the root of sin

Pastor John Piper of Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minnesota is probably my favorite author/preacher. I love his passion that just overflows in everything he does. One of his most famous books is called Desiring God. In that book he starts with the premise that "God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him." This statement is probably, if you had to pick one, his single greatest passion. I read Desiring God 2 years ago but I am still pondering that truth all the time.

Just as a warning, I am going to be very open about myself in this post.

If I had to name the one sin in my life that causes me the most grief it would probably be lust. I fight tooth and nail with this every single day. Being a person who spends loads of time on the internet, it is a very difficult struggle. And not only do I struggle with sexual lust, but I struggle with other forms of lust too-such as a lust for material things. I think that covetousness is just another form of lust.

I have begun to notice something about my struggle with lust or even some other sins. I have been pondering and trying to find out why this is such a struggle for me other than the fact that I am sinful and I am a Male. I have begun to notice that the times when I am the weakest to lust in when I am living for an earthly pleasure. That is the reason that I quit playing computer games a week ago because I noticed what it was leading to. I then, yesterday, I returned to computer games and I fell victim to the lie of lust again. Because these games are something I enjoy so much they become my earthly pleasure that I begin to live for. And when I am living for earthly pleasure it is easy to seek other early pleasure. And what greater earthly pleasure is there than indulging our sexuality?

I am going to make a weighty statement. I will venture to say that Any time, anyone puts anything on the throne of their greatest pleasure other than God himself it is Sin. We were designed to find our ultimate pleasure in God and anything short of that is going against how we were created. That is the reason Jesus had to go to the cross; we had to be forgiven for us to have any hope of being able to return the the communion with God we were designed for. Jesus didn't just die to free us from guilt, he died so we could be restored to the relationship with God we could not have in our sin.

In conclusion, I think that the root of sin is our adultery against God. We sin because we are seeking to be satisfied by something other than God. I think that we have to earnestly seek after the goal of finding our pleasure in God alone, this doesn't mean that we can't enjoy some of the good things this world has to offer and that were created by God (God created sexuality but we perverted it) but we must place every earthly thing we enjoy below our desire for God. What kind of message would it declare to the world if we didn't need all the earthly pleasures, that all we needed was Jesus to be completely satisfied.