Sin – Its very name evokes a sense of displeasure and disgust. Mention the word sin and you will see the forlorn look on people’s faces, casting a pre-gloominess feeling. Sin is something we are all familiar with and have been in some way of form influenced by it’s tantalising effects. We all have our own apples, our own forbidden trees, our line in the sand which we are told not to cross. While some can cry ignorance and be pardoned for that, the most of us, especially those who cling to our faith more deeply know its sinister effects.Sin is evil and selfish. It not only degrades your soul and smashes the fruits of the holy spirit with an unforgiving sledgehammer, but it also regenerates its strength and proliferates akin to Calvin from the movie Life. It prowls, seeking to further desecrate every part of your heart, body, mind and soul and it feeds of any inklings of unchecked temptation, impulse or enticement, slowly but patiently and in some cases methodically seducing and weakening your spiritual defence. And what more it is easy to do so. It is easy to succumb to unchecked temptation and for sin to creep in like a parasitic vermin in minuscule and undetected ways.
I have mentioned before about how duplicitous Satan can often catch his fallen prey with wit and unassuming ways. And that’s how he plants his seeds of sin. Just as how good seeds can fall on lands and produce good fruit, sins are also seeds of the devil which when they fall on a spiritual soil marked by traces of invariable quantity of the 7 deadly vices (pride, lust, greed, envy, sloth, wrath and gluttony), produces rotten fruit which in turns propagetes into the human body, mind and soul. Like a virus, you are now infected and the symptoms start to appear – moodiness, tiredness and despair all lead to bigger consequential sins over time.
Is there then no hope? Are we doomed to the clutches of sin? Of course you know its not all doom and gloom news for us who fall victim to our incessant temptations at every other time. We know there is strength and forgiveness as well as mercy and pardon from God. We know this from rote. We know that God is all forgiving and all merciful and that He always forgives us no matter how grave our sin is.
But there has to be something even more pronounce than this simplistic yet utterly true belief. To know God’s omnipotent and divine power over sin is one thing. To call and act upon it is another. And I believe this is the heart at overcoming sin. For years I have been contending with my own sinful desires and struggling with them. There are days I fall into sin in such great concert and progression as I described sometime back. While I am inundated with God’s truth in my mind, the journey from my mind to my heart takes too long to reach and by the time the journey is completed I am but too late – the sin has been committed and I have been relegated to my fallen state. Shame, guilt and despair as well as unhappiness permeates my soul instantly just as the euphoric and pleasurable desires or justified feelings start to fleet in cowardice response. And there in begins my return back to God, climbing the stone ladder staircase and making my way to the top after a clumsy tumbling down.
I will be honest with you. I have no answer for overcoming sin other than the pious platitudes that I could vainly conjure up for you – don’t give up, the important thing is to not give up when you sin, God always forgives, Jesus loves you anyway – To me all these are truths and don’t get me wrong, these are Truths – but there’s something more to it – there’s something more at place when you sin. Like how a parent keeps forgiving when his baby boy keeps making mistakes and doing silly things that offends him, the baby boy does not become a baby boy forever as the relationship must evolve. And I guess that’s where I am at. My relationship with God is evolving by the day and as it evolves, my heart at times does yearn to seek God and to overcome sin not because for overcoming Sin’s sake, but for the love of God.
There is a higher calling here at stake. An ongoing spiritual battle for a child’s soul for eternity even though I don’t see it that way most of the times. Overcoming sin means choosing God. But how do we go about choosing God in times of difficulty, temptation and seduction? How do we ensure our compass can still point north in the midst of a thunderstorm or a bright nice and sultry day? How can we anchor totally in Him?
