When You Can’t Conquer Sin by January 31st
January: the time of year when we all decide to be entirely sanctified in one month.
We choose a sin we struggle with, develop a five-step plan that can be completed in thirty-one days, and we decide that by February we will have shaken loose our chains. But February comes, and even if we stick with the plan perfectly, the sin still shows up the morning of the first.
As the conviction of sin settles over us, feelings of disgust, fidgety ickiness, and crippling shame cast a net over us. We walk with our heads low, knowing that even though those around us may not perceive our wretchedness, God’s eye is always upon us (Ps. 139:1–18). How do we continue? The weight of shame rarely lifts but continues to press down until we feel as if all breath has been rung out from our lungs. As we behold our wickedness, we wonder how God could ever forgive us, let alone make us clean again.
I’ve fumbled through these seasons throughout my life, especially in my younger years when I associated God’s fatherhood with my earthly father who didn’t treat me well and spoke of my flaws harshly. Here are the truths God bolstered my faith with and used to help me overcome my fears of his eternal disdain towards me.
Always Loving
Perhaps you have heard it said, “The God of the Old Testament was angry and wrathful, but God in the New Testament is much more gracious.” Yet this is a lie about the character of God. We worship a God who never changes (Heb. 13:8), so his graciousness cannot be less or more throughout redemptive history.
“But where do we see his grace?” they ask.
From the beginning.
When God created man and woman, he didn’t hold off to see if they could earn his blessings. After breathing into their lungs, God blessed Adam and Eve as the highest of his creation and gave them the Garden of Eden.
Even when Adam and Eve committed the first sin—when they sunk their teeth into the only fruit God forbade them to eat—the Father continued in grace. He gently sought them out with questions rather than accusations, though he knew their every thought, word, and deed. He covered their nakedness with the skins of animals—not only much more resilient and practical than leaves but as an offering to atone for their sin. He protected them from the Tree of Life, so they couldn’t take its fruit and live forever in their new sin-filled state. Most of all, he told them of his plan for redemption, which he knew from the beginning of time—the plan to send his Son to atone for their sins.
From the beginning, and even now amid your sin, even when you can’t conquer this sticky sin in one month, God is gracious—ready to show mercy and grant forgiveness to those he loves.
He Removes All Sin and Uncleanliness
After sin came into the world, God gave his people a law to set themselves apart as holy to him and to demonstrate how deep and wide their sin nature stretched and how far the consequences of the fall expanded. Part of these laws entailed regulations concerning skin diseases that made people ritually unclean. When a person became unclean, the community isolated him or her from society and worship until their uncleanness left. If you touched an unclean person, you became unclean, and you might even catch the unclean person’s disease, being sentenced to the same isolation. Your uncleanness kept you from entering the temple to bring sacrifices and worship. It was a lonely life, filled with physical and emotional pain.
In the Gospel of Mark, Mark recounts a story of a man with a skin disease who came to Jesus. “And a leper came to him, imploring him, and kneeling said to him, ‘If you will, you can make me clean.’ Moved with pity, he stretched out his hand and touched him and said to him, ‘I will; be clean.’ And immediately the leprosy left him, and he was made clean” (Mark 1:40–42).
We can understand the desperation that brought this man to his knees pleading before Christ. But he also knew his uncleanness and how it would spread if Jesus came too close, so he gave the caveat with his plea, “But only if you are willing.”
Being compassionate, Jesus was willing. He reached out and touched him.
If any other person did this, the man would have remained unclean with his skin disease, and the person who touched him would have become contaminated as well. Yet Christ remained unstained by the man’s disease and in turn, made him clean. With his holy touch Christ immediately changed the life of this diseased man.
Perhaps you feel unclean—blemished, damaged, dirty—from sin. You feel as though you could never wash away the stains of sin. Friend, Christ can make you pure. You are never too filthy for Christ’s blood; he bore our sins on the cross so we could be brought near. By grace, through faith, your sins are washed away—forever.
This January, whether you fill out that habit tracker or break the bonds of that particular sin struggle, you are still clean in Christ.
Discipline From Love, Not Hatred
As a child and middle schooler, I looked around every corner after I sinned, wondering how God would “get me back” for my disobedience toward him. I feared God but not in a reverent way. I read my Bible, bowed my head to pray, and said kind words like a good little girl—not because I wanted to please God, but to safeguard myself from his wrath against my sin. Yet this resembled legalism, not Christianity.
We can fall into this trap of believing God is out to punish us when we sin against him. When we catch the flu after neglecting our Bible reading, we think we experienced a drip of God’s wrath. However, the relieving truth of the gospel is that our punishment for sin, God’s righteous wrath, was already endured on the cross by Christ. As a child of God, we will never face God’s wrath—though we will receive his discipline.
God disciplines us out of love, not anger. As the writer of Hebrews wrote,
It is for discipline that you have to endure. God is treating you as sons. For what son is there whom his father does not discipline? If you are left without discipline, in which all have participated, then you are illegitimate children and not sons. Besides this, we have had earthly fathers who disciplined us and we respected them. Shall we not much more be subject to the Father of spirits and live? For they disciplined us for a short time as it seemed best to them, but he disciplines us for our good, that we may share his holiness. For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it. (Heb. 12:7–11)
Our Heavenly Father desires our ultimate good, which is holiness; therefore, he disciplines us to lead us away from sin. When life goes awry this January, don’t burden yourself with thoughts of God pouring out wrath on you for your incompetence or inability to conquer this sin. There is a difference between punishment from God and discipline from God—one is to condemn a sinner; the other is to grow a saint.
Holy in Christ
As believers, we live in this already-not-yet reality where we are both holy saints hidden in Christ while still remaining in our sinful flesh and needing sanctification. We can’t fully sanctify ourselves in thirty days or even in a lifetime. Therefore, when we feel the strangling grip of sin and its shame, we can fall before the Father and ask for his forgiveness, again and again, resting in the work of Christ and our declared status as righteous in him. This is true now in January, and it will be true still in February.
Lara d’Entremont is first a wife and a mom to three little wildlings in rural Nova Scotia, Canada. While the wildlings snore, she primarily writes—whether it be personal essays, creative nonfiction, or fantasy novels. She desires to weave the stories between faith and fiction, theology and praxis, for women who feel as if these pieces of them are always at odds. Her first book, A Mother Held, is a collection of essays on the early days of motherhood and anxiety. Much of her writing is inspired by the forest and ocean that surround her, and her little ones that remind her to stop and see it. You can find more of her writing at laradentremont.com.