DO YOU HAVE SECRET SINS?
ROMANS 7:14-25
there was a woman who told her pastor that
she had secret sins in her life.
And she went on to tell him, that she liked them.
This pastor didn’t ask the woman what her secret sins
were. He was afraid to ask,
He didn’t want to know!!
And this woman was a regular church goer and
a very respected person in the community.
But somehow she had accepted these sins
and she liked them. No doubt thought there
was nothing wrong with her secret sins!
I fear that there’s many of us here tonight
who do the same thing.
Somehow we think its ok to enjoy our little
secret sins.
After all we ain’t hurtin nobody!
We’re still serving God! RIGHT!
We go to our homes and we pull down the blinds
we have a blast enjoying whatever our pet sins are!
Then we open the blinds and go back to church,
and back out amongst our friends, and neighbors,
and brothers, and sisters in Christ, as if
there ain’t nothing wrong!
But guess what?
There is something wrong.
There’s something terribly wrong!
We ain’t really serving God whole heartedly.
We don’t think it hurts us, but guess what it does
We don’t think it hurts anyone around us but it does
We don’t think it hurts God, But it Does!
It hurts no matter how big or how small our sins
may be!!
We can think we’re serving God
We can pretend we’re serving God
We can Go through the motions of serving God
But I have a HOT NEWS FLASH FOR YOU
You can’t serve God part time!!!!
You can’t be a sipper of beer and the whisky
and still be serving God.
You can’t be shacking up with your boyfriend
or your girlfriend and be serving God
You can’t take his name in vain and still be serving God
You can’t wish for your neighbors Cadillac and His wife
or Her Husband and be serving God!
You can’t keep all those so called - little sins
in your life and be serving God!
You can’t go to the doctor and tell him you
have a problem with pain or nerves,
and get a bunch of different
pills and take a months supply in a week
or distribute them to the whole neighborhood
and still be serving God!!!
You will serve God wholeheartedly or you
will be the most miserable person in this world!
And not to mention you’ll go to hell!!!
A lot of times people will try to begin to serve
God, but they have so many things they can’t
let go of, their little secret sins,
They get just enough of a taste of Serving God
that it just makes them miserable!!
When you begin to serve God
you have a desire to change those
little sins in your life
You have to want to be freed from those sins
They can’t be your friends anymore!!! AMEN
And if you need help with them all you have to do
is ask for it!!!
Just tell God you can’t do it alone, and you need help.
He already knew it anyway but He likes to be asked!
When you make friends with your sins
you are making friends with the enemy
and that enemy is the Devil!!
In our reading tonight it seems that Paul is
frustrated.
His desire’s are not - in The Will.
He’s almost mourning that he don’t understand
his own actions.
People we can’t understand everything that gets
thrown at us!!
I don’t think that its meant for us to understand
everything!
But what we can do is stay prayed up and
steer clear from satan’s temptations.
You have to understand, that the devil knows that
he don’t have much time left here on this earth.
and he has to work overtime,
and believe me he is working overtime.
And our minds is where he works at!
The Bible says
Resist the devil and he must flee from you!!
Paul’s theory here is that:
We experience a sense of being out of touch
with ourselves because we are out of touch
with God. AMEN
and that’s where sin creeps in because its
our automatic nature to sin!!!
Sin comes natural to us, It’s a curse from the Garden
of Eden.
We don’t have to teach our children to do wrong
they do wrong automatically!
But there’s a solution to all of this
and I’VE GOT A Hot News Flash TONIGHT
AND ITS GOD!!!
We have to know ourselves, in relationship
with the Lord!!!
Even when the Apostle Paul was disobedient
and even when He didn’t want to follow God’s
lead, The Holy Spirit would convict Him
and steer Him back to God’s goodness.
And God’s law
and His law is spiritual PEOPLE
The law was given to us by the Spirit of God
The law is how we know what God’s will is!
And How we can stay in His perfect will
People will say well Brother Wendell
How do I stay in God’s perfect will
Psalms 118:8 says:
it is better to trust in the Lord
than to put confidence in man!
There you have it
Don’t trust Man just Trust God.
Gods Holy Spirit is put here to guide us!
It tells us what God is like
and it will reveal both the mind and nature of God
And not to mention his spiritual purposes!!!
Can somebody say AMEN!!!!
The law is Holy!
It’s set apart, and its pure, and full of Glory!
The law expose’s our sin,
and sin is everything that’s contrary
to God and His will!!!
The law shows us our need for a Savior!
Paul tells us that he finds the law at work within!
Are you allowing the law to work within you
And here’s a few good questions to ask yourself,
When you sin, are you aware of it?
When you sin, do you feel conviction of it?
When you sin, do you care?
When you sin, do you say OH GOD FORGIVE ME?
People sin is an illness, And it’s a Choice
Its an addiction.
And just like a drug addiction, or an alcohol
addiction, or a nicotine addiction, if we
continue to feed it, It will eventually
destroy us!!! AMEN
Galatians 5:17 says:
For the flesh lusteth against the Spirit
and the Spirit against the flesh
and these are contrary the one to the other
so that ye cannot do the things
that ye would.
