How to Overcome Sin

Kinda Obvious

Megan Breedlove August 5, 2013 No Comments

The other day around suppertime, some friends of ours were on their way over. Our refrigerator had died in the middle of the night, and our friends were going to help us get rid of the old one and pick up the new one I’d bought. In order to feed everyone, I decided to order pizza. My kids were well aware that I was planning on calling for pizza. In fact, they were ecstatic.

And that’s important for you to know—that they knew pizza was on its way. Because twenty-five minutes later, I heard Kenny call to me, “Mom, someone’s at the door, and I don’t know who it is.”

“You don’t know who it is?” I asked him, puzzled.

“Nope,” Kenny said. “But he’s wearing red and blue.”

At this point, I realized who our visitor had to be. “Is he carrying pizzas?” I asked.

“Yes,” said Jessica.

“Then it’s probably the pizza guy,” I said.

I would have thought that would be obvious—a guy in a recognizable uniform (we’ve seen it many times before) standing on our porch holding a stack of pizzas. I mean, he probably wasn’t a robber. He probably wasn’t some random stranger looking for directions, or somebody selling magazines. He was probably—remember that he was holding plenty of pizzas—the pizza guy everybody knew was coming.

I found the incident funny. It can be cute when kids don’t realize something that’s obvious.

On the other hand, it’s not so cute when you and I don’t realize something God says should be obvious to us.

Some things, we will never fully understand until we get to heaven. Like the nature of the Trinity, for example. We’ll spend all eternity learning about them.

Some things, God may choose never to tell us, like the reasons behind some of His plans, actions, or seeming inactions.

But other things, He’s made glaringly obvious.

Let’s talk today about just one of those things—the fact that when we sin, it reflects the reality that our heart’s not right before God in that area. You and I may be aware of our sins, but rarely do we stop to consider that our sins reveal a heart that needs to be cleansed.

Over and over in the Bible, we’re told that what’s in the heart is vitally important—that everything else in life springs from that. So when something bad springs from our lives, it means that our heart is bad, at least in part.

When I snap at my kids, my heart isn’t right. When I nag my husband, my heart isn’t right. When I fail to make it a priority to spend time with God, something is definitely out of whack in my heart.

Oh, we have plenty of excuses. I’m tired. I don’t have time. He/she deserved it. But instead of making excuses, we need to look at what it is in our heart that would have caused us to do or say such a thing (or fail to do or say something).

Is there selfishness in our heart? Anger? Malice? Any of those things we’re told repeatedly to put far from us?

When we sin, it ought to send up a red flag for us that our heart needs some work. We should examine our heart, asking God’s help to search out the sin. And then we should repent.

When we look at our sin, it should be just as obvious that our heart has a problem as it is when looking at a guy in uniform carrying pizzas that the pizza guy is standing at the door.

Luke 6:45—The good [mom] brings good things out of the good stored up in [her] heart, and the evil [mom] brings evil things out of the evil stored up in [her] heart. For out of the overflow of [her] heart [her] mouth speaks. (NIV)

Proverbs 4:23—Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it. (TNIV)

1 Peter 2:1—So put away all malice and all guile and insincerity and envy and all slander.

“Toe” the Line

Megan Breedlove June 3, 2013 No Comments

The way my husband Phil tells it, it went something like this: Phil and the kids were at his parents’ house in Houston for a visit (I was teaching at the Colorado Christian Writers Conference in, well, Colorado). Phil and his dad were sitting on the couch talking while Phil’s mom got dinner ready in the kitchen. Timmy, wanting to be where Grandma was, was getting underfoot. So Phil removed him from the kitchen to the adjoining living room.

Before I finish the story, I should also tell you that we have been working on teaching Timmy the meaning of the word “no”. It had been going well that weekend, right up until Timmy got removed to the living room. He toddled back toward the kitchen.

“No, Timmy!” my husband instructed.

Timmy paused right there at the dividing line between the carpet of the living room and the linoleum of the kitchen floor. He stood there rocking back and forth from one foot to the other. And then, ever so slowly, he extended one toe and touched the linoleum with it.

At that point, my husband jumped up, hauled Timmy back to the couch, and said, “Time out, Timmy.”

Timmy had disobeyed.

But it was only one toe, we might be tempted to protest. It’s not like he went all the way into the kitchen.

That’s the problem. We excuse our children’s disobedience by saying that it’s not that big a deal. Worse yet is the fact that we do the same thing regarding our disobedience to God. We act like sticking a toe over the line ought to be okay with Him.

I didn’t have an affair; I just flirted a little, we rationalize.

