Ruling Over Sin

What I hope typically happens on a Sunday evening service is we choose a text that applies to the passage or relates to the passage of the morning sermon, and then someone would come in and give a devotion that is very practical and encouraging that complements the morning sermon. So I am attempting to do that tonight. We're going to look back at the passage we read in the service that Brian read. We're going to look at Cain and Abel. Now, I'm looking ahead as well. I'm preaching from Genesis coming up. We're going to be looking at two particular verses. Verses 6 and 7 of chapter 4. So, Genesis 4, 6 through 7. The Lord said to Cain, Why are you angry? And why has your face fallen? If you do well, Will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin is crouching at the door. Its desire is for you, but you must rule over it. Now, the context is obviously we're familiar with the story. Abel gave God his best sheep, got accepted as a worthy sacrifice. Cain gave God some of his grain, and whenever he sees that God's accepted Abel's sacrifice, well, this is God's rebuke of Cain for being angry, for being angry at Abel particularly. So just making some observations from the text. One, now, obviously, Cain's faith has fallen. That's an idiom. His faith literally was still there, but it was the long Why the long face partner joke about the horse and the bar? No need to recite that now. But his face showed his grief. But God knows what's going on in Cain's heart. God knows what is creeping, what is evident, what is powerful in Cain's own heart. Secondly, God gives Cain clear instruction. Here's a choice very much like what God gave Israel over and over again. You can either obey and be blessed or you can disobey and be cursed. Very much like the choices we have every day. God saw Cain. He saw the importance of the moment and he God himself gave clear instruction. You can obey and be accepted like your brother. Or you can continue down this road and sin, which desires you. Desires to consume you and destroy you. It will rule over you. We see here that sin is seeking to destroy Cain. Sin is personified here. It has its own personality. Sin has its own desires. It's quite interesting how sin is spoken of here by God. Finally, Cain is instructed to rule over sin. That's really what we're going to focus on tonight. God tells Cain to rule over the sin. Look at that very last sentence. Its desire is for you, but you must rule over it. Cain, you must rule over sin. And what I want to talk about tonight are some simple ways for us. We're not as simple for us. We think about how we should be ruling over sin because we are like Cain. We all have hearts that are rebellious against God. We all have hearts that have sin deep down, causing us to be envious, causing us to have hatred, causing us to covet, to lust, to murder. We all have these hearts that contain this sin that desires to consume us and destroy us, and we must rule over it. So I have listed here some ways that we can think about how we should be ruling over sin so that it does not rule over us. First. The first thing we need to see whenever we're thinking about how we must rule over sin when given this choice, we need to see sin for what it is. Sin is destructive, not enjoyable. You see, Cain thought he was going to get something out of allowing this sin to take root. Cain thought that he would have enjoyment. Cain thought that his problems would be over. whenever he killed Abel. He had a desire to kill Abel because his problem, he thought, was Abel. He thought his problem was the fact that his brother offered a better sacrifice. That wasn't the problem at all. The problem was Cain didn't give God his best sacrifice. Cain's problem was with God. But he was short-sighted. So Cain saw his solution as killing his brother. You see, he had a a murderous heart. He looked at what Abel did and he desired to have that same acceptance from God. And instead of, well, following God's instruction, he tries to take out Abel. He thought he would actually get some enjoyment, some relief by obeying the sin. But sin does not bring joy. Sin does not bring comfort. Sin does not bring relief at all. Sin only brings more sin. Sin only brings destruction and death. So as we are tempted with sin, as we are tempted to envy, to lust, to hate, we must realize that we must conquer and rule over these sins by realizing it, seeing sin for what it is. It's gross. It's rebellious. It's offensive before God. So, if we're going to rule over sin, we must see sin for what it is. It is not enjoyable. It is destructive. Secondly, we need to be able to analyze our desires and actions critically. We need to be able to ask ourselves, what brings God glory? Is this desire, if I follow through with it, going to bring God glory? Now, I use the different loves this morning. You know, we can have a love for God. We can have a love for our wives or spouses. We have a love for our children, our parents. We can have a love for cheeseburgers. What we have to realize is we have to put the appropriate affection with the appropriate object. That's the problem with the heart. It's constantly wanting to put the wrong affection on the wrong object. What we have to be able to do is critically analyze what we love. Why we love it and how we love it. This takes time, this takes effort, this takes a lot of intentionality, but our hearts are something we should be able to study. Our affections, our desires are something we shouldn't just say we're going to let them run loose and obey them. No, we need to know. We need to be focused and intentional on what we lay our affections upon or our affections will naturally lie upon sin and evil desires. Part of this analyzing our desires and our actions