Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hey there. You're listening to Rooted at Home with Christian Lloyd, kids, pastor at Edmonds First Baptist Church, diving into real life topics that impact kids, parents and families today and discovering what God's word has to say about them.
[00:00:13] Speaker B: Well, hey everybody. Welcome again. Thanks for joining me today.
I wanted to talk about something that is something that affects every believer, whether it be child, whether it be a kid of any age, a teenager, an adult, a senior adult. And that concept is sin. And not just sin, but the concept of habitual sin. What happens when you have you as a parent or a grandparent and you are constantly battling with a sin in your life and it just seems like the sin just comes around and around and around and it's just a consistent part of your Christian walk? Because that can be frustrating, isn't it? It's frustrating when you try to try to break free from a sin and you feel like it's just a constant struggle in your life. I mean, we know that as believers, we are struggling consistently all the time, aren't we? We're constantly either battling a sin that we know is a sin, but we keep going back to it, or we're constantly battling a new sin that may pop up. And the Christian life is definitely one that is a constant battle. There's a reason why Scripture says that we should guard ourselves and put on the full armor of God as if we're not careful. I feel like sometimes we'll wake up in the morning and we'll put on maybe the breastplate of righteousness, but we'll forget to put on the helmet of salvation or we'll lace up the shoes, but we'll forget to open our sword and have our sword for the day. It's something that I think is an ongoing battle and that needs to be talked about. So reason I want to talk about this one is because one of my friends and also an accountability partner of mine shared with me an article this past week, and it was an article on habitual sin. And it just has really, really got me thinking about just sin in general, but not just sin, but how I treat my sin as well. I think it's really easy sometimes as parents and believers in general. But parents especially when you're so busy with everything that you've got going on between getting the kids to school in the morning and trying to get them to three different places at once because one kid has this activity and another kid has this activity and life gets hectic. And it's easy sometimes to almost trivialize our sin, trivialize it and make it just something that, oh man, I'm frustrated. I sinned and just kind of move on and not really understand the consequences of our sin. And, and so it got me thinking and something that I felt like that the Lord wanted me to share with you all and just to kind of talk about a little bit. So once again, I thank you to the person who sent me that they know who they are, but I definitely appreciate their, their.
Their desire in my life to help me stay accountable and continue to grow in my faith. But so first off, In Romans, chapter 6, verse 12, it says, Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body to make you obey its passions.
It's so easy for us as believers to constantly get enthralled with sin. And we have to understand that sin is something that we're going to struggle with consistently. Scripture also says that sin will always be around until either the Lord comes back or we're made perfect in heaven.
And so a Christian can't stop sinning completely just because they're a believer. And so we're going to struggle with this. In fact, another passage says that for I do not know the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing.
And Paul said that. And so if Paul, which is one of the great, great people of our faith, if you will, constantly struggles with sin, we know that it's something that we're just going to deal with because we often sometimes desire sin. I talked about on the last podcast episode that the K Pop Demon Hunters and how the movie itself was such a great way of showing the temptations of sin and how sin looks good. And isn't it parents, isn't it so often that sin just can look engaging? And when we talk with our kids, it's sometimes hard for them to understand. You know, when I talk with the kids on Sunday morning during kids church, I had them ask a question, or I asked them a question rather, and had them all raise their hands based on what they thought. And the question I said was, hey, guys, does sin look good?
Does sin look good? And you'd be surprised that most of them, at first, they didn't raise their hand. Well, of course not. Sin doesn't look good. Sin is bad. Sin is something that we shouldn't do. We shouldn't sin, we shouldn't lie, we shouldn't cheat, we shouldn't be disrespectful to our parents. And they looked and kind of, you know, said, well, no, sin isn't good. And I had to Tell him, like, absolutely, sin looks good. It can be tempting. That's why we're tempted with sin. You see something, see, see something that looks great on the outside, but on the inside it's terrible. And so kind of like I talked about in the K Pop movie, it shows how easily, easily we can get enthralled with sin and temptation. And our kids are no different. They, they struggle with things as well. We're talking, you know, about habitual sin, sin that we try to escape from, but that for some reason just keeps always coming back and back and back. And for adults and kids, it's no different. If you're a believer, then you are going to struggle with sin. And it all kind of helps. It helps you to frame your mind around what sin is. Which we know, as I tell the kids, is anything you think, say, do or don't do that displeases God. And we talk about that, that that's what sin is. But do we really know God's mindset behind how much he hates sin and how much he desires sin? And so again, this part of this was shared from an article that has, was phenomenal.
