowered by the Holy Spirit, though, he or she is filled to the brim with the love of Christ, and desires nothing more than to please God and follow in Christ’s steps. The love of sin is gone. In its place is a love and passion for others. That is Christian Holiness. This is Christian Holiness Daily.

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I had done so much wrong in my life that I was convinced God could never forgive me. I had been such a wicked sinner I had feared that I had crossed a bridge too far. After all, I had been saved, I knew right from wrong, I knew what God expected. I just found that I didn’t want to do what was right. Doing right involved sacrifice, and I didn’t want to sacrifice. It involved giving up control, and I liked being in control. Because I couldn’t see anyway to fix my life, I could not understand how God could fix it. I had no faith. I had no self-discipline. I had no comprehension of the power of God. And I had no grasp of the depth of God’s love.

Here is what I thought I understand. I knew that Hebrews 6 talked about those who sin too much and lose their salvation, or that’s what I believed. I knew that Romans 1 spoke of those who sin so much that God gives them over to a “reprobate mind.” I had read, in Acts 7, the sermon by my namesake, Stephen, that God had once given up on the nation of Israel and turned them over to worship false gods. And, I knew that the psalmist had spoken of that same event in Psalm 81:12.

It was in the Bible. Those people had gone too far, and God had given up on them, turned His back on them, and let them reap the rewards of their sins. I feared I was in the same place as the People of Israel. I didn’t worship a golden calf, but I did worship the idol known as self. God was, I was convinced, angry at me.

Here are the two points that we will be looking at as we continue our study on bondage to sin and freedom from sin through the power of the Holy Spirit.

First, sin is a frightful thing. Its grip on the life of an unbeliever or a weak believer is nothing less than a Vulcan death grip. Sin latches on to your heart and your soul and squeezes you, harder, and harder, and harder, and is not happy until you collapse, dead. If you manage to resist and break the grip, it stalks you, and doesn’t give up until it possesses you once again. It never gives up. Paul describes the wages of sin in Romans 1 as a depraved mind. God – knowing that the people of Israel would not repent – turned them over to the wages of sin, to live with their own bad decisions and willful disobedience, and as a result their minds and souls grew dark, and filled with muck, and the only word to describe them is depraved.

It didn’t have to be that way, though. They had plenty of chances to repent.I had once been convinced that Hebrews 6 tells us that we can lose our salvation by sinning too much. A closer reading reveals that that is not at all the case. Instead it says that we may lose our salvation if we stop believing in Christ the Messiah. I had done many, many things wrong, but I had never stopped believing in Christ, and I had never once thought that there is any other route to heaven but through Him. He is the Way and the Truth and the life. “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—  not by works, so that no one can boast” (Ephesians 2:8-9 NIV).

Sin can take you down. But it is only if you stop believing that your salvation may be in jeopardy. Your good works didn’t earn you salvation (salvation is by faith), so your bad deeds will not lose it for you. Sorry, you are not more powerful than the grace of God.

That Vulcan death grip was a farce. It didn’t work. Dr. McCoy saved the day. Jim wasn’t really dead. Spock showed emotion at the recovery of his captain. And, guess what. There is a cure for the death grip that sin has on your life, too. Confess your sins. Repent of them. And trust in God. It is NOT TOO LATE. 

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Holiness is, perhaps, the most misunderstood concept in Christianity. Anyone who has striven to follow the life of Christ can likely tell you that it is impossible to do. No one can match His love, His grace, or His compassion. For no one but Jesus is perfect. Once the believer is filled with and empowered by the Holy Spirit, though, he or she is filled to the brim with the love of Christ, and desires nothing more than to please God and follow in Christ’s steps. The love of sin is gone. In its place is a love and passion for others. That is Christian Holiness. This is Christian Holiness Daily.

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We’re discussing bondage to sin and freedom from sin this week on Christian Holiness Daily.

The master’s son takes mercy on the slave and purchases him. Upon the slave’s return, the son grants him his freedom and tells him that he has also purchased the freedom of his family.

