When One Kind of Pain is Better Than Another
Copyright 2006 by Shea Oakley
All Rights Reserved
It is better to suffer than to sin. By this I mean that the pain of successfully resisting temptation is better than the misery that results from giving in and doing what it lures you to do. This might seem like an obvious truth but many of us have trouble grasping it. Having a deep understanding of the reality of this equation usually only comes after we have repeatedly hurt ourselves, others and God through repetitive sin.
Make no mistake about it; resisting temptation is hard, sometimes very hard. If you have little trouble avoiding sin living in this fallen world then you are either a spiritual giant or you are in denial, more likely the latter. The wiles of sin are legion in the daily life of the believer, especially at this time in human history. We are a generation of Christians who are bombarded daily by the many-headed hydra of mass media in a society where, as one commentator put it, "sin has gone mainstream." We live in an affluent, morally permissive world in which many of us have too much time on our hands and a host of culturally sanctioned avenues to sin to fill that time. The temptation of evil is all around us today.
If we have given in to one of these temptations repeatedly then we are on the road to habitual sin, a road that ends in a very dark place if we continue on it. Resisting the enticement to commit a particular sin has a tendency to become harder after we have indulged in that sin a few times. Temptation that might have been relatively easy to resist at first becomes increasingly powerful each time that we give way to it. I do not presume to know when a "tipping point" is reached after which we are enslaved to a particular transgression, however it might come significantly sooner than we would like to believe. The web of sin is strong and quickly entwines.
This is not to say that habitual sin is always fatal, but freeing ourselves from such sin is very difficult. It is, of course, better not to go there in the first place. Once we are there, though, we must be prepared for a battle if we want to be free, a battle that involves pain and a very real sense of loss.
Sin would never get a hold on us in the first place if it did not promise some gain that we think obedience to God either would not get us or would not get us quickly enough. The truth is that sin is, as the scripture tells us, pleasurable for a season. This is part of the deception of habitual sin. We like it for a while. It feels good, and fallen humans are all potential hedonists. Once we have tasted the pleasure of a certain evil habit we do not want to let that pleasure go; to do so feels like loss. True repentance is hard to even want because of this dynamic. Loss means pain and who wants that?
It will hurt to resist the soothing voice, which whispers (or screams) to us that the immediate comfort and pleasure the sin produces is what we absolutely must have at the moment. We will feel this most when we initially try to stand firm against the temptation in question. It does not feel good to deny ourselves of a gratification we have grown used to experiencing. This is the critical point when it is vital to remember the decidedly unpleasant aftermath of guilt and misery that comes when later realize what we have done. Usually the "spiritual hangovers" from sinful behavior more than equal the fleeting pleasure that behavior brings us.
If we can begin to remember this pain when we are tempted the different kind of pain that comes from strongly resisting the lure of the sin will become, for us, the lesser of two evils. At such times we can sincerely ask God to give us new strength to flee or resist the enticement and then engage our will to operate in that strength. If we begin to do this consistently the pain of resistance will progressively decrease. Eventually, and it will take some time, the sin that seemed so impossible to live without will no longer have such a hold on us. Then we will know that we’ve successfully endured the redemptive fire of resistance, and this because we have come to prefer it to the un-redemptive fire of guilt. If we continue to endure such "positive pain" when under temptation we will know profound victory and enter into a higher level of holiness and intimacy with our Lord than we ever dared to imagine.