Can't stop sinning?

It has long been recognized that anyone trying to progress spiritually must grapple with sin. Sometimes we may have grown accustomed to an activity that perhaps didn't seem sinful at first but now does, and that we've repented of and would like to drop. Do we, like Paul (and it's comforting to know he grappled with this problem too!), find ourselves saying, ''The good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do''? n1

n1 Romans 7:19

Whether the sin that has now become apparent as a brake on our progress is homosexuality, drug addiction, alcoholism, or an irritable disposition, it's not likely to yield simply to a repentant human will. And trying unsuccessfully to stop doing something we have now come to realize is sinful, sometimes tempts us to indulge in self-condemnation. This darkened state of mind would blind us to the ever-presence of the healing Christ, Truth, which, blessing humanity through divine law, can make us free. ''The law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law of sin and death,'' n2 said Paul. This law of Spirit, God, is the only law that really can permanently separate us from sin.

n2 Romans's 8:2

The law that frees us from the bondage of sin or sickness was demonstrated fully by Christ Jesus, and we might say it was summed up by him in the simple words ''Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.'' n3 The law expressed in this statement is that God, Spirit, is perfect and that man, His spiritual image and likeness, is therefore perfect.

n3 Matthew

Imperfection - which would include the tendency to sin or be sick - is a false product of a belief that man's real nature is not spiritual but material, mortal, fallen from perfection. While it certainly seems, to the human sense of things, that we are a mixture of spiritual and material qualities in which the material predominates, this simply isn't true, because perfect Spirit is the only genuine creator. There is no divine law supporting the apparent materiality of man. God's man has no tendency to sin. And only the spiritual, that which is Godlike, is ultimately real.

We can hold to this truth, denying any reality to the claim that the sin of which we've repented can separate us from the absolute purity of our relationship to God. Thus the desire to sin is progressively destroyed in us, as is the temptation to condemn ourselves or to expect our suffering to continue past the point where we've ceased to sin and have been redeemed.

''The destruction of sin is the divine method of pardon,'' writes Mary Baker Eddy, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science. She continues: ''Divine Life destroys death, Truth destroys error, and Love destroys hate. Being destroyed, sin needs no other form of forgiveness.'' n4

n4 Science and Health with key to the Scriptures, p. 339.

Sin inevitably produces suffering because it mistakenly presupposes an absence of that infinite good which is ever present and which is ever enforcing its own divine law. It presupposes the absence of Life, Truth, and Love - God Himself. While to ignore the presence of divine law may not seem so immediately disastrous as an attempt to ignore the law of gravity, the general effect is the same, and serves to awaken us to the illusory nature of sin. But once we've been awakened to its falsity, have sincerely repented, and are striving to obey divine law, sin cannot hold us in bondage.

The understanding that the law of Spirit, Life, is ever present, and is ever maintaining man's perfection, is revealed by the Christ. It is the Christ that makes us free from the ''law'' of sin. DAILY BIBLE VERSE Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage . . . Walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfil the lust of the flesh . . . The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance: against such ther is no law Galatians 5:1, 16,22,23

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