There’s a great swindle, a great con going on in our society – and in part, we’re all being conned.  It goes like this – if you look after numero uno – everything else will be fine.  We know it doesn’t work, but…

Today … today we’re starting a new series that, I have to warn you, the devil does not want you to hear. In fact he’ll do anything he can to keep you away from what we’re going to be talking about over these coming few days and in fact next week as well. Why? Because if we let loose in our hearts and our lives, the thing that we’re going to be talking about, it is going to mess up his game plan for your life and for mine, big time.

Well, what are we going to talk about? The subject is this, Breaking Free from the Power of Sin. That’s the name of the series: Breaking Free from the Power of Sin. See, I have this crazy notion that God means, for you and me, to live not just a good life, not just a great life but an utterly sensational life. What I don’t mean is that each one of us should live in a mansion with 2 Merc’s in the garage.

What I don’t mean is that everything in life will go well, always healthy, live to a ripe old age. It doesn’t work. Life’s not like that. But what I do mean is that, come what may, God means for us to live a life of joy and peace and fulfilment and contentment. The question is; how do you get that life? Problem is there’s a big con being perpetrated in this world today.

The big con of this world is that what you do is you earn, you spend, you buy. That’ll give you all those things. The big con is that you look after number 1 and everything else will be fine. You and I know it doesn’t work. We know that it’s a big con but it’s a big con that we really, really, really want to swallow, hook, line and sinker And then some joker comes along and talks about sin and you think, “Well you have got to be kidding me. We’re not in medieval times, we’re not in the 1950’s. This is the 21st century. Sin? Oh please, what planet are you living on?”

What does sin conjure up in your mind? Some old-fashioned, moralising, finger-pointing, self-righteousness. That might have worked in the dim dark ages but don’t try that religion stuff on me today buddy! Sin, how gullible do you think I am? Crimson clad clergy pointing their bony fingers at me. Get out of here! Hmm, you might wonder, how is it that Berni can articulate this position so passionately? And well, the answer is this: it’s one that I held for most of my life.

Religion’s a bunch of rules; I don’t need a bunch of rules. Sin is an old-fashioned concept, that’s it, buzz off! And yet, if we were completely honest with ourselves, each one of us would admit we do things and we think things and we say things that hurt us, that ruin our lives. What we don’t often realise is how much they ruin our lives. Ever asked yourself exactly what sin is? Is it an out dated concept or is it real. And does it have consequences. And is it the thing that’s robbing me of a full and satisfying life?

Sin is one of the most frequently used words in the Bible, 486 times – 486. There is kind of various concepts but at the heart of it is this notion that God is perfect and that we’ve rebelled against God and we’ve broken His law and that will bring punishment. That’s the kind of “sin” thing in a nutshell and I guess that’s it for many people.

You mention sin and that’s what it conjures up; rules, religion, moralising and who needs that? Rebellion against God, well it is that, it’s all of those things. But I don’t know, my hunch is, giving where we are today maybe that’s not the best place to start to really understand what sin means because we’ve been conned.

See, I used to go scuba diving when I was younger and what you discover when you want to go scuba diving is we were made to float, we weren’t made to sink. You jump in the ocean or any body of water and you’ll float. And when you put on diving gear you float all the more because your wetsuit is very buoyant. So what the diver does is he or she straps weights to their body. It helps them to sink, that’s what they want to do, it works for a diver and these weights are these ugly old lumps of lead that you strap on.

I look back on my life, a life of sin for the most part and it was like I was bobbing around in the ocean. All these boats would sail by. All these different shapes and sizes and people would bend over the side and offer me this and that. This ball, that trinket. “Oh yes please, I’ll have that one and that one and that one and that attitude and that selfishness and this ambition and this desire. Oh yes please!”

But actually, what they were was lead weights only they’d been dressed up to look attractive. And you don’t have to be Einstein to figure it out. The more I took on, then the more I started to sink. That’s the big con and then, because we’re not made to sink, we frantically thrash around with our arms and legs to get back to the surface because we’re drowning. We’re not made to drown.

