What Do You Want Most?

Ever watch the show, Intervention? It’s a story of families who – together with a trained professional – stage an intervention as a last-ditch effort to save a family member from the clutches of addiction. It’s mostly a tragic show because of the wreck these people have made of their lives and the hurt and damage they’ve caused to their family and friends. Their family knows that – given the choice between drugs and time with their own kids, for example – they’ll often choose the drugs. Why? Because in that moment, nothing on earth is more valuable to the addict than their drug of choice. So rehab for them becomes both a separation from the drug, as well as a mental retraining. They need to value being sober more than the temporary benefits the drug offers. As the doctors on the show explain, if they’re doing it to make someone else happy, odds are good that it won’t “take.” They have to want to be sober for themselves.

What do you want most?

This is an important question to ask, because what you and I do describes what we value. There are some things we say we value, but the real test comes when there’s a choice between two desirable options.

The trick is, sin is usually a pretty desirable option in the moment. As John Piper tweeted yesterday:

“Nobody sins out of duty. We sin because we believe sin’s promise of pleasure. So the path to holiness is a superior promise.”

Do you believe that Christ offers us a superior promise? This is the question at root of Paul’s words to the Ephesians in 4:17-24

Now this I say and testify in the Lord, that you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their minds. They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart. They have become callous and have given themselves up to sensuality, greedy to practice every kind of impurity. But that is not the way you learned Christ!— assuming that you have heard about him and were taught in him, as the truth is in Jesus, to put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires, and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.

The Gentiles – “in the futility of their minds” – pursue sensual things because they believe those things will bring them happiness. But it’s a fleeting happiness, isn’t it? And we know deep down that we were made for lasting happiness – the kind only our Maker can provide. Now we have been adopted by God’s amazing grace into Christ. We have His Spirit living in us, teaching us and empowering us to escape our addiction to sin. But – like any addiction – it doesn’t happen overnight. Like the addict, we have been set free – but in order to truly live like a free person, we must train ourselves daily to let go of the past, to let go of the things we used to want – and to value and love the things that God loves. Paul says it this way: “put off your old self…and put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.”

In the English Reformation, there was a preacher named John Owen who wrote a series of sermons on Romans 8 – where Paul echoes the same thoughts he speaks of here. He wrote something here that’s worth writing on a sticky note and sticking to your dashboard, or your bathroom mirror:

Be killing sin, or it will be killing you.
(John Owen, On the Mortification of Sin)

If you want to be like Christ, then – by His grace and in His power, which He has given to each of us – be daily killing sin. Hunt it down. Do it because you have been given a superior promise of an eternal joy, the promise of a life lived as it was designed to be lived. The temporary happiness that sin brings, on the other hand, will keep you from experiencing that joy, that life. So – moment by moment, day by day – let’s help each other sniff it out, hunt it down, and kill it.

Questions:

1) What are the things you value most? How does your life reflect this value system? How does it not?
2) How have your values changed since you were saved? What has that looked like in your life?
3) As friends, as a small group, and as a church – how can we help each other to “be killing sin…”?