And so it really just got me really hit home with thinking about sin and habitual sin and how we struggle.
So in Matthew 5, 29, 30, a lot of you have probably heard this verse. The verse, and what it says specifically is that if your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. For it is better for you to lose one of your members than that your whole body be thrown into hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off, throw it away. For it's better for you that you lose one of your members than not the whole body go into hell. And so you read that passage, and I think it really helps to portray what God thinks of sin and how much he hates sin and how much we should hate our own sin as well.
It's, it baffles me sometimes when I'll sin and I'll do something wrong and how easy it is for me to kind of trivialize and go, you know, I think it, I know I sin, but it's not that bad. It wasn't that bad of a sin. That person cut me off and I said a bad word. Well, it's just one bad word.
It's okay. It's just one bad word. I need to ask forgiveness and move on.
But you really, it's easy to kind of just, just not think about that struggle and get into a mindset where the Next thing you know, you're sinning more regularly because you're not thinking about how much God doesn't like sin and God hates sin. And so when the scripture literally says it's better for you to cut your own hand off if it causes you to sin, obviously that is not an actual literal thing. Please do not go and cut your hand off because it caused you to sin or pluck your own eye out because it caused you to sin. That's obviously not what the passage is saying. It's using that symbolism there. But it shows that we need to be taking the utmost caution in our lives as parents and grandparents and whatnot. That we are making sure we know how sin is and how bad sin is and taking the seriousness of sin. And we need to imply that and apply that to our children. They need to understand that, yes, you lied to me about this.
We'll say my love, my kiddos to death. But this morning actually, and this just goes to show how, how much sin has entered the world and how we have such sin natures is my 2 year old this morning had breakfast and she had a piece of toast and with butter on it. And I don't know if it's just my kid or if it's all children that like butter, but this kid will, I mean, she'll eat a. If we gave her a bar of butter, she would just eat the whole thing.
So she ate half her toast and then she said, more butter, more butter. I was like, no, you need to eat the actual bread of the toast. Well, naturally she didn't do that. She threw it and I had to go get it and we had to go throw it away. And anyways, I continue to go about the morning and she grabs, I hear her go to the pantry and I'm like, no, we don't need anything else. You had toast. It turns out she grabbed a bag of chips and I said, of course. Like, I don't, I'm assuming other parents do this. It's like, I don't know, 8 o' clock ish in the morning. She's like, chips? And I said, sure, here, I'll give. You can have some chips and tell her, remember, we don't need to eat that many because you just had your toast and you don't need to eat that many chips. And then I go about continuing what I was doing and for a second it was quiet and I thought to myself, well, that's not good.
I mean, you gotta know, as a parent, you probably already know this, but silence Sometimes is never a good thing, especially when you have a toddler. When you've got a teenager, I think silence may actually be a normal thing. My kids are six, about to be seven in a week and two. And so I don't have a teenager yet. But I assume most of the time they're in their rooms and quiet. But for my 2 year old, I'm like, oh no, she is getting into something. So I go on the hunt for her and I find her and she's in our little linen closet that we have our board games and things in. And she had got the sour cream chips and she had closed the door and hidden inside and was munching on the chips. And I, as soon as I opened the door and found her, she had this very like, oh face. And I picked her up and caught her and took the chips and put them up and had a conversation as much as you can with a two year old talking about right and wrong. But it showed that she actively knew that I didn't want her to eat that many chips and she decided to take the whole bag and go hide in a closet so she can eat these chips. It just shows sin nature and how we're all ingrained with the sin nature from birth and how our mindset has to be right or we're going to continually sin over and over and we're going to get into this pattern that we don't want to be in.
But so first and foremost, I think that it's very important that when you're dealing with habitual sin in either your life or your child's life, the first thing that needs to happen is we've got to pray. Prayer is something that has to happen on a regular basis. And it's something that I think is one of the more neglected aspects of Christianity and believers in general is prayer.