Interesting, God’s word talks about that. Over and over again He talks about sin as this concept of missing the mark. It’s the image of an archer shooting at a target and missing. Literally, what the word means is “to miss the point”. That’s how we’d say it today. People are drowning on mass because they’re missing the point. Have a listen to this. It’s what the apostle Paul writes about sin, he says:

Don’t deceive yourselves! If you think that you’re wise in this age, well you’re going to have to become fools in order to become wise because the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God. It’s written, ‘He catches the wise in their craftiness’ and again the Lord knows the thoughts of the wise, that they are futile. (1 Corinthians 3:18-31)

See, we think we’re clever. We think that with our sophisticated economic systems and share portfolios and cable television and electronic gadgets. We think we’re so clever.

In this context, Paul was talking about quarrels and factions – earthly wisdom as opposed to God’s wisdom. See the earthly wisdom is “win”, get on top, be number 1, that’s the wisdom of this world. And okay, we dress it up to make is look respectable but at its core, it’s rotten.

Contrast that with God’s wisdom, James chapter 3, verse 17:

But the wisdom from above (God’s wisdom) is first pure then peaceable, gentle; willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits without a trace of hypocrisy.

Do you see the difference, the contrast? Here’s the con. We trade in the good and wondrous things of God, the diamonds if you will, for the stones or the lead weights of this world. Our attitude of selfishness, anger disputes, horrible things that people do to one another. We justify those through this whole “number 1” mentality because we’ve been sold that con. We’ve swallowed it hook, line and sinker and yet, those are the things that are like lead weights, those are the things that make us sink to the bottom. And it’s exhausting because we’re not made to sink to the bottom.

Finally, one day I got it. Sin wasn’t some old-fashioned, moralising from an irrelevant Church. Not that. It’s here, it’s now. It’s important, it’s vital. It was something that was ruining my life. And at some point we have to do something about it otherwise we spend the rest of our lives missing the point and eventually we drown.

We live in a world of cause and effect.  You spend more than you earn, you end up in debt.  Cause and effect.  So how come, well why is it that you and I are such masters of self-deception when it comes to the consequences of our…sin.

We live in a world of cause and effect. We know that; you work, you earn, your bank balance goes up. You buy, you spend, your bank balance goes down. Cause and effect. You spend more than you earn, you go broke. You earn more than you spend, you have savings. Simple. Cause and effect. You break the law, you go to jail, at least that’s the theory. You obey the law, you stay free. Cause and effect.

But when it comes to how we live our lives, how we behave and think and speak and act, we’re pretty good at denying the effect from the cause, at least I am. “Oh look, I know I was rude to him but, but he deserved it!” Never mind it ruined a relationship. Never mind it injured the person. Never mind that it undermined his self-esteem and that had an impact on the way he brought up his kids. Cause and effect; oh never mind.

It’s true, isn’t it? Cause and effect is alive and well but when it comes to us violating the laws of cause and effect, we are only too ready to make excuses for ourselves. Well no matter how many excuses we make, cause and effect rolls inexorably on. You can’t avoid it, it just does.

None of us likes to talk too much about consequences but it’s the consequences of the dumb things we get up to that gives sin it’s power. I’m going to come back to the title of this series that we’re going through this week and next week, it’s called “Breaking Free from the Power of Sin”.

See sin is not some old-fashioned concept of moralising, it simple means this; to miss the mark, to miss the point of life. And see, when we talk about breaking free from the power of sin, I’m assuming that sin has some power, that this whole kind of lemming-type desire we have to miss the whole point of life is powerful and addictive.

You know I believe that each one of us is addicted to something. There’s some form of sin that’s just our sin, our weakness that robs us of life. The heroin addict knows that it’s bad for them, knows that it’s ruining their lives but the addiction is so powerful. They want to do something about it but they can’t because they’re addicted.

You may have heard of the seven deadly sins; lust, gluttony, greed, laziness, anger, envy and pride. And my hunch is, each one of us relates to at least one of those in our lives. And like the heroin addict, we kind of know they have consequences. We know they’re ruining our lives, we just can’t do anything about them.

