The armour of God can help in our fight against sin.
The Battle Against Sin Part 4
By Josh McCarthy / Cowboys of the Cross
So we finally made it to the part of the series where I tell you the one trick to defeat sin in your life for good. Well, pard, I have some bad news: that’s not how this works at all. God didn’t design life that way. Like anything worthwhile, it takes effort and a whole lot of time. You can’t just become the next Wade Sundell, Trevor Brazile, or Juan Ulloa just because you decided one day you wanted to.
Being the next world champion in the sport of rodeo takes time and a lot of practice. You have to lay aside bad habits and cultivate good ones. It’s like working with a young horse: getting a good handle on him is a process that you’ll be working on and refining for the rest of that horse’s life. So how then do we get the upper hand in this fight against the world, the flesh, and the Devil? Well, like in roping or riding you can never stress the basics enough.
So what are the basics in this fight? Read your Bible, pray, and find accountability.
Read your Bible
2 Timothy 3:16 tells us, “All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for instruction, for conviction, for correction, and for training in righteousness,”
Whether you compete in rodeo or are out ranchin’ somewhere, one of the most obvious ways to get better at your trade is to talk to some top hands. Maybe that means going to a practice pen where they hang out, going to a horsemanship or stockmanship clinic, or seeking out some of the older, wiser folks in the area. We need to have someone to help us with our issues and be honest and straightforward when we need it. We seek out these people because we know they can be trusted. They’ve been there, done that, and know how things work.
If we want to know how things work in our fight against sin, we need to go to the most trustworthy source: the Word of God. 2 Timothy says, “all of Scripture is God breathed.” That means the whole Bible is the very Word of God and because God is perfect and cannot lie, His Word can be trusted.
Since the beginning of creation, the Devil has been trying to get us to doubt what God really says and sometimes reading through our Bibles can be confusing, but if we want to truly know God and how to fight our sins we need to use “the sword of the Spirit which is the word of God” (from Ephesians 6:10-18).
In the gospels, when Jesus was tempted in the wilderness, His response always started with, “it is written.” He always brought to mind the truth of Scripture and the God-glorifying nature of it. Speaking for myself, it’s easier for me to fall to temptation and roll over to sin’s demands if I haven’t been reading my Bible. It always reminds me of who I am and who God is.
I strongly encourage getting into the habit of daily Bible reading of some kind. I confess that I’m in a stage right now where I don’t sit down and “read” mine daily, but I instead listen to the day’s passages in the YouVersion Bible app (the #keepthefeast reading plan) while I feed cows in the mornings.
Prayer
So this one seems pretty simple, right? To sum it up, it’s how we talk to God. We use prayer to worship God, to thank Him, to repent of our sins, and to ask Him for things. Jesus is our example in this life and when asked how to pray he gave this model:
“…Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.”Matthew 6:9-13
Now, this doesn’t mean we just repeat this prayer and that’s the only prayer God will hear. This prayer should be used like the tree on a saddle: it provides the form and shape, but we can add our own personal touch to it. When we are really struggling with temptation to sin, praying to God with this form in mind will be helpful. This prayer reminds us God is holy, our wants should be what God wants, He supplies our needs, He forgives us of our sins, He will help us in our struggles, and He will deliver us from the power of the world, the flesh and the devil.
“Our prayers might be awkward. Our attempts may be feeble. But since the power of prayer is in the one who hears it and not the one who says it, our prayers do make a difference,” Max Lucado
Accountability
I personally think this one is going to be the hardest to apply. Most people don’t like having to rely on others for anything, especially something like dealing with the sin in our lives.
If you’re on the rodeo road or out in the saddle moving cows somewhere you might be able to get by alone for a while but you won’t go very far trying to make a hand if you’re the only expert in any room. God didn’t design the Christian life to be lived out alone. It’s made so that we will be in friendship with other Christians. Just like we need other people to help encourage us and give us pointers if we’re going through a bad stretch of buck offs or if we can’t get that heel trap to lay just right in the branding pen, we need other people to help us fight the sin in our lives. This is why being a part of a church is so important. “For just as each of us has one body with many members, and these members do not all have the same function, so in Christ we, though many, form one body, and each member belongs to all the others.”Romans 12:4-5.
As Christians, we are a part of Christ’s universal Church that covers the whole world. But if we follow the example given to use in the Bible (specifically the New Testament), we are called to be involved with a local church wherever we call home. With rodeos on the weekends or feeling like you can’t leave the ranch for any number of reasons, it’s easy to make excuses about why going to church on Sunday isn’t that important. But it is. Being a part of a church isn’t just showing up on Sunday to check it off the list or to do it because “that’s just what we do.” It means being under the authority of a pastor and elders that will hold us accountable and having friends in the congregation we can be `100 per cent honest with about our lives and about our daily battle with sin.