We have a, I tell the kids sometimes we have a direct line to the God of the universe. We can communicate with the creator of everything, someone who's eternal, who has always been and always will be. We can talk to them about our problems, about our sin, about our struggles, but we just don't do it.
For whatever reason, we don't do it. We either get busy or we get lackadaisical and we say, oh, thank you Lord for this. Oh, thank you Lord for our food. Bless it to our bodies. Amen. Lord, please help me with the hedge of protection. We pray, but we just go through the motions. We're not actually praying, truly believing that God is going to take care of us. We're praying because that's something that we're supposed to do. Hey, we're believers, we pray. But we have to be careful and know that when we're sinning and when we're struggling with our sin and when our kids are struggling with our sin, we have to be in prayer for them. And they also have to know that they can be in prayer for themselves.
If you're a believer, we all have the same spirit.
If you're a third grader who's given your life to Christ, that third grader has the same Holy Spirit in their life that the 85 year old does who gave their life to the Lord 70 years ago.
They have that same spirit. And so we have to first teach and understand that we're struggling with habitual sin. We have to be in prayer. We have to be praying that the Lord will help to take away the sin, to help us fight the sin. Because ultimately the Lord is the one that's going to fight for us, right? The scripture says that we need to be silent and let him fight for us, that God will fight for us. The God of the Creator of everything will fight against our sin to help us overcome.
And yet we take some time and we, we just don't, we don't pray like that. And if we do pray like that, a lot of times we just don't, we don't truly believe that he's going to do that. So we need to first spend some time in prayer, thinking and praying to the Lord, letting him know our struggles, letting our children know their struggles, letting them voice them out loud.
Parker, my almost 7 year old now, she absolutely is scared to pray out loud, like honestly a lot of adults are. But I've tried to encourage her regularly that she needs to pray out loud because there's something about audibly praying out loud to the Lord that helps to show that we are truly believing in what we're praying for. And it helps us to take a moment and just, I don't know, there's just something about audibly voicing prayers. Maybe that's just me, but I, I just audibly voicing prayers is something that I really want to encourage my kids to do and what I'd encourage you to do as well for you and your k, audibly pray and ask the Lord to help you with whatever you're dealing with, whether that be that your child is dealing with struggling with lying because maybe they're at school and they're not doing so hot. You know, I was never bad at, I was never good at math. Math is something that I have just never had a grasp on. I tell you what it's like. If I look at two plus two, it equals seven. I. I just. I've always been bad at math.
But that's a struggle that you can pray for. It's not necessarily a sin. But as it becomes a sin because of the struggle, maybe the child is. Your child is starting to forget to do homework assignments or not do them. Or maybe your child is doing something like that and they're lying and hiding that they're not doing well, and it becomes a sin because they're nervous. There's underlying things there that you can talk about, but maybe that lying is a sin that continues to happen in your house. And I know even in my house, sometimes that is a struggle as well. A lot of times struggle, especially if you have siblings, is the anger and the jealousy between siblings and the fighting and the punching and things that can also be a habitual sin because it just happens. But the first thing we need to do is to pray and ask that the Lord is going to help take care of us, because God is going to take care of us. It's not a.
God isn't going to help us. It's a. When we pray and we earnestly seek the Lord, he will deliver us from our sin.
So we need to make sure that we're spending time in prayer. The second thing we need to understand too, though, is the importance of not just prayer and spending time in prayer and knowing that God's going to help. But we have to also know that scripture tells us that we should flee from sin, not that we should be okay with sin. Not that we should.
It's okay to be in the same room with my sin. It's fine. It's fine.
That's not what the passage. That's not what scripture says. Scripture says that we should flee from our sin. And so we have to understand that when we're courting sin, when we're in there and we're saying, oh, I lied, but it's okay, it's fine. It's just one little white lie. Oh, I cursed. It's fine. It's just one little white lie. Oh, my child, they've been being disrespectful. And it's okay, though. They're under a lot of stress. They're at school.