If your particular weakness is laziness, you know you never achieve anything. You know that you don’t invest in relationships. You know you don’t get a sense of fulfilment out of life. If it’s anger you know anger ruins relationships. If its pride you realise that you can’t work closely with other people. If it’s gluttony, well that’s obvious. There are consequences. We can’t deny them.

Have a listen to the consequences of sin the apostle Paul writes about. Romans chapter 6, beginning at verse 13, he says:

Don’t present your members, your body, to sin as instruments of wickedness but instead, present yourselves to God as those who’ve been brought from death to life and present your body to God as an instrument of goodness and righteousness. Sin will have no dominion over you since you are no longer under the law but under grace. What then? Should we sin because we’re not under the law but under grace? Absolutely not!

Do you not know that if you present yourselves to anyone as an obedient slave, you are slaves of the one whom you obey? Either of sin, which leads to death or of obedience which leads to Gods goodness and righteousness. But thanks be to God that you, once having been slaves of sin, have become obedient from the heart to the form of teaching to which you have been entrusted. And that you, having been set free from sin, have become slaves of righteousness.

So what advantage did you get from those things of which you are now ashamed? The end of those things is death. But now, now that you have been freed from sin and enslaved to God, the advantage you get is God’s holiness and sanctification. The end of that is eternal life. You see the wages of sin are death but the free gift of God is eternal life in Jesus Christ our Lord. (Romans 6: 13-23)

Paul uses the analogy of slavery. Well maybe we wouldn’t use that in the same way today. Maybe the analogy we might use is addiction. There’s this concept with sin, that we’re in bondage to it and if we go the way of sin and rebellion and all that stuff we know is rubbish and wrong. You end up being a slave to it. You end up being addicted to it, the way a heroine addict is addicted to that needle and that heroin pumping in their veins. The wages of that, the outcome, the consequences of that is death.

See, there are so many people who are trapped in a downward spiral of consequences. Trapped, they can’t get out, it doesn’t matter how hard they try. And mostly we all try at some point and then we give up because it’s too hard. We roll over and we accept the reality and we say, “Well you know, I’m just an angry person. That’s it, nothing I can do about it. I know it’s ruining my marriage but there you go!”

The wage of sin is death. There are consequences today and eternally. Today, so many people are like the living dead. They’re robbed of the fulfilment that God’s goodness brings. It’s what righteousness means; integrity, purity, goodness. The power of sin is the addiction that traps us in the consequences and at some point, at some point we have to decide: enough is enough. At some point we have to wake up and say, “I can’t do this anymore.”

A former prisoner and drug addict wrote to me recently, this is what she said, “I’m 36, I’m a sole parent of 4 lovely kids. I lived a life of drugs and crime and wait for it, all sorts of sin for 20 years. Finally, in 2005 I ended up in jail, been there 3 times now. A year ago in my cell I finally threw my arms in the air and called out to God, “I give up, I’ve tried to do what I thought was right, I can’t do this life anymore, I’m yours.”

See, if you were expecting me to talk about being a better person in this series, you’d be wrong. We’ve all tried that, it don’t work. It just doesn’t, right? Because sin is more powerful than you and me. We’re drawn inexorably to it like a moth to a flame and the consequences destroy our lives. So what are we going to do about it? You, me, come on let’s get real here. What sin are you hanging onto so hard that you can’t let go of and it’s robbing you of life?

Over the next few weeks on the program, we’re going to show you how you can get your life back. Not in our own strength, can’t do that, but in God’s. First we have to decide to let go, you know we hang onto something real strong and the problem is its like hanging onto lead weights. We either have to paddle real hard and that’s exhausting and ultimately we end up drowning. That’s why Paul writes, “The wage of sin is death.”

All those little compromises are a foot-hold for the devil, like a bull into a china shop. He wreaks havoc in our lives and those compromises are like opening the door and inviting him in. Now the mistake we make is we think that applies to everyone else except us.

So many people on this planet are living so deeply in the debt of their – well, their sin – that they’ve forgotten that all along, God has a plan ‘A’ for their lives.  A glorious, wonderful, Plan ‘A’.

