Abide and Live

God is fully alive and He wants to make us fully alive as He is. We cannot be fully alive on our own, we can only become fully alive when God is living in us. When God is alive and present in us, His life will radiate out of us. When we live apart from God’s life, his glory begins to fade as it did with Moses when he left the presence of God(Exodus 34:29-35, 2 Corinthians 3:13). Every time Moses returned to the presence of God, God’s glory would return to shining through his face. When we abide in Christ, his life will radiate from us.

Whoever commits sin is a slave of sin. And a slave does not abide in the house forever, but a son abides forever. Therefore if the Son makes you free, you shall be free indeed.” 

John 8:34-36

Sin cannot abide in God’s presence. If we abide in sin, we will not be able to remain in God’s presence, and if we abide in God, sin will not be able to remain in us. The way to remove sin is to replace sin with righteousness. We cannot simply remove sin; we have to fill ourselves with God, and then the sin will naturally depart from us. We can’t simply say no to temptation, we have to say yes to goodness. When temptation comes our way, it should urge us to find something good to do.

Evil spelled backwards is live. We can overcome evil by actively living well, staying busy doing good. 

"Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good."

Romans 12:21

If we are being chased by a bear, we don’t just pile rocks and branches to make a barricade so he can’t get to us and stand there. The bear will eventually get through the barricade. To escape the bear, we have to actively find a way to get ourselves out of the situation and start moving in that direction. It is not enough to observe sin and evil, we have to do something about it. The good news is that through the gift of the Holy Spirit and the power of our free will, we can do something about it. We can choose to live for Jesus; we can choose to overcome evil by doing good.

Life is a battleground not a playground.

“For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.” (Ephesians 6:12). Once mankind allowed sin to enter the world, the world became a battleground. We must live our lives with an awareness that sin is a deadly enemy and wants to destroy us. The only way we will be prepared to face our enemy is if we are alert and dressed in the full armor of God. God has given us everything we need to fight against the powers of darkness, but it does us no good if we just let it sit on the ground beside us.