A practical primer on how to deal with sin
This is a long one but the concept I’m talking about here is worth the length
Ok, this post is a bit frenetic… a careening, fast moving message that has and could fill books but instead fills today’s humble Substack post. I don’t usually send out posts like this but I’ve been thinking about this subject a lot lately and I want to hopefully encourage you with the practical stuff I present here. So I apologize ahead of time for its length and air of urgency. But I hope it blesses you all the same. 💛
So here’s a weird cooking truth.
If you’re cooking something— say, an Indian curry, for instance— and the dish ends up bitter because you’ve put too much turmeric in it or whatever, the best way to balance out that bitter taste is with something sweet, right?
Wrong.
The best way to balance out bitter, at least in the culinary world, is with acid.
The bitter curry needs lemon juice. Or amchoor powder, which is an Indian spice made from mangoes that I’m sure was developed for the exact purpose of righting the bitter wrongs of curries.
So here’s a not-so-straight-forward spiritual truth that relates to the above cooking tip.
If you’re struggling with a sin— say, any sin, for instance— what is the best way to deal with it? The opposite of sinning is not sinning, so the logic goes, so I need to somehow muscle my unruly flesh into just not doing the sin in question, right?
Wrong.
The remedy for sin is not less sin— it’s faith. Less sin in our lives is the byproduct of faith. Less sin is not the byproduct of will or muscle.1
In other words, the opposite of sinning is believing. Believing Someone beyond yourself more than you believe the lie of the sin.
Sin dies in belief.
It’s sort of like what they say about anger (they being psychologists).
A lot of people would like to be less angry— to have more control when they feel out of control with rage.
But the way to control anger is not to just stop being angry. That’s like trying to control weeds by adding fertile soil and fertilizer to empty ground, because anger is a “secondary emotion:” an outward expression of a much deeper and oftentimes unrelated hurt or insecurity. Anger is the plant: the underlying hurt is the soil in which it thrives. We can’t get rid of our anger by pulling it up like a weed because it will just keep coming back. Instead, when we scrape away the fertile soil by facing the underlying reason we are angry, the unwanted weed simply has no more substrate to survive in.
Belief does the same thing: it deals with sin down at the root level.
Back in the garden, how did the serpent get Eve to actually commit the sinful action of eating the forbidden fruit? By messing around with her beliefs.
“Did God really say?” the evil little punk asked her.
“You will not die! Instead, your eyes will be opened! Just like God’s!”
The woman was convinced. She saw that the tree was beautiful and its fruit looked delicious, and she wanted the wisdom it would give her. (Gen 3:6, NLT, emphasis mine)
Her sin started with a lie, which she then believed. And once she was “convinced”, the fruit of the tree and the promise of “wisdom” suddenly looked beautiful and delicious. I’d love to know if the fruit didn’t really look beautiful and delicious to her before this manipulative little infection of doubt took root in her belief system…
Ever since then, God has directed all efforts at breaking down and building up the root source of our error: our belief.
“Believe in the Lord Jesus and you shall be saved.” (Acts 16:31)
“Whoever believes in him shall not perish, but have eternal life.” (John 3:16)
“Trust in the Lord with all our heart, lean not on your own understanding…” (Proverbs 3:5)
And my favorite verse of all time when it comes to the value of belief—
In this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while, if need be, you have been grieved by various trials, that the genuineness of your faith [belief in God], being much more precious than gold that perishes… (1 Peter 1:6-7, emphasis mine)
Our beliefs separated us from God in the garden, but they are also how we return to him, even unto eternal salvation. I love this 1 Peter verse because it shows a behind-the-scenes view of how God sees our faith/belief/trust: to Him, it is more valuable than gold and equally as rare.
So many times in the gospels we see Jesus “marveling” at unbelief.2
“When the son of man comes, will he find faith on the earth?” (Luke 18:8)
So let’s apply this to sin vs faith. This is so practical and useful that I’m giddy to talk it.
Let’s say you’re like me and you sort of just revert to yelling at your kids when they start acting like little buttcakes.
You can’t just tell yourself, “Stop yelling,” because you won’t stop yelling. The yelling is not a conscious decision. It’s a knee jerk reaction because it is based on belief, just as all actions/reactions are.
If this is true, what you need to do is follow the breadcrumb trail back to the source pain by doing an exercise that goes something like this:
Why do I yell at my kids?
Because they disobeyed me and because I’m frustrated.
Why does their disobedience frustrate you?
Because it’s wrong for them to disobey me.
Why is it wrong, meaning to you— why do you feel wronged when they disobey? Because, Cas, you’ve seen them do other things that are technically “wrong” and you don’t just start yelling . You know kids are kids and sometimes they just do nutty things. So why is it wrong when they disobey you?”
Because if they can’t obey my authority as a parent now, they’ll grow up and think they can not only shun earthly authority in their lives (like their boss or the cops), but that they can shun God’s authority and just do whatever they want.
Why is that a big deal— a big enough deal to overreact and mindlessly yell at them?