Most of us would be familiar with the term “downward spiral”. The sense that things are heading inexorably downwards. And whilst we have quite a few “up” times in our lives, one of the things you get a sense of when you talk to people is that many, many are experiencing this downward spiral. A sense almost that their quality of life, whatever that may mean for each of them, is slipping away. That whilst things maybe going fine on the outside, inside life seems to be draining down the plug hole.

This week on the program we’re talking about “Breaking Free from the Power of Sin” and for many that will be a phrase that doesn’t seem to relate to what they’re experiencing on the inside. But, in fact, it has everything, everything to do with it. Because, as we’ve seen over the last few days, the way that we live our lives has consequences.

And so many people are heading so far down that spiral. It’s hard for them to imagine there’s another way. It’s hard to imagine that there was, in fact, some time in the dim distant past, a time when they were on top of that spiral. It’s hard to begin to imagine as we’re living out this terrible plan B, that God had a plan A all along.

And as we head down that spiral, the longer we spend further down the spiral the more we want to hang on to that rubbish that we’re living down there, for dear life. I want to introduce you to a passage of Scripture today, Colossians chapter 3, that we’re going to have a bit of a look at today but a more detailed look over the next few days. It’s about how to break the power of sin.

“Okay, okay, I’ve sinned in my life and yes I’m addicted. Yes I admit it, yes it has power over me. Yes there are consequences that are robbing me of life itself but what do I do about it? How do I get out of this mess? If I accept my life is a mess and a lot of that mess is my own doing, what can I do about it now?”

Have a listen to this fabulous wisdom. It comes from Gods word, it’s written by the apostle Paul a couple of thousand years ago, if you have your own copy, Colossians chapter 3 in the New Testament, beginning at verse 1. He says this:

If you’ve been raised with Christ (in other words, if you believe in Jesus) then start looking for the things that are above. Seek those where Jesus is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your mind on the things that are above, not on the things that are on this earth. You’re dead to those and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Jesus, who is your life, is revealed then you also will be revealed with Him in glory. Put to death, therefore, whatever in you is earthly: sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, greed. On account of those, God’s wrath is coming on those who are disobedient. (Colossians 3: 1-6)

 See, it’s not enough for us to know what the problem is; we have to know how to deal with it. What we’re going to see, over the next few weeks, is that Gods plan is that we don’t have to do it on our own. In fact, we can’t. It’s His power that sets things right. But where do we step off? How do you and I take our step into a partnership with God that changes things?

See, we’re so locked in the here and now, we’re so locked in our current patterns of thinking and behaviour and addictions. Now Jesus died to set us free from that. Jesus died so that you and I could be forgiven. And we can believe that and yet, still not know where to begin in seeing the power of sin broken over our lives.

Here in this passage, Paul tells us where to begin:

If you believe in Jesus, seek the things that are above! Set your mind on those things, not on the things that are here on this earth ’cause you’re dead to those and your life is hidden with Christ in God.

See, we hang onto the things we can see. We grip onto them.

You know, maybe it’s selfishness, maybe it’s anger that’s your particular sin, maybe it’s gluttony, maybe it’s sexual immorality. We kind of hang on to them so tight that they end up reaching their dark tentacles in our heart. And they grip us and they have a power over us and we’re addicted to them.

We can’t get rid of them, they’re too strong. But what we can do is we can make a decision of the heart today, to listen to what Paul says here. ‘If I actually believe in God, I am going to start seeking the things that are above where Jesus is. I’m going to lift my gaze from all this stuff that I thought was important here in the world and begin to look at my Jesus. This Jesus who hung on that cross, nailed to the cross, suffering, brutalised, crucified, dying for me.

That’s where my focus is going to be. I can’t deal with the stuff that’s going on in my life. I can’t change that. I’m addicted to this stuff but what I can do is I can lift my gaze to Jesus. I can shift my focus from the stuff down here that I thought was important, to Jesus who really is’.

