I am currently reading a book entitled “The Enemy Within” by Kris Lundgaard- I highly recommend it.  The book deals with indwelling sin and is largely a modern revision of some of the works of John Owen.  I thought I would share a couple of nuggets from my reading over the last couple of days.

If sin only came to visit now and then, like an unwelcome in-law, we could get a lot of godliness done while it was away.  If it were like an army that struck, then pulled back for a time, we could refresh ourselves and fortify our defenses during the calm.  But the flesh is a relentless homebody and assailant.  Wherever you go, whatever you do, the law of sin is with you step for step–in the best you do, in the worst you do.  How often do you think about the fact that you carry around in you a deadly companion?

There is no spiritual duty, nothing godly you can set yourself to, in which you won’t feel the wind of sin’s resistance in your face.  Does God command you to believe he is good and wise when you lose a friend?  Indwelling sin sidles up with seeds of doubt and mistrust.  Does God command you to help a neighbor in need?  There is sin with apathy and stinginess in hand.  Does God want you to long for the coming of Christ?  Here is sin, dangling before  your eyes the trinkets of the world.

You can feel the hostility of the flesh wheever you approach God– it makes real love for him into work: Digging around the Bible to find a juicy new incsight to impress your small group is like sailing the Caribean, but pouring over the Scriptures to find the Lover of your soul is like skiing up Mount Everest.  Conjuring up a happy mood with some music you don’t even know the words to is like solving 2 + 2 with a calculator.  But savoring the glory of Christ and his tender love until your heart is softed toward him is like using mental math to calculate pi to the thousandth place.  And giving a birthday present to your best friend is like forcing down some double-fudge brownies [chocolate is probably not the best analogy here].  But giving up your extra bedroom to a homeless person in the name of Jesus is like eating the Rockies for breakfast.

The more we know and understand indwelling sin the more we will be ready to identify it fight against it.  As we see its power we are pushed to God- to the cross- for grace- grace for forgiveness and grace for the battle. 

As powerful as our enemy is we know that our Savior has defeated it and stripped it of authority.  We know that we have a new nature within us battling against sin and the Holy Spirit warring on our side continually. 

Wretched man that I am! Who will set me free from the body of this death? ²⁵ Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!                    -Romans 7:24-25a

This entry was posted by Tim Pickard on Thursday, July 13th, 2006 at 3:13 pm and is filed under Christian Living, Main. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.