Getting the Mastery over Sin
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Dear friend,
If you were here and I could talk to you now and then and offer a little prayer to God with you and for you, I am sure I could do very much more for you than I can merely through letters. But I want to help you in every way. Especially do I want to help you to be strong. Remember that the divine keeping which is promised to us, depends upon ourselves far more than we sometimes think. We ask God to keep us, and then we let ourselves drift along in the old way, and think our prayers have not been answered and that God has not done for us what he promises to do. We forget that we must get the mastery of our desires and feelings, if we would get God's help. The old maxim which says, "God helps those who help themselves" is perfectly true. For instance, there is no use in our praying God to provide for our bodily needs, if we are strong and do not lift a hand to earn the bread we ask God to give to us. So when we ask that we may be kept from doing wrong — we must resolve to stand like a rock in the path of right, resisting all evil.
I get letters very often in which the writers tell me that somehow they do not get answers to their prayers, when they ask God to keep them from doing wrong. The reason is that their prayers are not accompanied by any real effort to do the thing they ask God to help them to do. Remember that Christ does not destroy our desires, our feelings, our appetites, our passions. Buddha's teaching was that desire must die, that our appetites and passions must be crushed and destroyed. Christ taught a different way — not the crushing and the destroying of our natural longings and desires, but the satisfying of them in the right way. You remember he said that he who drinks of this water, that is, of God's grace and love, shall never thirst, and that the water he takes will become a living well in him, springing up into everlasting life. You will find that Christ never says a word in all the gospel about crushing our feelings and desires — he wants us to bring all these heart yearnings to him, and he promises to satisfy them from his own fullness, and in his own service.
The truest way for us to get the mastery over anything wrong, is to turn all the power of our life toward the doing of something beautiful and good. If you will seek opportunities to help others, using your pent-up affections and feelings in this sacred service — you will find that they will be satisfied and more than satisfied. If you yield to a wrong desire, even for a little while, it leaves bitterness in your heart afterwards. But if you turn that same natural longing into a channel of helpfulness to others, and honor to Christ — you will find thesatisfaction far deeper and joy, instead of bitterness as a result.
We must think of ourselves as the children of God. If you realize that you are God's child, Christ's redeemed one, and that your life must be kept for Christ, and that you must live worthy of him who died for you and worthy of the high calling to which he calls you — then you cannot but rise into a worthy, wholesome, natural and well-balanced character.
You ask me the meaning of the words, "Watch and pray, that you enter not into temptation; for the spirit indeed is willing — but the flesh is weak." One lesson from the words is that we must watch ourselves, watch against the smallest beginnings of wrong, watch against the alluring temptations which come to us — watch as well as pray — the very thing I have been saying to you. Temptation is not a sin in itself. We all are tempted. Christ himself was tempted. Indeed, we are continually required to make our choice between the right and the wrong. When someone speaks sharply to us, there is a temptation to retort in like tone. We have not sinned, however, in experiencing the temptation. But if we yield to it and speak sharply and bitterly and resentfully — then we have sinned. If, however, we resist the temptation, control ourselves and speak patiently and kindly, or keep silent — then we have not sinned. So whatever the particular temptation may be, the same is true. There is no sin in being tempted — but sin begins the moment we yield to the temptation.
It seems to me, that it should help us to resist temptation, to think of the debasing effects of sin, and of the bitterness which it leaves in the life after it has been committed.
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