Many of us have actually made a contract with sin
like we’ve made an agreement with the devil
We’ll say I can have my secret little sins.
But the bottom line is that if you have
Jesus Christ living within your hearts
This contract has gotta be broken. AMEN
You won’t want to sin like you used to!!
When your sin in your life tries to come out
know that God is watching.
Not as a judge - but as a friend!
Psalms 1:2 says:
But his delight is in the law of the Lord, And in
His law doth he meditate day and night!!
We as Christians can’t enjoy our secret sins!
We don’t need to be feeding them
We are to extinguish them!
We can’t let these little sins rule us.
And not to mention send us to hell
and we all have them.
and we can all relate to this subject.
We have to always remember that,
our secret sins are our secret enemies.
we have to have enough sense just to realize it!
Romans 6:13 says:
Neither yield ye your members as instruments
of unrighteousness unto sin: but yield yourselves
unto God, as those that are alive from the dead
and your members as instruments of
righteousness unto God!
Listen to me tonight Church
these sins get between us and all the wonderful
stuff that Christ has come and died for!
They get in the way of the things that
we as Christians are called to do!!
And you better believe that you’re here
for a purpose, And definitely not by accident!
You are all Ministers in your own ways.
And we all need to stand up and accept our
calling’s, and stop running from them.
I ran for quite some time from God, Because
I didn’t want to be a preacher.
I wanted to have a Gospel Group!
But God said NO!
You’re gonna be a preacher of MY WORD!!
And finally I said OK, because God was making
me so miserable, cause I wouldn’t listening
So finally I said, Hey I’m a Preacher!!!
And man it felt you lifted this church-house of me!
Everybody already knows or they should know
what’s wrong and what’s right.
Sin comes automatically but we all should
know that we can overcome that sin, But
we gotta have Jesus in our hearts to do it!!!
You just have to make up your mind,
do you want to serve God or the devil.
It’s just that simple.
For years we’ve heard the preachers tell us
you can’t straddle the fence
You can’t eat from the Lord’s table and the
devils table at the same time.
The bible says:
If you’re lukewarm He will spue you out
of His mouth!!!
Paul explains to us here in Romans
that there’s a war goin on
and it’s a war within!!
A war for what is good and what is bad
God has placed in our hearts a knowledge
of that which is good
and even a desire to do what is good
but there is an evil force, the power of sin
that power that we allow the devil to have over us
and if we continue to give in to the power of sin
We will miss that place called Heaven!!!! AMEN
But in order for us to battle this war
We have to first accept Jesus Christ
into our Hearts!
We can’t keep our little pet sins!
We can’t keep our little secret sins!
We have to give them ALL to the Lord
We can no longer be selfish!
We can’t live for our self and not for God Anymore!
Apostle Paul said
For I have the desire to do what is good
but I cannot carry it out!!
Willing to do what is good ain’t good enough people,
because right at the core of us,
we are in Bondage to sin!
Now Paul was a genuine believer and He didn’t
want to sin!
He didn’t like his secret sins.
He actually willed not to sin!
but He found that it was very difficult not to sin
So He confesses that he’s desperate
and he’s a man who needs to be delivered!
And we as Christians also need the same!
Paul said He was pulled in two directions.
Pulled so much it was almost like two
different men in the same body. AMEN
And I don’t care how holy you are, or how
close to God that you are.
I don’t care how often you Pray
and how long you Pray
You know just exactly what Paul is talking about
here in the Book of Romans tonight! AMEN
We have to fight this law of sin that The
Apostle Paul is talking about here tonight
in our reading!!
Now I know we all want to go to heaven
and I don’t think there’s anybody here
that wants to go to hell and bow down
to the devil for eternity, IS THERE?
Paul said in VS 24
O wretched man that I am
Who shall deliver me from
from the body of this death?
I know who, Do you know who?
Its Jesus Christ!!!
Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!!
Paul bursted forth in praise to God
Because of Jesus Christ, we take our new mind
and we do all we can to serve the law of God!
And when we fail, when our fleshly motives,
allow us to cave in to sin
We know that it’s the force of sin that caused it.
Not our new minds
We know that we are still fleshly and spiritual!
But as Christians we have to reach for perfection.
But we have to understand that we have an
open channel right to the throne.
An open invitation to forgiveness,
Through our mediator Jesus Christ.
Matthew 19:26 says:
With men this is impossible
With God all things are possible
I don’t want to sin, how bout you?
I want to go to heaven and I want to take
everybody with me that I can!!
Do you want to go to heaven tonight
Do you know that through Jesus Christ tonight
you can have the promise of eternal life.
He paid that debt for us on the cross at Calvary.
He bled and died for your sins and for mine!
Tonight if you will allow me to lead you
in a short repentance prayer,
not only will your sins be forgiven
But they will be forgotten, Covered by
the precious blood of Jesus!!!
Won’t you come tonight and receive
everything that God has prepared for you?
Don’t you want to see this man that died
for your sins?
Do you want to cover your secret sins?
By His Blood?
Come tonight and receive a fresh start
and a power surge from God’s Grace
and Forgiveness!
Come tonight and start all over again