What do you do with sins that come from the world? Paul talks about this in the opening verses of Romans 12, where he writes that we are not to be conformed to the world, but are to be transformed by the renewing of our minds so that we may prove what is the good and acceptable and perfect will of God. This means that you have to live close to God in the Scriptures, as you grow in the Christian life and allow God to enable you to think increasingly as God thinks rather than as the world thinks. For this to happen we need to draw near to God and allow the Holy Spirit to do that kind of transformation which makes us different people as the new life of Christ comes to fruition within us.
Finally, there are those sins that come to us from the devil. James talks about that in his book. In chapter four he has instructions as to what we are to do: “Submit yourselves, then, to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you” (v. 7). Here we see that we must first of all submit ourselves to God, and then resist the devil, so that he will flee.
If you want an example of that, you find it in the life of the Lord Jesus Christ. We have the story of the Lord’s temptation told in Matthew 4 and also in the fourth chapter of Luke. We are told that the Lord had certainly submitted Himself to God the Father by prayer and fasting for forty days. The devil came to the Lord on that occasion, but that Jesus resisted him by His knowledge of the Bible. Three times in that encounter with the devil Jesus answered Satan’s temptations by quoting from the Old Testament. It was after that kind of submission to God and resistance to the devil that he left. You and I can resist the devil as well; but it is only as we submit to God and rely on the Scriptures that He has given to us in our battle. The Bible is the Christian’s offensive weapon. It is the sword of the Spirit to help us triumph against temptations when they come.
In verses 14 through 22, Paul gives one specific example of what needs to be done. This ties chapters 8 through 10 together because he is again in a certain sense talking about this matter of food that has been offered to idols. But he takes it a step further by placing the issue in the context of participation and fellowship. When you buy food in the marketplace, or when you get invited to someone’s house for dinner, you do not have to worry about where the food came from and whether or not it had been sacrificed previously.
But if you get invited to a party or festival being held in honor of a pagan god, that is something entirely different because you would then be participating in the fellowship of those assembled in the name of a false god. While it is true that Zeus or any other god is nothing, there are, nevertheless, demons in the world; and the demons stand behind these pagan religions. So if you were to attend that pagan festival, you would actually be participating with the demons in this kind of debased worship.
I think that relates to this matter of temptation because this illustration raises the question of whether you are going to go God’s way and determine to do everything you can to be as righteous as you can and follow Jesus Christ, or are you going to approach a given situation and ask yourself, “How close can I get to sin without actually transgressing the law?” I heard a story years ago about a little girl who kept falling out of bed. Somebody said to her, “Why do you keep falling out of bed?” She answered, “I suppose it’s because I always stay too close to the place where I got in.”
A lot of Christians do exactly that. Do not stay as close as you can to the edge. As long as you are on the edge it might not be sin, but that is not where you should be. You should be going on with Jesus Christ as strongly as you can. And that’s the evidence, of course, of the life of Jesus Christ within.
