Motivation Against Sin

Michael Jordan is perhaps the most famous basketball player of all time. Winning six championships and starting a successful shoe brand, he is the embodiment of success in sports. And yet, he didn't even make his high school team. When he asked his coach why he didn't make it, the coach said that Michael was bad at free throws. So, he practiced, and made 500 free throws every day for 10 years. Not shot 500 free throws. Made 500 free throws. He didn’t let himself go to bed until he made 500. Think about what would happen if you identified such a weakness and then systematically set about eradicating it.

We are called by God to be the best version of ourselves. This means that, like Michael Jordan, we need to systematically work to eradicate sin from our life, to truly live the life that God calls us to. This is why regular confession is so important; otherwise sin is so powerful that, like a cancer on the body, it will devour us.

When you first wash your car, you take extra care to make sure it stays clean, avoiding potholes and mud as much as possible. But, no matter your seemingly best efforts, it gets dirty over time, and you start to care less and less about getting dirty. So too, with sin. Without the restoring grace of regular confession, you will lose your sensitivity to sin and your strength against temptation will decrease.

So what to do when you feel tempted? Don’t dialogue with temptation. Keep yourself busy. The temptation will pass. Replace the dialogue with temptation by another dialogue: prayer. Often, we don’t actually want God and his all-powerful-self getting in the way of our sins, so we don’t pray to him when we are tempted. In this case, ask God to give you the desire to give up that sin: “Lord, I know [this sin] is stopping me from becoming the best-version-of-myself, and that’s stopping me from loving You and the people in my life. But I love [this sin], so please give me the desire to give it up.” Trying to fight the battle against temptation alone is pointless, an expression of the same pride that likely led us to sin in the first place. Invite God into your spiritual battle against sin.