It's Hard To Kill Sin

Joshua 16:10 (ESV) However, they did not drive out the Canaanites who lived in Gezer, so the Canaanites have lived in the midst of Ephraim to this day but have been made to do forced labor.

Joshua 17:13 (ESV) Now when the people of Israel grew strong, they put the Canaanites to forced labor, but did not utterly drive them out.

The people of Israel were not supposed to let the inhabitants of Canaan live. They were allowed to subject any external nation that attacked them into forced labor but all those inside the borders of the land were not supposed to live. Sadly, the tribes started following the example set by Joshua in Joshua 10 concerning the Gibeonites and make slaves of the foreign nations among them.

Of course, this applies to our spiritual life. We cannot compromise with sin. We must not allow sin to live in our mortal bodies.

Romans 6:11-14 (ESV) Even so consider yourselves to be dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus. 12 Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body so that you obey its lusts, 13 and do not go on presenting the members of your body to sin as instruments of unrighteousness; but present yourselves to God as those alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness to God. 14 For sin shall not be master over you, for you are not under law but under grace.

Paul here ties putting sin out of the power-spot in your life to the reality that you are now under grace. We do not let sin reign. How? By the grace of God which Christ has placed us under. How often we think that being "under grace" is a license to sin and simply ask for forgiveness. That is foolish thinking.

Here in Romans 6 and in the physical illustration of Joshua 16-17 we see that God's grace both brings us out of sin's power (Egypt) and into life with God (Promised Land) so that we have the POWER to put sin to death.

"For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people, 12 training us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in the present age..." Titus 2:11-12 (ESV)

The lesson we learn from ancient Israel is that it is not easy to put these small issues to death. I imagine Israel felt as though killing the inhabitants would be unnecessary bloodshed and an awful mess. We are okay with them here, what is the harm?

Perhaps the Israelites learned well from Joshua the many benefits of holding on to those able-bodied workers in the promised land, sinful tendencies can seem like helpful means to a better end. But the problem is, those little compromises do not stay small.

Let God's grace come and empower you for heartless rejection of any and all old vices. It will take time, just like the capturing of the land for Israel, but don't give up like Israel did. Those nations they let live grew to be thorns in their side. Joshua will state at the end of us life:
Joshua 23:13 (ESV) they shall be a snare and a trap for you, a whip on your sides and thorns in your eyes, until you perish from off this good ground that the LORD your God has given you.

In our lives, we have a choice, and by the grace of God, we have the power to put sin to death. Someone is going to die in this equation, Christian. We can either enter into the hard work of killing sin or we can experience sin living and eventually killing us. In the words of Puritan theologian John Owen: "Be killing sin or sin will be killing you."