Power Move w3: Wield your Power

Introduction

Whats up friends! Welcome back to NXT High School. My name is Matt Velasco, if we have not met I want you to know that I am so glad that you are here and would love to meet you before you leave tonight! You’ll hear and see that we say something around these parts, we say that Wednesday night, tonight, is the best night of the week. And we firmly believe it. Not just because you get to hangout with friends and have free dinner and a ton of fun, but also because God has a funny way of showing up in special ways on Wednesday nights here at NXT.

So, if you’re new, thanks for being here! We hope you love it and I want to personally invite you to come back next week.

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Before we get started with the teaching for the evening I want to share some exciting news with you that has already changed my life… I did my first mosh pit last night. Like, legit mosh pit. In fact, I cared so much about all of you knowing about this that I took a video of it (not even my wife has seen this). Check it out...

Video from Underoath concert.

Thats my expectation for our worship from here on out, just want to set the record straight on that. And yes, I was running around and got my phone knocked out of my hand and a kind stranger held it in the air for me to find. Nice guy.

Anyways, the real thing I want to start with tonight is a question are you killing your sin? John Owen in his book titled The Mortification of Sin coined this phrase: “Be killing sin or it will be killing you.” It offers us a vivid image of the battle against our sin. The consequences of entertaining any sin is that it will kill you.

So we have to do everything we can to kill the sin that would otherwise kill us.

Big Idea

Tonight we’re going to learn a really practical lesson on what it means to resist temptation- or in other words, kill sin. Each and every time you resist the temptation to lust, to gossip, to lie, to hate, to judge, you deal a blow to that sin that would otherwise take root within you and slowly fester and kill.

Text Address

We’re going to be in Matthew 18:7-9 this evening so would you open up with me to it...

Matthew 18:7–9 ESV

“Woe to the world for temptations to sin! For it is necessary that temptations come, but woe to the one by whom the temptation comes! And if your hand or your foot causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to enter life crippled or lame than with two hands or two feet to be thrown into the eternal fire. And if your eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. It is better for you to enter life with one eye than with two eyes to be thrown into the hell of fire.

Content

Set Up

Lets pray.

What we do privately, with our hand or our foot or our eye actual can affect other people. That’s what Jesus is teaching us here.

How you see things (the eye) affects how others see.

What you do (the hand) affects what others will do.

And how you walk (the foot) affects how others will walk.

The idea behind this scripture is that Jesus is teaching us what we have to do to guard ourselves against temptation to sin. Its important to note that the actions taken are immediate, decisive, and absolute. In fact, its going to hurt (if you’ve ever broken a sinful habit, you know this to be true. For example., alcohol, drugs, pornography, sex) “If your hand… causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away” Thats gonna hurt!

Now, am I instructing you to literally remove your hand, foot, and eye? No. I’m not. But what I am instructing you to do is to literally take immediate, decisive, and absolute action against your sin.

Jesus has talked this way about sexual sin sin in the Sermon on the Mount,

Matthew 5:29–30 ESV

If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body be thrown into hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body go into hell.

But here he expands it to every imaginable sin. Do you grasp for power? Do you rush to judgement? Do you easily lose your temper? Do you overstuff your stomach? Do you gossip? Do you hoard money? Do you overlook the unimportant, are you lazy? Do you think of yourself to be so very important?

Cut it off and cut it out. Cut off pride. Cut off lust. Cut off laziness. Cut off anger. Cut off greed. Cut off envy. Cut off gluttony. Cut off those seven deadly sins and seventy more because they will kill you.

“It is better for you to enter life with one eye than with two eyes to be thrown in to the hell of fire” What Jesus is saying here is that it is better for you to endure the pain of struggling against temptation, than it is for you to let the sin you struggle against kill you.

But Matt, how do we fight temptation? We understand how important it is and we’ve heard you say that our sin will kill us but how do we actually cut off the sin and kill it?

Well there are 3 ways that you can kill the sin that is killing you and fight against temptation…

Keep your eye on God’s holiness

Cut off every hand

choose life

Keep your eye on God’s Holiness

We have to keep an eye on our sense of God’s holiness if we have any hope in killing sin. That might seem a little simple to you.

I don’t mean our doctrinal knowledge of God’s holiness. Because of course we all recognize that God is holy, we all recognize and might even affirm and even teach that God is holy, when secretly our knowledge of God’s holiness is declining because we’ve taken our eyes off of it.

The doctrine of God’s holiness is real to us only when we have real fear of God. And one clear piece of evidence of our fear of God is our fear of sin.

One writer said this: The loss of the sense of God’s holiness always produces the loss of the sense of sin’s sinfulness. When God is not feared, sin is not feared.

You fear God by recognizing His holiness and your lack thereof. That you have been invited towards God, you have not brought yourself there. He has brought you.