Uh, it's fine. They're tired, which is an easy excuse sometimes. And I do believe that tired. Tiredness does have a factor into how children act. But we also need to make sure and know that just because they're tired doesn't mean they can be disrespectful. Um, but we have to understand that we should flee from sin and take those opportunities to pray and of course seek God's face, but also make sure that we're doing our part and fleeing from the sin. You can't get out of habitual sin and you can't struggle with sin and not flee from it and expect any different results.
That's, that's not gonna do anything for you. You've gotta make sure that you turn and 180 flee from your sin. That sin is something that's gonna help, that's gonna hold you down and delay your Christian walk and make you not as close to the Lord as you wanna be if you're not going to flee from your sin. And so you definitely need to make sure to do that. And kids need to understand too. Just because I'm talking kind of more generally right now doesn't mean these points just affect adults. Of course children have to understand that too. My six, almost seven year old needs to understand how much God hates sin and how God tells us that we should flee from our sin. Now my child right now has not given her life to the Lord. She. But she's been asking great questions and has been getting really close in my opinion. But the worst thing you can do, of course, is to push them over the edge to make a decision that they shouldn't make then and there.
Because as we know, kids are very.
If I wanted my seven year old to be my six, almost seven year old, if I wanted her to be saved, I could talk her into being saved tomorrow and she could walk down the aisle on Sunday and I could baptize her and then nothing would change in her life. We need to wait for the Holy Spirit to move, but she still needs to understand how much God hates sin and how we should flee from sin. And of course we also need to understand that Satan, he desires us to sin.
He wants us to sin. He wants sin to rule our lives.
We know that as believers, because we're believers. Satan doesn't get our life. Satan can't do God when he we are given salvation and freedom from sin. He wraps his hand around us and there's nothing in the world that can take us out of his hand. Because of that. Satan wants to go on and he wants to get us to mess up and he wants us to sin continually. He wants us to get in a pattern where we're constantly in this circle of never ending sin. Sin where you sin, you ask for forgiveness, you sin, you ask for forgiveness, you sin, you ask for forgiveness and eventually get where you sin, where you sin, where you sin, and then maybe ask for forgiveness here and there because it's become kind of a habit and habitual in your life. We need to understand though, like that Satan, his entire goal is to what, to steal, to kill and to destroy.
Well, he can't steal us from him, from God. He can't kill us in the physically, in their spiritual sense, of course, and, but he can, he can't really destroy us either in that aspect. But what he can do is help impede our lives by stealing our joy, by stealing our Christian walk, by us hating others and doing things that is God, that God considers sin by destroying our lives and ruining it with sins and things that we may think is okay, but that isn't.
So we need to understand that goal. The goal of Satan is for us to sin because he hates God. And we're going to continually do that if we don't focus and attack our sin the way that God tells us we should attack it. And for our kids, they have to understand too that sin is bad. I say that kind of fusely, if you will, but sin is bad and kids need to understand that when they lie or they do something like that. It's not as simple as, oh, it's okay, baby, I understand. It's okay, sweetheart, I know that. No, they need to understand that sin is bad. And we need to make sure to give kids the credit they're due, that they can understand that they can understand how bad sin is and how much God hates sin. And so they need to see that as well in their life.
But one thing we also need to remember, and I think this is the point, that probably it's actually one of the points on the article, but it's one that got me really thinking this week.
And that is that God doesn't just dislike sin. God has a holy hatred for sin. That's what the article actually says, holy hatred. And I really like that.
God absolutely hates sin.
He doesn't just dislike sin. He doesn't just say, oh well, I know you sinned. No, God absolutely hates sin.
And every time we continue to sin and we don't view our sin as actual sin and bad, even if it's a subconscious thing where we're not giving it the threat that it's due, sometimes we, we, it just, that's how, that's how it becomes A habit in our life is when we let ourselves kind of run rampant with this, this thing, this idea that sin is not the end of the world, but sin is absolutely horrible and something that we should take seriously.
And not only should we take it seriously, but we have to know that God absolutely hates sin.
Jesus died to save Dave, save us.
He died to save us. And whenever we continue to live in this habitual sin, when we continue to sin and do things we shouldn't, Scripture actually says it's almost like we're putting Christ back on the cross because we sin.
Every time we sin, it's like we're doing that. And so when we get in this habitual pattern of sin and not taking it seriously, it really harms our Christian walk.