We learned yesterday that – according to the words of Christ as recorded in John 8:34 – everyone who practices sin is a slave to it.

The Son, though, has purchased our freedom – the Son of God – paid for with His own blood, His own death, and sealed with His resurrection. He has paid the price to set us free from the bondage of sin.

The story is not a perfect analogy, but take a look at the next two verses in John 8, verses 35and 36 (ESV):

The slave does not remain in the house forever; the son remains forever. So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed

If we are living as slaves to sin, it is because we have not accepted the gift that the Son is offering us, freedom from sin.

If you’re faith in Christ is not sufficient to believe that you can be free of the bonds of sin, do you think it is really sufficient to believe you can be free from the bonds of death?

We believe, God. We believe in the gift Jesus has given us. We believe the Son of God died to pay the price for our sins, that we may be free from sin and death. Lord, help us to believe.

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Holiness is, perhaps, the most misunderstood concept in Christianity. Anyone who has striven to follow the life of Christ can likely tell you that it is impossible to do. No one can match His love, His grace, or His compassion. For no one but Jesus is perfect. Once the believer is filled with and empowered by the Holy Spirit, though, he or she is filled to the brim with the love of Christ, and desires nothing more than to please God and follow in Christ’s steps. The love of sin is gone. In its place is a love and passion for others. That is Christian Holiness. This is Christian Holiness Daily.

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We are continuing our conversation on sin and freedom from sin, on Christian Holiness Daily…

The Morning After (1974 – ABC TV from the novel by Jack B. Weiner, adapted for TV by the legendary Richard Matheson) was an amazing movie, and the first one that presented alcoholism as a real problem, and not simply a comic prop. It is still shown today in rehab centers worldwide. It starred Dick Van Dyke as an alcoholic who could not admit he had a problem. Van Dyke, for those of you too young to remember, was everyone’s favorite TV husband, dad, chimney sweep, and funnyman. When he made The Morning After, no one could accept him – this wholesome TV comic – as an alcoholic. When it became known that he took the role because he closely identified with the character, no one could believe it. I, myself, was devastated, for I had admired the actor tremendously (rather, I admired the characters for which he was known).

The movie portrayed Van Dyke as a businessman who repeatedly drank to excess, picked himself up, promised to never repeat his actions, promised to live on the straight and narrow, and once again falls into the same routine. Get drunk. Hurt those you love. Sober up. Apologize. Stay on the straight and narrow for a few days. Get drunk again. Over and over and over again. From the outside, he looked okay, but those who knew him, saw his problem, and realized that every time he failed, he fell a little harder and a little farther into a black hole from which – someday – he would eventually never return.

Alcoholism, like sexual addiction, gluttony, and a myriad of other sins is just a vicious circle. Alcoholics feel like they are a slave to the drink; they cannot – of their own power – resist the temptation. Jesus characterizes sin well when he says, “Those who practice sin are slaves to it.” Likewise, those who are slaves to sin can do nothing but practice it. According to Jesus, in John 8:34, everyone  who practices sin is a slave to sin. As one who struggled for decades with the same old sins, the same old temptations, the same old struggles, and as one who has rarely won a battle against temptation, I know what it is to be a slave to sin. It is like being bound hand and foot and chained to a chair, to be at the mercy of a diabolical master. It is like one of those movies where a maniacal bad guy threatens to kill the good guy’s family unless he does “exactly as I say.” Living as a slave to sin is watching your perfect Van Dyke-esque life shattering all around you and you can do nothing to stop it.

Only Christ can free us from the sin that imprisons us.

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Holiness is, perhaps, the most misunderstood concept in Christianity. Anyone who has striven to follow the life of Christ can likely tell you that it is impossible to do. No one can match His love, His grace, or His compassion. For no one but Jesus is perfect. Once the believer is filled with and empowered by the Holy Spirit, though, he or she is filled to the brim with the love of Christ, and desires nothing more than to please God and follow in Christ’s steps. The love of sin is gone. In its place is a love and passion for others. That is Christian Holiness. This is Christian Holiness Daily.

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