That’s a huge thing. Today I can decide, I can do that instead of focusing on my stuff, to focus on Him. ‘I want you God, not me. I want your reign and your power, I want your will in my life not my own despotic little life. I want so much more God, I just don’t know how’.

Imagine if you just took these three short verses and 20 minutes every day for a week, just spend some time reading and praying just about them. Let me tell you something, your God will show up, absolutely He will. I was talking with someone the other day, he was a great bloke, ordinary, everyday kind of person but struggling with a relationship.

The problem he was having was forgiveness. This other person was doing things to hurt him and this guy would struggle and complain and blame. You know the cycle, we’ve all been there. So we talked for a while. And we all have difficult people in our lives and what ruins our lives is not so much them, it’s how we react to them.

Peter said to Jesus:

How often to I have to forgive this person, 7 times? And Jesus said, “No, no, no, 77 times.

Over and over again until forgiveness works, we know it does. Unforgiveness robs us of Gods forgiveness. Jesus taught that over and over and over again. Unforgiveness is like, well, it’s like a cancer.

And so this man and I were talking about this and yet you could see he was struggling. We get in that place and we want to hang on to unforgiveness. This man, I was talking to, saw the sense of what I was saying but you could see it in his eyes, the struggle of having to let go. The struggle of finally forgiving the other person.

We’re addicted to sin, sin has a power over us. And you know what we do? We hear a message like this and we think, ‘that applies to everyone else except us’. We do. And yet it does apply to us. Sin robs us of life, it’s powerful stuff, we need God’s power to deal with it. So right now, right now, you and I can make a decision to take the first step.

If you believe in Jesus, start seeking things that are above where Christ is seated. Set your mind on the things that are above, not on the things that are on this earth. And before you know it, before you know it, God begins to step in. God is in that place with us; His power breaks the power of sin.

It’s funny, but when we finally come to the realisation that the way we’re living our lives – well, it’s not working all that well – the first thing we do, is we invent a bunch of rules to make our lives better.  And then we discover – they don’t work either.

When we finally wake up to ourselves and admit that the way we’re living our lives just isn’t working, the next thing we need is something that does work. Because like it or not, what we discover is that by and large, we ourselves our powerless to change.  We need power to change.

I don’t know, you turn on the evening news on the radio or the TV and there never seems to be much good news, it’s all bad. And then, when there is good news, on the odd occasion, I don’t know, the good news stories, they’re very, very rarely, you know, really good news. Well today on the program it’s a ‘good news’ story, not just a good news story, a great news story. In fact, not just a great news story, an absolutely fantastic news story.

If you’ve been joining me on the program this week, what you’ll know is that we’ve been talking about breaking free from the power of sin. Okay, there are people who think sin is some old-fashioned concept from an out of date Church but scratch below the surface, what you’ll always find is that each one of us has things in our lives that we do or we say or we think, that have lousy consequences. Things that drag us down and rob us of life. And the worse they become, the more powerless we feel to change them. And in fact, powerless we are because they are addictions.

So today’s absolutely fantastic news is this; that there is power available, the power to change and it comes to us from a source that, perhaps, we may not expect. It’s the power to have a fresh new life irrespective of what it is that the world’s throwing at us.

Power is something that people in this world seek after and abuse. You don’t have to look very far to find that. There are the powerful and the powerless. So many people are oppressed by power but that’s not the kind of power I’m talking about today. I’m talking about the power to change. The power to deal with things in our lives that rob us of life and that ruin the lives of those around us.

Sin is shorthand for those things. Sin literally means to ‘miss the mark’ to ‘miss the whole point of life’. The point of life is that God is the most amazing God. He wants to fill us with His joy and His peace and He wants us to live a life that glorifies Him.

See, for me, when people talk to me about sin, for much of my life, I was so touchy about that. I cared so much what other people thought about me. I’d do anything to enhance my reputation. I’d lie, I’d cheat to get people to think better of me. I couldn’t stand it when I didn’t have the limelight. I couldn’t stand it when other people succeeded and they got the limelight and they got the credit.