As we jerk the saddle off this series and turn it out to pasture, I hope and pray this has been an encouragement to y’all. We all have good days and bad days in this fight against our sin but remember
“being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.” Philippians 1:6
Last time around, I said verse 4 in Ephesians 2 gives us the answer as to why we should fight sin: “But because of His great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ, even when we were dead in our trespasses. It is by grace you have been saved!”
I’m going to focus here on the part “because of His great love for us,” or God loving us by saving us from our sins (which is to say, God saving us from the World, the Flesh, and the Devil). Author and teacher, Matt Chandler, when he preached on 2 Corinthians 5:14-17, made the point that “the love of Christ compels us,” so God’s love for us should be the Christian’s primary motivation for obedience (i.e. fighting sin). This is the same love we see in Romans 5:6-8: “You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous person, though for a good person someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”
God loved us so much that even when we were sinners, (i.e. traitors, haters of God), Christ died for us. If God loved us that much, shouldn’t we love Him in return?.
Think about the people you love or care about: your spouse, family members, the crew you work with, or your traveling partners. How do you treat them? Do you purposefully hurt them or disrespect them? Do you ignore them when they ask you to do something? If we are called to love God over everything else, do we treat Him like these others (when we should treat Him better than anyone else)? Or does the way we live our daily lives show that we don’t really love God and therefore don’t fight sin – we just act like my heeler when he gets disciplined, rolling onto our backs and letting sin run all over us? If you hear someone say they really love getting on broncs but you’ve never seen them on one and don’t even know if they own a saddle, you’d question the truthfulness of that statement. Well, if we say we love God but never attempt to show it or fight the sin we know He hates, it makes those words pretty hollow. John 14:15 gets straight to the point: “If you love Me, you will keep My commandments.”
Before becoming a Christian, I saw things like the Ten Commandments or commands in the New Testament as expectations I could never live up to. After God saved me, I now see these commands as ways God loves me – like a father instructing his son on how to handle life or the cow boss helping out the new hire on the ranch. Those commands are for our good.
In that sermon I mentioned above, Chandler says that we don’t always love God the way we should. Sometimes we struggle or doubt in those seasons of life. That’s when secondary motivations come in. Two that I think are important are knowing the cost of sin and noticing our drift toward sin.
The cost of sin
As Christians, we know the punishment for sin is the death of the sinner. We know that punishment should be against us, for our rebellion against God – but praise Him for the grace He extends on His people! In the Old Testament, God used the death of animals to atone for sin in the sacrificial system as a foreshadowing of Christ’s death.
Imagine for a moment having to watch something die because of the sin you committed. I don’t know about you, but for me one of the most nerve-wracking things about calving time is if you have to tube a fresh calf to give it milk to keep it alive. Even with plenty of experience there’s always the chance that if you screw up, that calf will have to pay for your mistake by drowning in the milk you’re trying to give it . In ranching or rodeo, we know death is a part of life. When you have a sick cow or an old horse that’s been your work partner for years but won’t survive the winter, sometimes the best option is a bullet. It’s a tough but necessary part of the job. Most of the world doesn’t see that side of ranching. Instead, they just see some nice clean packaged steaks by the time their meat arrives in the store.
Just like the people in the store, I think most of us miss what sin actually costs. This cost wasn’t just any death though. It was bloody and gruesome. Just go look at the sacrificial system in the Old Testament or the crucifixion of Christ in the New.
1 Peter 1:18-19 tells us: “For you know that it was not with perishable things such as silver or gold that you were redeemed from the empty way of life you inherited from your forefathers, but with the precious blood of Christ, a lamb without blemish or spot.”
I think we cheapen the price God paid for us in our salvation. We need to remember, especially in moments of temptation, to think of how bloody and awful it must have been for Christ on the day of His crucifixion. Remember how much pain He endured to save us when it was pain we deserved. That should make us think twice when we are ready to roll over to sin’s demands.
Our natural drift toward sin
If you’ve dealt with cattle in steep country, you know that if left on their own for very long they will eventually drift down to the flattest spot or along a waterway. Much like cattle, if God would leave us alone we would just drift down further and further. Cows don’t just appear at the bottom of the draw and we don’t just “happen” to go deeper and deeper into sin. We make decisions that don’t seem that bad at first but will eventually trap us in our old sinful way of life. If we don’t fight our sin it will just keep growing, kind of like my horse’s feet. If I don’t trim them up or put shoes on him, they’re just going to get worse and worse. As John Owen put it, “be killing sin or it will be killing you.”
