19 I am using an example from everyday life because of your human limitations. Just as you used to offer yourselves as slaves to impurity and to ever-increasing wickedness, so now offer yourselves as slaves to righteousness leading to holiness. 20 When you were slaves to sin, you were free from the control of righteousness. 21 What benefit did you reap at that time from the things you are now ashamed of? Those things result in death! 22 But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the benefit you reap leads to holiness, and the result is eternal life. 23 For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. -Romans 6:19-23
Let’s get real about how sin tricks us. When you first commit the sin, it feels so good. It feels like that sinful act is so fulfilling and life-giving even. But it’s so short-lived. After we commit the sinful act, there’s a sense of emptiness. Then there’s the guilt! The Apostle Paul here uses the term “ashamed.” This is how sin gets us. It tricks us in accepting short-lived empty so-called “pleasures.” We keep falling for it and then at the end of our lives when we look back at what we accomplished, it’s just emptiness. We’ve wasted our lives chasing one empty pleasure to another.
But when we allow God to take control of our lives, we find true fulfillment. God made us and so He knows what we were made for. We were made for holiness. We were made for righteousness. When we pursue these things, there’s a sense of peace and calm that overtakes us even in the midst of life’s setbacks and storms, because we operating the way God designed us to.
Horatio Spafford wrote the famous Christian hymn, “It is Well With My Soul.” He wrote it after the death of his four daughters from a shipwreck. Check out the first verse of his hymn:
When peace, like a river, attendeth my way,
When sorrows like sea billows roll;
Whatever my lot, Thou hast taught me to say,
It is well, it is well with my soul.
Only a man who pursues God can write this after such a tragedy. There was no emptiness in this man’s heart. His heart was filled by God and that’s why he can sing, “it is well with my soul,” even in the direst of circumstances.
Do you want unassailable peace? Do you want eternal fulfillment? Choose God. Follow Him. May it be well with your soul.
But when we allow God to take control of our lives, we find true fulfillment. God made us and so He knows what we were made for. We were made for holiness. We were made for righteousness. When we pursue these things, there’s a sense of peace and calm that overtakes us even in the midst of life’s setbacks and storms, because we operating the way God designed us to.
Horatio Spafford wrote the famous Christian hymn, “It is Well With My Soul.” He wrote it after the death of his four daughters from a shipwreck. Check out the first verse of his hymn:
When peace, like a river, attendeth my way,
When sorrows like sea billows roll;
Whatever my lot, Thou hast taught me to say,
It is well, it is well with my soul.
Only a man who pursues God can write this after such a tragedy. There was no emptiness in this man’s heart. His heart was filled by God and that’s why he can sing, “it is well with my soul,” even in the direst of circumstances.
Do you want unassailable peace? Do you want eternal fulfillment? Choose God. Follow Him. May it be well with your soul.
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