Now maybe it’s entirely different for you, we all have something different that we’re addicted to. For me it was recognition and success and we need setting free from that stuff. Now I’m a tough-minded, hard-nosed businessman kind of guy but as much as I tried, I couldn’t get away from that and I know it was ruining my life. I just didn’t have it in me. I needed some power.

Well today, I want to share with you where that power came from, I want to share with you actually through the words of the apostle Paul, yesterday we looked at what he wrote in Colossians chapter 2. I want to have a look at a different part of that today, this is truly powerful stuff. We’re talking about breaking free from all that rubbish that robs us of life, God calls it sin, breaking free from the power of sin. How, if we don’t have it in us, can we break free?

Have a listen to what Paul writes; this comes from a really contemporary translation called The Message Translation ’cause I find it really easy to understand. I’m beginning at Colossians chapter 2, verse 2.

I want you woven into a tapestry of love, in touch with everything there is to know about God. Then you’ll have minds confident and at rest, focused on Jesus, Gods great mystery. All the richest treasures of wisdom and knowledge are embedded in that mystery and nowhere else and we’ve been shown that mystery. I’m telling you this because I don’t want anyone leading you off on some wild goose chase after some other so-called secrets.

My counsel for you is simple and straight forward, just go ahead with what you’ve been given. You received Jesus Christ, now live in Him. You are deeply rooted in Him, you’re well constructed upon Him, you know your way around the faith, now do what you’ve been taught. School’s out, quit studying the subject and start living it and let your living spill over into thanksgiving.

Watch out for people who try to dazzle you with big words and intellectual double talk, they want to drag you off into endless arguments that never amount to anything. They spread their ideas through empty traditions of human beings and the empty superstitions of spirit beings.

But that’s not the way of Jesus. Everything of God gets expressed in Him so you can see and hear Him clearly. You don’t need a telescope, a microscope, a horoscope to realise the fullness of Christ and the emptiness of the universe without Him.”

When you come to Him, that fullness comes together for you too, His power extends over everything. Entering into His fullness isn’t something you figure out or achieve, it’s not a matter of being circumcised or keeping a long list of laws. No, you’re already in, you’re the insiders. Not through some secretive initiation rite but through what Jesus has already gone through destroying the power of sin. If it’s an initiation ritual you’re after, you’ve already been through it by submitting to baptism.

Going under the water was a burial of your old life, coming up out of it was a resurrection, God raising you from the dead as He did Jesus. When you were stuck in your old dead life you were incapable of responding to God but now, God brought you a life, all your sins are forgiven, the slate is wiped clean. That old arrest warrant is cancelled and nailed to Christ’s cross. He stripped all the spiritual tyrants in the universe of their sham authority at the cross and marched them naked through the streets. (Colossians 2: 2-15)

You see what Paul is saying here? The power of sin has been defeated; the guilt, the condemnation, the power of addiction is completely disarmed because Jesus triumphed over them. Through His death we have forgiveness ’cause He paid the price. Through His resurrection we have new life. And that very same power that brought Jesus back to life is available to you and me.

Do you believe? Do you believe in Jesus? Have you received Him? Well, now live in Him. See, we wander around feeling powerless and believing that we are powerless and that is a deception from the devil. It’s like the devil is pointing a pistol to our heads but if you have a look inside, he’s got no bullets in it. It’s a lie. God gives us the same power that raised Jesus from the dead to change our lives.

Paul writes that in Ephesians chapter 1, he says:

I just pray for you that you would know, as you get to know God, the hope and the riches and the immeasurably great power He has for us who believe, the very same power that raised Christ from the dead.

We don’t have to rely on ourselves to change. I can’t change me, I can’t change you. You can’t change you and you can’t change me. The only one that can change us is God. And God has already given us everything we need. If we place our faith in Jesus we have forgiveness, the old arrest warrant has been torn up and nailed to the cross. And the same power that raised Jesus from the dead is given to us. There will be no breaking free from the power of sin until we believe that in our hearts.

Next week we’re going to look at really practical, day-to-day, ways of breaking free. But today, I want you to stand firm, I want you to claim this promise for yourself. Decide YES! The power of God is in me because I believe in Jesus and I have a new life.