While as Christians, we have a new heart and a new nature, our old nature and old habits are still with us.
In Romans 7:21-25 Paul is talks about his flesh or the sin that is in him and how it wages war against his new nature in Christ. “So this is the principle I have discovered: When I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God’s law. But I see another law at work in my body, warring against the law of my mind and holding me captive to the law of sin that dwells within me. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God, through Jesus Christ our Lord!”
Praise God we have been rescued, and don’t have to drift towards sin. God gives us the ability as Christians to fight our sin and honor God with our daily lives.
I pray that on the days when we are really in a knock-down, drag-out fight against our sin – or heck, any day – we’ll remember how much God loves us and that His love will compel us to keep up the good fight. I’ve heard it said that practice doesn’t make perfect, but perfect practice makes perfect. So in the next and final part of this series we’ll get into the “how to” in this fight against sin.
The bang! The traumatic moment of losing someone under his command that brought a lot of other experiences together into a turning point that left Virginia Bull Rider Austin Beaty clinging to his faith. He wants his honest story to bring encouragement to you about the importance of a saving faith in Jesus, especially when you reach a breaking point.
Spiritual warfare is real and can throw all kinds of sin in your path
The Battle Against Sin Part 2
By Josh McCarthy / Cowboys of the Cross
I mentioned earlier that it’s a good idea to know who you are up against in any fight, this week we are going to dive into detail on what has been identified as the three main sources of sin.
The Flesh
This describes us, our self-centeredness, our thoughts and motivations. One of the old timers of the faith once said, “We aren’t sinners because we sin. We sin because we are sinners.”
My heeler isn’t a cow dog because he bites cows; he’s a cow dog, and therefore he bites cows. It’s in his nature. But unlike my heeler biting cows, sin is never a good or right thing for us as Christians. Sadly, it is our nature (Romans 3:23: …for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.) I think one of the most important things for us to see is the sin in ourselves. Jesus tells us in Matthew 15:18-19, “But the things that come out of a person’s mouth come from the heart, and these defile them. For out of the heart come evil thoughts—murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, slander.” He points to the heart of the issue, and it’s our hearts.
It’s a very popular theme on Facebook and everywhere else nowadays to follow our hearts. In a way, I can see how that sounds good. Some might mean it as, “God has given you certain passions in life that aren’t sinful and you should pursue those for His glory, not your own,” and yeah, that’s okay. Unfortunately, most (if not all) people mean it as, “do whatever you want to make you happy and don’t let anyone tell you no.” In response to that, let me just bring up Jeremiah 17:9:“The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?”
Or as one wise pard of faith put it, “The heart is an idol factory”.
The World
“When we are told to not love the world, the Bible is referring to the world’s corrupt value system,” says GotQuestions.org. There are a lot of things that fit into the category of the world’s corrupt value systems: basically take anything except God and put it as the ultimate “thing” in this life. The world tells us that having that gold buckle is all that matters, or that shiny new stock trailer, or that nice, fully-tooled saddle with all that silver on it, or even the family ranch (yeah, listing some of these things hurts me a little also). But Matthew 16:26 asks, “What good will it be for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul? Or what can anyone give in exchange for their soul?” Jesus is talking about the cost of following Him.
The promises of this world don’t last. “The world and its desires pass away, but whoever does the will of God lives forever” (1 John 2:17). Does this mean we just throw everything away and become a hermit with a Bible? As Paul would say, by no means! (Or by a looser translation, heck no!) We are called to be in the world but not of it (John 17:15-19). There are a lot of good gifts God has made – horses, cattle, and blue heeler dogs being some of my favorites, and the occasional shiny silver bit or two – but I need to be watching to make sure I don’t make those things the ultimate part of my life where only God should be.
The Devil
Depending on who you talk to, the Devil either doesn’t exist or is responsible for everything including that last cold, your recent buck off, and those yearlings breaking out (and now you have to sort out three different feed lot pens this morning!). I’m here to tell you, neither one of the above views is accurate.
As Christians, we know that there is a spiritual realm. God Himself is a spiritual being (John 4:24). We also know that God created spiritual beings that we call angels and demons (including the Devil). While it’s a good idea not to obsess about these created spiritual beings, the Bible teaches about them and about spiritual warfare so it is something we should have a grasp on. Jesus also had many encounters with demons during His earthly ministry which looked more like them begging to not be destroyed compared to a fair fight.
