Natural Desires and Sin

Sin shall ever be with us as long as we are in this body. There is nothing we can do about it. I don’t mean there is nothing we can do about sin lived out or unchecked. We can do something about that, though we cannot free ourselves completely from it. I refer to the thing sin, sin itself--that principle of wickedness which is in us and demands our allegiance. For all our lifetime it shall move in us and upon us, forcing its desires upon our minds and wills. It creates in us desire that is not what we want as Christians. We cannot get away from it. No matter where we go or what we do, we will be severely pressed upon by sin and its longings to be fulfilled in us.

It will make us remember our past sins and desires--one of its best weapons. It will tell how pleasurable it was and that it is OK to do it again. It will make us forget the guilt we felt and the sorrow it caused. It will make one forget the fact of death and judgment and the abyss and heaven and the face of God and His judgment seat. It moves directly to our passions and lets us know how pleasurable it would be to fulfill its temptations. Not everything it wants us to do is wrong by itself. But how deceiving! Everything it wants us to do is wrong, for the least it wants is for us to wrongly fulfill legitimate desires. And it is the wrongly part that makes it sin in every case. Sin can never be legitimate, for wrongly fulfilled desires can never be legitimate.

The Scriptures tell us how we are to fulfill our natural desires. We are first to do all things to the glory of God, not simply for self fulfillment. When we do not directly concern ourselves with God in all things we are in sin by that very fact. We are also to fulfill our desires in accordance to how God made us and how He told us we are to do this or that. God’s word tells us what is sin and what is not. We must go with it in every case.