A tolerance of habitual indulgence of sin is an indicator that the fear of God is not ruling our life.

“I’m going to watch porn just one more time because I know God will forgive me in the morning”

“I’m going to _____ because I know God is going to forgive me”

Friends, if you’ve said this recently then you are lacking the fear of God in your life, and you are allowing your sin to kill you.

When we are in such a state we need to fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith and run with perseverance towards Him and His holiness.

If you have no fear of God, then you have lost sight of God’s holiness.

Cut Off Every Hand

If you’re in that place and you’ve lost the sense of God’s holiness then Jesus’ words in Matthew 18 might land lightly on you. You might be thinking that that warning is for someone else. You don’t seriously think it applies to you. Of course not, you’ve got it under control!

So what does Jesus tell us to do if we are infected with a lack of reverence towards God’s holiness? Cut off every hand that is causing you to stumble. Like I said before- I do not expect you to go to small groups and ritually cut off your hands as a testament to your seriousness in killing sin. But Jesus is saying this: the time is now to repent and take the extreme measure to amputate whatever is entangling our feet in sin.

What is the “hand” that is causing you to stumble? Perhaps you are trapped in an addiction to pornography. To metaphorically cut off the hand that is causing you to stumble means that you need to get rid of your phone, your iPad, your laptop, whatever device you use to participate in that sin.

And friends- let me be blunt: If you hear that, and you’re trapped in the cycle of sin, and you say “well its not that bad, I don’t need to go that far” then I would once again challenge you that you have most likely forgotten God’s holiness and have no fear of Him. Because keeping your phone so you can snapchat your friends has become more important to you than killing the sin that separates you from Christ.

I’ve been discipling someone for the past 8-9 years, we’ll call him John, since he was 14ish years old and new in the youth ministry I was working with at the time. And for most of our relationship he has struggled significantly with drug use and mental illness. About 3 years ago he got to a point where he realized just how much his sin of drug use was destroying his life. So we sat down and made a plan for how he was going to kill this sin and I said to him, “John, you’ve got to get rid of everything you own that tempts you to smoke” and he said he would. A month went by and he was doing great, two months and he was great, three, four months and he’s hanging in there each day, until five months in I got a call “Matt- I smoked again” I asked John what happened and he said “I opened a drawer and I saw the pipe I told you I threw away and couldn’t resist.” He was unwilling to cut off the hand that caused him to sin, so the sin crept back up and overtook him.

We must plead with the Lord and do whatever it takes for the fear of God to be restored in our hearts. Because when the fear of God is restored in our hearts we are so much quicker to cut off every hand that causes us to sin.

Choose Life

The fear of the Lord through recognizing and keeping our eyes on His holiness is the source of our Joy in the Lord.

Isaiah 11:3 says,

Isaiah 11:3 (ESV)

And his delight shall be in the fear of the Lord.

Jesus delighted in the fear of His Father, and God wants us to enjoy this delight, this joy, too!

Proverbs 14:27 says,

Proverbs 14:27 ESV

The fear of the Lord is a fountain of life, that one may turn away from the snares of death.

Friends, to kill sin means to choose life. Choose joy in the Lord over despair in sin. It may seem simple, but if you want to kill sin and fight temptation then you have to have the mental realization that you are choosing despair over joy every time you sin. When you sin and you lose sight of God’s holiness and the fear of God you are actively choosing not to pursue the Joy of the Lord, which is life!

Deuteronomy 30:19 says,

Deuteronomy 30:19 ESV

I call heaven and earth to witness against you today, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse. Therefore choose life, that you and your offspring may live,

Friends, choose life! If you’re trapped in a cycle of sin you probably feel defeated. Despair. Sadness, or Shame. These are all a result of the lack of the joy of the Lord.

When we pursue the joy of the Lord we end up finding something that is better than any sin and actually fills us completely and permanently. Not like sin which fills us only little and keeps us coming back for more. God’s joy is the antidote to whatever is causing you to continue in a cycle of sin.

Conclusion

So at a risk of oversimplifying the fight against temptation I’m going to challenge you to do these three things:

Keep your eyes on God’s holiness, which leads to the fear of the Lord.

Cut off every hand that causes you to sin by radically removing whatever it is that is causing you to sin from your life.

Choose life by pursuing the joy of the Lord.

The fight against sin and the temptation of sin starts for you right now. The question is, how far are you willing to go to kill the sin that will otherwise kill you?

I want you to take a couple of moments and ponder what it might be that you need to cut off and out from your life. Which sin seems to constantly entangle you? What is the hand that you need to cut off in order to kill the sin that you keep turning to?

Take a few minutes and ponder these things. I’m going to have the band come up and play one more song in a few moments.