The Six Elements Of The Spirit-Filled Life Series

Finally, one of the things you can say about Jesus was that he was sin resistant. In a nutshell, I have defined as simply a life that responds as it should when it should. How many of you think that Jesus was capable of sinning? How many of you think that he was not capable of sinning? Some of you just don’t know. Most of us don’t know. I tend to come from the school of thought that I believe that Jesus had to be capable of sin. Because we know by the story of the wilderness that he was tempted. If you are tempted but you have no possibility of sinning, is it really a temptation? We know from the book of Hebrews that Jesus was tempted, yet he did not sin. The writer writes “For we do not have a high priest (speaking of Jesus) who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way just as we are, yet was without sin.” If Jesus was not capable of sinning, how can we relate to him? We can’t. He was fully God and fully human. It is a mystery, but that is how it is described. Jesus wasn’t simply just tempted in the wilderness. He was tempted all through his entire life. Just read through the gospels and look at all the temptations that were thrown at him. Yet he did not sin. The reason I believe that he didn’t sin has really nothing to do with the fact that he was the Son of God but that he was so in tuned with the will of the Father, so wired in and so connected to him that in some sense he really couldn’t sin. It would just be insanity. It would be outside of himself. It would be inconsistent with his identity. So when a temptation would come, he would say get out of here. Why would he want to do anything that would offend the Father? Likewise, we are to be sin-resistant people. I defined sin resistance as a life that responds as it should when it should, which means when we are faced with some sort of a temptation or even a trial, we don’t respond as the world would respond. We don’t yield to the ways of the world. When we do mess up, we certainly don’t use an excuse and say I am only human. No Christian should ever say that. What it does is demonstrate you really don’t know much at all about Jesus. You are comparing humanity to the fallen broken humanity of the world rather than the humanity that Jesus came to model for us. To show us what the true human was capable of looking like. A human that was capable of sinning but yet because of that ongoing intimate relationship with the Father, it almost seems absurd to even think about sin, because again, that is what it means to be truly human.

Those are the six elements of the spiritual faith or spiritual formation or whatever you want to call it. The six elements of Jesus. The things that we can observe in Jesus’ life. Things that we should try to imitate or at least try to compare ourselves to where we are with it. And ideally begin to make adjustments so we are in line with Jesus so that we are continuing to be on track to learning to live our life like Jesus and partnering with God as he makes his impact in the community, the city of Pittsburgh, and the world. Let us pray.