Yes, I was impatient. But look at all I have to put up with!

So I don’t ever read my Bible regularly. At least I know what it says.

We look at our disobedience and say that one toe over the line shouldn’t be that big a deal, when in reality, God doesn’t want us to be anywhere close to the line. Jesus had lots to say to those who thought their sin was no big deal. He told them that even those who are guilty of “little” sins are in fact guilty of the “big” ones as well.

Flirting is already being unfaithful. Being impatient is being selfish. Neglecting God’s Word is disrespect and disobedience.

Is there something in your life right now that’s sin, for which you have been making excuses? Have you sinned in a way that you’re trying to pretend is no big deal?

Lest you say “no” too quickly, remember that we have all sinned, and if you’re not in this situation right now, you’ll be tempted to excuse or minimize your sin in the future. But instead of doing that—instead of acting like one toe over God’s line is no problem—let’s fall on our knees before God and repent. Let’s be sorry. Let’s turn from our sin.

No more excuses or minimizing, mom. No more.

John 15:22—“If I had not come and spoken to them, they would not have been guilty of sin, but now they have no excuse for their sin.” (ESV)

One Blade

Megan Breedlove May 6, 2013 3 Comments

Recently, I was having a stressful day. I had some things on my mind, and I was tired of doing child care. I told my husband I needed a break. He went outside and came back in a half hour later. “I weed-eated around the fence line, the shed, the swing set, and everything else out there,” he said, referring to the back yard. “Why don’t you go mow the rest?”

Lest you think my husband was being particularly insensitive, I must tell you that I actually enjoy mowing (except the detail work, which he had just taken care of). Phil knows I like the simple mindlessness of the work, the basic-labor kind of joy in pushing the mower up and down our quarter-acre back yard. I also like doing a task that’s going to stay done and looking nice for longer than 30 seconds after I complete it.

So I jumped at the chance to go mow. The kids followed me outside and played on the swing set while I mowed. Up and down. Back and forth. Watching the patch yet to be mowed growing smaller and smaller. I felt like I was truly accomplishing something.

At one point, I looked back over an area I had just mowed to make sure I got it all. I saw one long blade of grass sticking up in the midst of an otherwise-well-mowed section of lawn. I knew that one blade didn’t matter all that much, but I went back and mowed it down anyway. Why? Because I wanted to do the job right.

We’d all do well to take the same approach when uprooting sin from our lives. Yet too often, we leave one blade of sin sticking up, and we say to ourselves, Well, that’s good enough. But it isn’t. It’s not doing the job right.

Jesus didn’t die on the cross so that we could be forgiven of some of our sins, or even most of them. He sacrificed Himself so all our sins could be forgiven. He did the job right. And aren’t we glad? Aren’t we grateful that everything we’ve done is forgiven, not just the things that wanted to lie down and die easily on the first pass over them?

Why, then, do we only take some of the sins in our life seriously enough to make sure they are mowed down? God has commanded us to be holy. Not “kind of” holy, not “sort of” holy, but completely holy. He even gives us a promise, through the apostle Paul, that if we don’t put sin to death in our lives, we will die, but if we do, we will live.

I want to live abundantly, and I bet you do too. But we can only do so to the extent we are willing to give up known sin. To put it to death. To mow it down. To the extent that we tolerate sin in our lives, we won’t fully live.

What sins are sticking up in your life right now? What sins have you been tolerating because you think they aren’t that big a deal, or because hey, at least you mowed the rest of them down?

Precious mom, mow the whole yard. Put to death every sin that you find in your life. If you think you’re done, ask God to point out anything else to put to death, and see what He shows you.

Your life may still look pretty good even with that one sin sticking up in the middle. But you won’t be as fully alive as you could be.

Go mow it down.

Romans 8:13—For if you live according to the sinful nature, you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the misdeeds of the body, you will live.

Brushing Off the Crumbs

Megan Breedlove April 1, 2013 No Comments

Recently, I made two cheesecakes to take to a party. No, I couldn’t have chosen the easy way out and simply bought a couple of cheesecakes. I had to make them myself.

The actual recipe isn’t too hard, and I’ve used it before. The whole experience went pretty well, except for a minor glitch that had to do with my brand-new Springform pans.

I had never used that kind of pan before; previously, I had always bought prepared crusts. This time, I wanted to make my own. So I made the first cheesecake, then had to remove it from the bottom of the pan to slide it onto a serving tray so I could reuse the pan for the second cheesecake.