critically is what the challenge, the practical challenge is. All right, we're here a new year somewhat, a little later, but do you love God any more than you did a year ago? Can you critically analyze your heart and say, I love God more today than the day I first became a Christian. Do I love God today more than I did a year ago? Can you analyze your heart and critically analyze what your affections are for God or for your spouse or for your loved ones? Secondly, I think this one really flows along with the last one. Thirdly, we need to have others speak into our lives about our affections and our desires. This one's important because, well, there's a whole strand of Puritans that were so dedicated to self-analysis that they became depressed, typically. You can get so involved into your own heart and your own desires that you get overwhelmed with how perverse and rebellious and gross your heart is. That's why others need to come alongside you and remind you, no, brother. The gospel is greater than your evil desires. The gospel is greater than your rebellious heart. The gospel is obvious in these evidences of grace. So we need others to come alongside us to encourage us in the midst of our analysis, but also to pick up our blind side. We need others to help analyze us as well. We need others to be able to point out the blind sides. The real sick and twisted part about sin is that it's self-deceptive. The more clever of us, we can justify our sins. We can think of why certain sins are okay in certain circumstances. We need other brothers and sisters to come into our lives and say, no, you're being sinful. Your actions do not line up with the gospel. Your actions do not line up with your confession. We need to invite people in to do this. It's awkward for someone to have to come in and say, you know, you're being a real bonehead right now. Don't make someone have to come up and say that out of the blue. You need to establish relationships that invite people to say this. The obvious relationships that are already there are spouses. There needs to be obvious times and open invitations to speak into each other's lives. Children, the most important for you, the most important people for you are your parents. They're the ones who know you and are analyzing you. They're the ones that you should invite to speak truth into your lives. And men, I think, well, more than the ladies, more than our wives, we need other men speaking truth into our lives in addition to our wives. Maybe this is just my own casting my own self upon you, but our pride, Our pride needs that. My particular pride needs another man speaking into my life in addition to my wife. Because of our pride, we need other men who are going to speak clearly and boldly. Fourth, we need to remember and recognize that Christ has died to free us from the power of sin. So as we analyze our sin, as we see sin for what it is, as we have other brothers and sisters come into our lives to proclaim the gospel to us and to proclaim to us where sin is realized, we always have to put sin in its proper context. And that is the gospel. Because if all we do is analyze and see our sin, if all we do is hear the conviction of sin. Well, we'll be. Down, our faces will be fallen. What we need to do is constantly hear and see that Christ has died to free us from our sin. The power of the gospel, the power of Jesus Christ is greater than the destructive power of sin. He frees us from guilt. He frees us from the desire and he gives us a new direction. To the gospel, it is the perfect healing. He frees us from the guilt of our sin. He freezes from the power of the sin and then he sets us off in a new way, in a new direction. And that really leads us to the final way in which we can rule over sin and that is to be actively pursuing righteousness. We can't just say, I am a sinner, I need the gospel, I'm forgiven and then think we can just go about our day. Sin is destructive, sin is seeking to devour us. Sin is seeking an opportunity proactively to destroy us. We can't just lackadaisically sit back and think, oh, now that we have Jesus, we're going to be OK. No, we have to proactively seek to rule over it by practicing righteousness, by finding ways to invest ourselves in doing God's work, doing God's good work, because idle hands will naturally go back to doing what is evil. Idle hearts will naturally start desiring those things that are opposed to God. So the thing about Cain, we can look back at him and we can really see how foolish he was. We can really see how corrupt his heart was. And if we do that, we must realize that we have the same heart. We have the same fallen heart, we have the same sin that seeks to destroy us. And these are some simple steps that obviously we could elaborate on more. The most important was obviously the gospel. It's in the gospel that we see how destructive sin is. In the gospel, we see how to analyze our hearts because it is God's holiness, the God's holy standard by which we judge ourselves. It's in the gospel that we see new direction. It's in the gospel that we have freedom from guilt. Let's pray. Almighty God, we thank you, Lord, for your gospel. We thank you, Lord, for your good news. We thank you, Father, for the love you have shown us in Jesus Christ. We thank you, Lord, for the freedom you give us in Christ. We thank you, Lord, for the freedom from guilt. We thank you, Lord, for the freedom that we have now to live new lives, to actually participate in eternal life now. Pray that we as a church will be a constant witness to these eternal life within the body, loving one another, and outside of the body, proclaiming your gospel to all the lost. Help us, Lord, to be a body that's united in these efforts. In the name we pray. Amen.