Obtaining Victory Over Sin - NetBibleStudy.com

Victory Over Sin 49What does it all means?Why did this man fail in his quest for freedom? He didn’t understand theprinciple of REPLACEMENTS. None of us can overcome evil by simply renouncing it!Rather, we can only do so by substituting the good in its place. Sinful habits cannot bebroken without replacing them with righteous ones.Try a simple experiment. Think of the number eight. Have you visualized it? Ifso, exercise your willpower and stop thinking of the number eight right now!Are you able to not think of the number eight? Of course, not! The more wedetermine not to think of something, the more our mind remains on it. The point is thatwe cannot by sheer willpower stop thinking about the number eight. Trying to push itout of our minds actually causes us to focus our attention on it.How helpful this concept is when we try to overcome sin. We may get on ourknees and ask God to take the desire away; we then determine not to think those lurid,bitter, hateful or greedy thoughts, but there they are again. We resist them once more,trying desperately to push them out of our minds. But we are trapped. Try as wemight, we just can’t get them to budge.Can we really be free? --- Yes! We can control those thoughts, but not by tryingto stop thinking about them! To simply resist evil is to make it grow stronger.Our determination not to think lustful thoughtsonly reinforces them in our thought patterns!How, then, can we be free? Let’s return to our experiment once more and thinkof the number eight. Although we cannot stop thinking about it by sheer resistance, wecan push that number out of our minds quite easily. Here’s how: Think of the numberone thousand. Then divide it by five. Concentrate on this new information and you willstop thinking of the number eight. As simple as this illustration may be it supplies amethod of crowding suggestive thoughts out of our mind.We can handle sinful thought patterns in the same way. Fear , lust, covetousness- all of these can be squeezed out of our mind by turning our thoughts to theScriptures.Freedom comes by filling our mind with God’s thoughts!A minister tells of a Christian brother whose wife died of cancer. She sufferedintensely during the last weeks of her life. Yet she and her husband were able to acceptthis tragedy without bitterness or the slightest trace of self-pity. The husband wasasked, “Why were you and you wife able to accept this so well? Weren’t you ever resentful andangry at God though this ordeal?” His reply, ”Yes, we had moments like that. But when theycame. I read Scriptures to my wife. Then we bought the whole New Testament on records and