It really can harm our Christian walk.
So we have to again, just understand the seriousness of our sin.
But just to kind of recap through what we've talked about today and what the Lord really put on my heart is that we need to understand that sin equals death.
And we need to continue to have that viewpoint of sin.
We also need to understand that God absolutely hates, absolutely hates sin, doesn't just. Not just dislike it, he hates sin.
But we also have to realize that we have access to the Creator, the God of everything.
We should spend some time praying and seeking the Lord and what he has to say and how he can help us.
We can't fight sin on our own. We can't fight sin on our own.
We don't have that power.
But praise the Lord that we have a God who is so good and so powerful that when we come to him and say we're struggling with this sin, that he will not only help us get through the sin, but he will comfort us. He will help us to flee.
He will help us to give, help us to put up boundaries in our life that help prevent that habitual sin from happening.
That he will care for us, that when we sin, he will comfort us. Praise the Lord that we have a God that says, I know you sinned and you made a mistake, but I have forgiven you.
Your punishment has already been taken by Jesus on the cross.
Now let's work together to try and prevent these sins from happening again and again.
And I think our children especially need to see us as parents, us as grandparents, as whoever.
They need to see us understanding the reality of how bad sin is and see us fleeing from temptation and fleeing from sin and seeing us praying, seeing us down on our knees talking about our sin and struggles.
Our kids need to see that because so Much of how children learn is a caught behavior.
You can tell something to a child four different times, five different times, six, seven, eight, nine, 10 times.
But what they see, you do, what they see, they see how you respond.
That's how they tend to act.
You know, it's kind of like this.
One of my struggles especially is road rage. I would say it drives me crazy getting behind someone that's either going to 10 miles under the speed limit or sometimes someone going the speed limit. Because occasionally I, I do, like, probably a lot of people go over the speed limit sometimes. Um, but it drives me crazy. Absolutely drives me crazy. Especially when you're at a light and you're waiting for someone to go and they're not going. And so my 2 year old JC, I have been known to be like, come on car, go. Why in the world aren't you going?
And now we'll be sitting at a light and we'll just get to the light and it'll just turn red and we're waiting for our turn. And I'll be in the back or I'll hear from the back seat, go, come on car.
And I just laugh because I'm like, oh, oh. She learned that from me. And so now she thinks every light we stop at, every time someone tries to turn left and I have to wait or whatever it may be, she's saying, go, come on car, go.
It just goes to show you how easily kids catch and they learn things and pick up on things way more than we think they do.
And so again, I just wanted to share really from what's on my heart. And I apologize if I'm out of order. It seems like I'm rambling, but the Lord really wanted me to share just thoughts on this of what he's been putting on my heart for the week, about making sure that we understand that our sin is sin. It's bad. It's not just okay, it's not just something we can.
It's. It's horrible. And we need to understand that we need to flee from it. We need to remember that God just hates sin. He hates it tremendously.
But we have an open line of communication to the Creator of the universe. And I, I can't.
It baffles me sometimes when I just stop and think about that, that we have an open line of communication to the Lord. And yet we, including myself, I take it for granted sometimes. And I, I don't.
Unfortunately, I don't pray as much as I should. And so the Lord has really been working on me this week about that and I just wanted to make sure and share that with you. And I don't know if you heard the last episode, but I had a little story there at the end and talked about dad jokes because I'm a dad and I think that's fun and there's nothing better than saying a dad joke and getting an eye roll or something like that. And maybe some of you had that yesterday, that last time you listened to it was that. But I just going to say that I know some people really don't like dad jokes, but that's just how I roll.
Yeah. Get it. Because I roll. Yeah. I thought that was another good one. Well, I was. It's been a pleasure talking with you and I hope that you at least have got some things to think about and chew on. And so again, feel free to reach out and shoot me a message or call me or send me an email or something if you want to talk more about this. But this is something that's been on my heart for a little bit and I just wanted to share it with you all. So I can't wait to catch you next time. We'll talk to you later.
[00:27:21] Speaker A: Thanks for listening to rootedome, where faith and family take root together. If you enjoyed today's episode, be sure to like, share and subscribe so you never miss a conversation that helps kids, parents and families grow in God's word.