So who is the Devil? He is a demonic spiritual being. He is the serpent in Genesis 3, and in John 8:44 he is called the father of lies. 2 Corinthians 4:4 calls him the god of this world and his purpose is stated there: to blind the minds of unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the good news of the Gospel. The Devil and his demons do this blinding in a number of ways. Two examples would be getting people to believe God doesn’t exist or getting people to believe in a false god or spiritual force. Even things we might think are harmless, like yoga, visualization or meditation can be used to blind us. Before I go further I want to note that I’m not talking about stretching and exercise, picturing something in your head like the right moves to ride a bull and how to swing that perfect heel shot, or filling your mind with Scripture; I’m talking about the “New Age” practices that are far from harmless with their emphasis on going around God to attempt to influence our life and the world around it.
If you say, “If I visualize it in my mind I will achieve it” (visualization), you have basically made yourself God, which God calls idolatry (Exodus 20:3). If you get into the idea of meditation to “empty your mind” or to get to a sub conscious or unconscious part of your mind to be on the same brain wave as that bronc or bull, or ask for a spiritual guide, you just might get one in the demonic sense. If you get into yoga and start believing you need to find your “center” and that everything has a good or bad “aura” – or, heck, we’ve all heard someone mention the idea of karma – you’re embracing pagan ideas that come to us from Eastern mysticism. All of these and more are wrapped up in the New Age movement, what God would call witchcraft. Deuteronomy 18 :10-12 tells us: Let no one be found among you who sacrifices their son or daughter in the fire, who practices divination or sorcery, interprets omens, engages in witchcraft, or casts spells, or who is a medium or spiritist or who consults the dead. Anyone who does these things is detestable to the Lord…”
Now these three enemies in the fight against sin might have you thinking, “How am I going to do this, even if I think I’m John Wayne?” The answer is found in Ephesians 2:4-10: “But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions—it is by grace you have been saved.”
We have been saved from these enemies and we are empowered by God himself to wage this daily fight. Verse 4 shows us the answer to our next question, the “why” in the battle against sin – which we’ll answer in a couple of weeks. #keepupthefight
Feel free to comment below how we can be praying for you in your fight.
God can put the pieces together to form a picture we can’t even begin to see. A cowboy church devotion from horse man Jim Bull.
By Jim Bull / Cowboys of the Cross
I’ve known something for a long time and finally come up with an illustration that gives an idea of the complexity of life.
When you were a kid, do you remember putting together jigsaw puzzles that had a board with a curved border that all six pieces had one obvious spot for it to go? And do you remember putting every piece in the wrong place and turning it in a complete circle three to five times before either putting it in a different place on the board and spinning it again or putting it down and getting a new piece or giving up and finding something else to play with that didn’t hurt your brain?
Move forward a few years. Do you remember trying again to put together jigsaw puzzles? Only now you’re skilled and working with 500 pieces or one thousand or you like the challenge and go for puzzles with ten thousand pieces! You start with the boarder pieces or a specific color or whatever is your preferred method to make sense of the madness. Now it’s because you enjoy the challenge so you don’t give up, you just keep plugging along, piece by piece till you proudly look upon a finished puzzle.
Now we’re going to look at God. He takes all the millions of pieces of our lives such as who we meet and when and where we are, what we pay attention to. The good things and the bad; all the things that make up a life. It’s like the pieces are in a bingo ball scrambler cage, He reaches in and pulls one piece out and places it on a blank table with no border in the exact location it belongs. No twisting or turning or spinning or searching for a boarder or color. He just knows where it belongs. Then He grabs the next piece of the puzzle and places it perfectly. He is an amazing God!
But wait! That puzzle with millions of pieces is just your life! He also mixes your puzzle pieces with all of the people you are affected by or have an influence on or that influence you. Now it’s a puzzle with billions or trillions of pieces and it’s in 3D and he’s still pulling them all out of a bingo ball scrambler cage! You can look up awesome in a thesaurus and use every word it has and still not get the full picture of how great God is. Praise Him and worship Him for He is worthy! He knows your every hair, thought and action, inside and out. He is the master of your puzzle.
Luke 12:5-7But I will show you whom you should fear: Fear Him who, after He has killed, has power to cast into hell; yes, I say to you, fear Him! “Are not five sparrows sold for two copper coins? And not one of them is forgotten before God. But the very hairs of your head are numbered. Do not fear therefore; you are of more value than many sparrows.
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