After 35 blog posts walking through Precious Remedies against Satan’s Devices, I may be the most excited about the next five. That’s because the Lord Jesus and his strength to save are their center and focus. Wielding the word of God as his choice weapon, Jesus defeated Satan in the wilderness. Crying to the Father […]
Failure: Learn how to overcome persistent sin
Persistent sin defies logic and reason. It short circuits common sense. We will rationalize, minimize, and explain away to whatever degree is necessary our “darling sins.”
Breaking free of that deadly pattern requires a power greater than our will, stronger than our resilience, and more trustworthy than our self-directed promises.
From Thomas Brooks’ Precious Remedies against Satan’s Devices, here are six truths that counter our failure to conquer persistent sin. Satan uses our weakness to discourage us. But that’s when God’s strength is made perfect.
Do you want to be healed?
We are sometimes like the paralytic by the pool at Bethesda, lying dejected, consumed by our weaknesses, with the Source of our healing in plain sight. Satan blinds us against the power of forgiveness by shining the glaring light of our sins in our faces.
But as Brooks reminds us, “A Christian should wear Christ in his bosom as a flower of delight, for he is a whole paradise of delight. He who minds not Christ more than his sin, can never be thankful and fruitful as he should.”
And so we have six remedies available to us, weapons against Satan’s hounding our minds about the sins that so easily entangle us. It is in dwelling on our Healer rather than on our disease that we will be made whole.
The seven marks of true repentance
In his sixth “device” of Satan against believers in our striving toward holiness, Thomas Brooks offers this one remedy among many: Consider the nature of true repentance. … Repentance is some other thing than what vain men conceive. True repentance is a thorough change both of the mind and life. Repentance for sin is nothing […]
Do you take God’s grace for granted?
Making messes has always been easy for humans. Cleaning them up is the perpetual challenge. And the easier cleaning becomes the messier we may allow ourselves to get. Especially if it’s someone else doing the cleaning. As Thomas Brooks states, Satan wants us to be comfortable in our sins knowing we have a God who freely forgives through repentance. And because repentance is so easy, why not sin away knowing our return home is such a quick trip?
Why ‘everyone does it’ doesn’t work with God
Thomas Brooks says Satan’s fourth device to lure us into transgression is to make us focus on the sins of the faithful while passing over repentance, forgiveness, and restoration. He longs to have us think that we can engage in the same wrong behaviors that others fall into. But he hides from our eyes the terrible price we will pay in the long road of recovery.
