The Invisible WarSample

The Missing Ingredient In Your Battle Against Sin

You can do everything right and still not defeat a sin. You can read the Bible every day. You can pray. You can have a group of friends around you who’ll speak the truth in love to you on a regular basis.

And you can still be trapped in habitual sin.

At the end of the day, you can’t depend upon yourself and what you can do to defeat sin. You need the Holy Spirit’s power. The Holy Spirit enables believers to do what they can’t do and fulfill God’s desire for our lives.

You can have all the right equipment to defeat habitual sin in your life, but it won’t matter without the Holy Spirit. Imagine you were walking on the beach and saw a dead seagull that had died less than a minute earlier. If you pick it up, it won’t be much different than its live counterparts. It’ll still be warm. It’ll have the same muscles, bones, feathers, and wings. But if you toss it up in the sky, it’ll drop right back down to the ground.

Why? The seagull has no life left. The life isn’t in the feathers, wings, or bones. It’s in the life God puts in it. Without a spirit, the bird won’t fly, even if it has all the right equipment.

You can have all the right equipment to live a successful, victorious life, but without the Spirit’s empowering, you can’t live that kind of life.

It’s like throwing a dead bird into the air.

You can’t live the victorious life of Christ on your own. It’s impossible. Your best intentions and your too-easily-broken promises won’t enable you to live the Christian life. The Holy Spirit has to live through you.


This devotional © 2014 by Rick Warren. All rights reserved. Used by permission.