delivered

I am on my way to counsel a young pastor who recently fell into temptation and sin. He is a wonderful young man with a great wife and son. He is also a broken man who is being deeply loved by the church where he sinned.
Counseling this young man has forced me to see up close and personal the impact of such a sin on the entire world of a young family, a church and all of his friends. One would think this kind of firsthand knowledge of the power and pain of sin would be enough to stop any of us--including me--from sinning. It is not.

We must be delivered from sin. We cannot overcome it. We cannot control it. We must pray each day that God would not lead us anywhere near it and He would deliver us from it.

I think God left Israel in Egypt for 400 years so they, as a people, would know without a doubt that they could not deliver themselves from their slavery. God leaves us to deal each day with our flesh to teach us the same thing. I cannot deliver myself.

I think Jesus said we should cut off our hand and pluck out our eye when we find we cannot control our sinful desires to illustrate that we need solutions that are painful, public and permanent in order to ever deal with what causes us to sin.

This young man is now very hurt, very public and very permanently marked by this sin. He is in a good place now. He is ready and willing to be constantly delivered. I, too, need to join him in his weakness or I could also join him in this kind of pain.
It is by the grace of God any of us stays away from sin. We have been delivered. We have not conquered.