Because… I’m afraid.3
I’m afraid they’ll grow up and never walk with God and the blame for that will rest on me. I love them, and I’m afraid of them making the biggest blunder of their lives: never coming to God for His love, never being able to surrender to the sometimes difficult things He puts in our paths. So I yell because I want to force them to obey me. Because I’m desperate.
What does your fear-leading-to-desperation show about your beliefs at this moment?
It shows that I believe their entire future, down to their eternal salvation, rests on me.
No wonder you get so frustrated, Cas. No wonder you feel desperate. Don’t you think this burden you are bearing about their future lives being all about you is not only Biblically incorrect, but too much for you to carry?
LOL YES.
What is the truth, then? What belief can we put in place of this defective one?
I can start to believe that God is big enough to handle my children’s future. I can think back to my own completely insane childhood where my mentally ill and addicted parents just let me run wild, and yet God still got ahold of me. Twenty plus years later, I’m still loving Him and walking with Him. He didn’t need me to come from a perfect house to save me. Actually, it was the flagrant imperfection of my house that drove me to God.
Does God need your kids to come from a perfectly accurate discipline situation to save them and turn them into functioning adults someday?
No. He’s bigger than that.
Did any one person save you, the way you think you’re the one person who’s gonna save them?
No, it was a lot of different Christian people speaking into my life that helped me go towards God.
Do you guys see the logic? If I believe it’s all about me, I sin. I yell. I react. But if I believe that yes, it’s my job to do my best as a mom, but it’s not my job to stand in the place of God when it comes to my kids, all of a sudden the urge to yell isn’t as strong. If I believe He is big enough to handle the lives of my children, I can rest from my works, i.e. my sin. Whatever we believe will allllllways come out in our actions: our true beliefs are never hidden (ouch).
There’s a faster way to do this other than the above exercise. You take whatever thing you’re dealing with, and you cut to the chase by asking yourself, “What am I not believing about God’s love/care/authority over me right now that is causing me to take things into my own hands?”
Let’s take the example of road rage.4 When I get angry on the road at someone, what am I not believing about God? That He will justly deal with the evil things people do to each other. I’m not believing He sees the injustice. I’m not believing He will make it right because most of the time I see no evidence that any injustice in the world is or will be made right.5 The wave of evil around us can feel like incredibly suffocating, to put it mildly. So because I don’t believe God will handle it, I decide to handle it by getting angry (as if getting angry at a person in the next car changes anything).
The root of my anger is I long for justice— for wrongs to be made right: “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness.”
How do I find my way out of the road rage? By deciding that no matter the injustice and selfishness I see people getting away with on the road, I will choose to believe that vengeance is His and He will repay, which means it is 100% not my job to repay, get angry or let the sin of others destroy my day.6
Next time you struggle with something where you know you are sinning, whether it’s against yourself (overeating, overdrinking, overspending) or against someone else (yelling, rage, anger, putting yourself over others in some way), check in with your beliefs, particularly your beliefs about the character of God and His intentions towards you. I’ll bet you’ll find a dissonant note or two in there.
All you have to do at that point is adjust the notes back to their intended resonance using the tuning fork of the Bible and what it says about His character and His love for you, use your faith to actively choose to believe the truth of God over what you see or feel, and then walk forward with a new and better song.
Is it easy? No. It takes practice. But one of these times you’ll recite “Vengeance is God’s, not mine” to yourself as you see some airhead 20-year-old in a BMW weave through 3 highway lanes going 90 miles an hour and endangering every person within his vicinity…
And you’ll believe what you just recited. You’ll believe that God will handle that driver— that the driver will hopefully be saved and stop driving like the lives of the people around him don’t matter…And you won’t get angry, because your true beliefs will bud out into palpable action. And that will be an amazing moment.
Because you did what Eve didn’t do: you said no to sin because of your faith.
Above all, taking the shield of faith with which you will be able to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked one. (Ephesians 6:16, NKJV)
That’s why Paul goes off in Galatians and the first part of Romans about the works based method of dealing with sin as opposed to the grace and gospel based method of dealing with it. Works will never save us. Ever. We all know this. And yet we still think we can handle the issues in our lives by our own might and efforts, rather than belief.
Mark 6:7, Mark 4:40.
So many sins could be avoided if we called fear what it is— a sin— and then worked on worked on applying our faith to that sin.
If you think I have an anger problem, you are right. Good thing God and I are slowwwwly working on it together.
The psalmists felt like this too, which is why Psalm 2-15 are all about choosing to believe He will make things right, someday, somehow, no matter what we see with our eyes.
This method has really helped reign in my road rage. I wrote the “vengeance is mine” verse on a sticky note and put it on my dashboard and every time I feel crazy on the road I chant that verse to myself and challenge myself to believe it all the more.
This is really really good Cas. I like your road rage sticky note idea. I feel like God has been convicting me of something similar lately. Like you I very much have an anger problem. I've been thinking of it in terms of not wanting to grieve the Spirit, as it says in Ephesians 4:30-32. I want to be filled with the Spirit and that is not compatible with anger, so that provides a motive to deal with that sin. Thanks for sharing these very valuable thoughts!