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Flee From Sin

by Steve Countryman  
9/15/2011 / Christian Living

1Corinthians 6:18 Flee from sexual immorality. All other sins a man commits are outside his body, but he who sins sexually sins against his own body. 1Corinthians 10:14 Therefore, my dear friends, flee from idolatry. 1Timothy 6:10-11 10For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs. 11But you, man of God, flee from all this, and pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, endurance and gentleness. 2Timothy 2:22 Flee the evil desires of youth, and pursue righteousness, faith, love and peace, along with those who call on the Lord out of a pure heart.

Temptation starts in our thoughts. Temptation is not sin but part of our sinful nature. Sin happens when you choose to agree with the temptation and commit a sin. We are to resist and flee from sin. I have heard this preached all of my life but never heard a good explanation of it, until recently. During my praying time with God He explained what it meant and why we should flee. It is not a matter of defeat or to lose a battle to flee all kinds of sin. When you retreat you are backing up after engaging the enemy to regroup and to engage again. When you flee you do not engage the sin. You turn your back on sin and run away going in the opposite direction from it. God said to flee sin for good reason, sin causes separation from God and sin leads to destruction and death. By fleeing sin you give it no attention or audience, sin is ignored and you have the victory. Joseph and Potiphar's wife in Genesis 39:1-11 tells of sin presenting itself to Joseph, Joseph telling temptation no in his mind and to her face then fleeing from sin.

The decision to consider the sin is your first mistake by entertaining those thoughts of temptation. Once you choose to do it, the act of sinning follows even if it only happens in your mind and that sin is birthed in your life. When you don't flee from sin then you set yourself up for deception, isolation and defeat. You think that by arguing about the sin that you can better understand why those thoughts arise in you. The mistake with that is that you are leaning on your own understanding a better way to put it your own MISUNDERSTANDINGS, which is to trust your sinful nature instead of trusting God. Before long you start thinking that it is something that you can handle doing. You then start compromising your beliefs to rationalize why committing the sin is okay to do. Next you allow more deception to over take your thought processes by justifying the sin. Once you decide to commit the sin you align yourself with the kingdom of darkness and you come into agreement with it by committing the sin. Committing the sin can lead you to continuing in the sin or "backsliding". By committing the sin you allow sin access to different areas of your life thoughts, routines, behavior, relationships and your attitude. Sin will blur your vision and harden your heart against God and His Word. You are now in bondage and a slave to the sin and the sinful lifestyle that comes with it. All of which is meant to destroy you and those around you!

By committing sex sins or fornication you have committed up to five sins in one act. You end up committing lust, idolatry, fornication, murmuring and tempting Christ. Lust of the eye is the image that you set before your eyes real or imagined. Idolatry or Idol worship by the image or person you are looking at and the time and money you spend on it/them. Fornication is any sex act of any kind alone or with someone real or imagined who is not your spouse. Murmuring or complaining by way of the sex act because it is a way of complaining that your spouse isn't good enough for you, which means you are complaining about God's gift and blessing to you. Tempting Christ is thinking that committing any sin (or sex act out side of marriage) is okay with God since "God made you that way" or "God won't mind". It was these five sins that kept the Israelites out of their promised land and caused them to continue around the mountain again and again. Now you know why Satan spends a lot of time and energy trying to get everyone he can addicted to any kind of fornication. God created sex as a sacred loving act of intimacy between a husband and his wife, "and the two shall become one flesh". Satan wants sex treated as a lustful act between anything that moves and you! Five sins in one is bonus points to Satan. Some people set themselves up for failure. You are to avoid the obvious opportunities that are available to you that the world offers that will trap you back into your sin. If you are an ex-addict, don't put yourself in a position to be trapped ie being a pharmacist if you are an ex-drug addict, hanging out at bars or being a bartender if you are an alcoholic.

The problem is much worse than most people know. You would be shocked how many adults if they were truly honest about it would admit that they or someone in their family had been sexually abused at some point in their life. Here is some facts that you may not know67% of all victims of sexual assault reported to law enforcement were juveniles (under the age of 18) 34% of all victims were under age twelve. One of every seven victims of sexual assault reported to law enforcement were under the age of six. Convicted rape and sexual assault offenders serving time in State prisons report that two-thirds of their victims were under the age of 18, and 58% of those or about four in ten imprisoned violent sex offenders said their victims were twelve years old or younger. An estimated 24% of those serving time for rape and 19% of those serving time for sexual assault had been on probation or parole at the time of the offense for which they were in State prison in 1991. (U.S. Department of Justice) Sex offenders were about four times more likely than non-sex offenders to be arrested for another sex crime after their release from prison (5.3% of sex offenders vs. 1.3% of non-sex offenders). A 1994 National Institute of Health survey of 453 pedophiles showed these criminals were collectively responsible for the molestation of over 67,000 children or an average of 148 children per individual pedophile. 80% of inmates serving time in State Prison for intimate violence had injured or killed their victim." (Criminal Offenders Statistics)
"96% of female rape victims in 1991, younger than 12 years old, knew their attackers. 20% were victimized by their fathers or step-fathers." (US Department of Justice) Seven in ten sex offenders with child victims reported that they were imprisoned for a rape or sexual assault. Two-thirds of all prisoners convicted of rape or sexual assault committed their crime against a child. About 60% of the male survivors surveyed report at least one of their perpetrators to be female. And about 95% of the victims knew their perpetrators. Sad thing is that these figures are up to 20 years old. It can drive people to try to live out their sexual fantasies one way or another.

Understand that fleeing is the best reply to all sin. Controlling your thoughts by bringing them under submission to the Lord will keep you on God's path and out of the way of sin. To entertain thoughts as to reason with them will bring deception upon you to sin. Renewing your mind with the Word of God daily is an excellent cleansing method for your thoughts. When Satan tempted Jesus in the wilderness, Jesus didn't argue with him, Jesus didn't agree with him, Jesus didn't reason with him and Jesus didn't compromise with him. Jesus quoted scripture as His reply to every temptation that was thrown at Him by Satan. James 4:7 Submit yourselves, then, to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. This is how you defeat Satan's plans and have the victory that God has for you, bring your thoughts under submission to God, flee from all sin and resist Satan and he will flee from you! "Greater is He that is in you then he that is in the world." Are you ready?!?

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