I was driving to pick up my three-year-old granddaughter with another one happily singing in the backseat. After arriving, I buckled in the second three-year-old as she proudly pointed to a sticker on her hand. Before I could exit the parking lot, she let out a piercing shriek which, on investigation, was the result of the sticker being taken and ripped in two. The shocking element of what happened was not so much the theft of the sticker, but its brazen destruction. While not acceptable, children snatching toys from others probably dates to Cain and Abel. Of greater concern is the action of ruining something because someone else takes pleasure in it.
Augustine, the fifth century theologian, admitted to doing the same thing when he was a teenager. He and some friends wandered into an orchard near his house and, while they neither needed the fruit nor even found them appealing, stole and destroyed them. The guilt of his actions weighed on his conscience after God saved him decades later. About the experience he wrote, “We carried off a huge load of pears, not to eat ourselves, but to dump out to the hogs, after barely tasting some of them ourselves. Doing this pleased us all the more because it was forbidden. Such was my heart, O God, such was my heart–which thou didst pity even in that bottomless pit. Behold, now let my heart confess to thee what it was seeking there, when I was being gratuitously wanton, having no inducement to evil but the evil itself.”
Augustine recognized something in himself that is true of us all, that prior to being saved he (and we) loved sin for the sake of sinning. To that he added, “It was foul, and I loved it. I loved my own undoing. I loved my error–not that for which I erred but the error itself.”
Every Christian has grounds to be overwhelming thankful that they have been given a new heart and a new spirit. Indeed, “We know that our old self was crucified with him in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing, so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin” (Rom. 6:6). However, you have not yet been perfected. You are still at war!
For I delight in the law of God, in my inner being, but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? (Rom. 7:22–24)
If you have the Holy Spirit then you are no longer enslaved to sin, but you must be on alert against any temptation that would subject you to the captivity of “the law of sin that dwells in [your] members.” You must recognize tendencies toward sinful jealousy, covetousness or envy that revels in the misery of others.
The fact that a desire like this creeps into your thoughts is not in itself sin, but it can give birth to sin. That’s why it is important to be on guard for signs of the desire and go to war against it. Give it no quarter! It’s about this conflict that the apostle wrote to the church.
But I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh. For the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh, for these are opposed to each other, to keep you from doing the things you want to do. But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law. (Gal. 5:16–18)
According to Romans 7, believers delight in pleasing God, and according to Galatians 5, pleasing the Spirit is what the child of God wants to do. “Delighting in” and “wanting,” however, is not enough. Your mind and your heart need to be focused on a humble submission to God, especially when those negative attitudes begin to intrude. Look past stickers and pears and look to God.
And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. (Gal. 5:24)