Everything went fine with the transfer of Cheesecake #1 to Platter #1. Mostly fine, that is. With all that jostling of the crust, some of the crumbs somehow—I still can’t remember how—wound up on top of the cheesecake.

“How am I going to get those crumbs off?” I asked my friend Rea, who was going to the party with me. “I can’t just blow them off.”

Rea came up with the idea of using my basting brush to gently brush the crumbs from the top of the cheesecake. That worked. Until I stepped in.

As Rea gently brushed the crumbs from the dessert, some of them fell onto the platter. I used my fingers to scoop the crumbs into my other palm, and then, for some inexplicable reason that still eludes me, I dumped them right back on the cheesecake.

There was a moment of confused silence before Rea said, “What did you do that for?”

“I don’t know,” I said, as puzzled as she was. And this devotion was born.

You see, what I did with those crumbs is just like what we sometimes do with sin. We realize there’s a problem, we get the sin brushed off of our lives, then we add it right back in.

What in the world was I thinking? we wonder, just as I wondered that day in my kitchen.

I hadn’t stopped to consider the options of where I could put the crumbs. I simply didn’t think about the ramifications of what I was about to do, and I dumped them right back where they came from.

Yep. That’s definitely what we do with sin. We just. Don’t. Think.

Whether we put the crumbs back on the cheesecake on purpose isn’t really the point. The point is that there they are, back where they shouldn’t be. Whatever our motives, we still messed up, undoing all the work that had just been done.

Have you ever been in that place, in terms of sin in your life? Where you got rid of it for a time, then found yourself right back in it?

Sure you have. We all have. That’s part of the insidious nature of sin. It can have a hold on us without our even realizing it.

So what do we do to make sure that we don’t sin without thinking? That we don’t just let the words come out of our mouth that shouldn’t have been said, or fail to do something we should have done, without even thinking about our actions?

We ask God to help us, and we ask regularly. We ask Him to warn us when we’re about to do something wrong. We take those areas in which we know we are prone to sin, and we put those areas to death by establishing plans for dealing with our wrongdoing and preventing further sin.

It’s hard. Believe me, I know. But I don’t want to put the crumbs right back on my cheesecake. You don’t either.

We want that cheesecake to look like it was supposed to.

Psalm 139:23-24—Search me, O God, and know my heart! Try me and know my thoughts! And see if there be any grievous way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting! (ESV)

Overcome by Vegetables

Megan Breedlove March 25, 2013 No Comments

Being that our thirteen-month-old son Timmy is as fearless as he is, and being that he has already performed many daredevil feats from which he somehow miraculously escaped unharmed, my husband and I have asked each other a few times, “So, how long do you suppose it will be before we end up in the ER with Timmy?”

That question was answered Friday night. Timmy came walking into the kitchen, tripped over his own feet, and fell face-first onto a large can of green beans. The rim of the can caught him just above the bridge of his nose. Timmy cried heartily for at least sixty seconds, whereupon he got over it. I knew, however, that his cut required stitches.

So I changed his diaper and put him in a fuzzy sleeper (good hospital wear). I then loaded up all five kids in the van and took Timmy to the ER, where he got four stitches in his poor little face. If Timmy grows up with an aversion to green beans, we’ll know why.

The point of this story, other than the fact that green beans aren’t as innocent as they look, is this: despite all his activity, despite all the things that should have done him in long before now, Timmy was overcome by…a can of green beans. Something so simple led to his defeat.

Often it’s the same with us, isn’t it? We get all the big things right, but it’s the “little” things that trip us up.

We don’t commit adultery, rob a bank, or murder anyone. But we lie, speak critically, or gossip.

It’s not a temptation for me to rob a bank. I don’t have any trouble refraining from that sin, because I don’t want to commit it in the first place. But being critical? A temptation to which I give in all too often.

True, some sins may have “bigger” consequences than others. But even what we think of as the “little” sins—the ones that don’t really matter much—can ruin our relationships with God and with others and cause us additional consequences we never intended.

Any sin we commit is an offense against our relationship with God as well as against God Himself. God doesn’t just care about the “biggies”; He cares about all sin, even our favorite sins that we think aren’t that big a deal. He doesn’t like them. In fact, He hates them. Yet we too often excuse them or don’t even call them for what they are.

For most of us, the sins that slip in between us and God aren’t going to be things the world would care about. The things that take us down aren’t going to be things that make the front page of the paper.

No, the sins that bring about our downfall are much more likely to be something that looks like not that big a deal at first.

Something like a can of green beans sitting on the floor.

1 Corinthians 10:12—Therefore let anyone who thinks that [she] stands take heed lest [she] fall. (ESV)