August 09, 2021: Hidden Sins in Our Life Can Continue to Control Our Lives Without Our Surrender.

In the book, Salvation to Surrender, A 35 Year Journey in Finding True Rest, I tell the story of my life as a young Christian coming to know Jesus as my Savior in my early twenties. For over 35 Years as a Christian, I constantly struggled with sexual sin in my life...as a young boy, as a teen, as an adult, and into my first and second marriages.

I constantly went before God after becoming a Christian and asking Him for the power to stop this controlling sin in my life. What I did not understand was that this struggle of sexual sin was put upon me as young boy of five or six years old by two teenage brothers who lived next door to my family. It was their sexual sin that changed me as a young boy.

Years later a Christian counselor open the door to that hidden sin in my life and helped me to understand what this sin did to my psyche, my mind, my soul, the very essence of a young boy. This sexual, hidden sin in my life, began a long journey of heartache for myself and many other people in my life.

In November 28, of 2013, I came to "absolute surrender" to my Lord. I gave Him full control of every room in my life, even the closet where I had hidden that ugly sin in a black box back in the dark corner of that closet.

If we hold on to any sin in our life, whether placed upon us or we ourselves have chosen to sin, that sin will continually control our lives. We must be willing to give God full control of our lives through our full surrender to Him. It is at that moment, God will begin His cleaning up of our lives, through the "power of the Holy Spirit". We must become "dead" to sin and "alive" in Christ upon our confession of our salvation.

Galatians 2: 20 (NKJV)

I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me.

Romans 6: 2–4

We are those who have died to sin; how can we live in it any longer? 3 Or don’t you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? 4 We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life.

So, I raise the question: So why are so many of us still living a defeated life? Why are we still walking around as if "sin" is still controlling and have power in our lives?

PERSONNAL COMMENT:

So let us now live as "dead to sin" and "alive in Christ"! Our complete and absolute surrender to God should begin with a "prayer of surrender" first, and then daily wake up and read God's word for His power and then moment-by-moment, day-by-day, begin living a life surrendered to God's will and His power in our lives. May our lives portray the life our Lord Jesus who empowered us with a life dead to sin, and alive in Him.