Bible Study Weeding Out Sins

[WalterandDebbie]

Saturday 3-18-23 7th. Day Of The Weekly Cycle Adar 25, 5783 88th. Winter Day

Read: 1 John 1:5–2:2 | Bible in a Year: Deuteronomy 32–34; Mark 15:26–47

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If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins. 1 John 1:9

When I noticed a sprig budding next to the garden hose by our porch, I ignored the seemingly harmless eyesore. How could a little weed possibly hurt our lawn? But as the weeks passed, that nuisance grew to be the size of a small bush and began taking over our yard. Its stray stalks arched over a portion of our walkway and sprouted up in other areas. Admitting its destructive existence, I asked my husband to help me dig out the wild weeds by the roots and then protect our yard with weed killer.

When we ignore or deny its presence, sin can invade our lives like unwanted overgrowth and darken our personal space. Our sinless God has no darkness in
Him . . . at all. As His children, we’re equipped and charged to face sins head-on so we can “walk in the light, as he is in the light” (1 John 1:7).

Through confession and repentance, we experience forgiveness and freedom from sin (vv. 8–10) because we have a great advocate—Jesus (2:1). He willingly paid the ultimate price for our sins—His lifeblood—and “not only for ours but also for the sins of the whole world” (v. 2).

When our sin is brought to our attention by God, we can choose denial, avoidance, or deflection of responsibility. But when we confess and repent, He weeds out sins that harm our relationships with Him and others.
How does knowing your sins are offenses against God change your view about repentance? What sins have taken root and need to be weeded out of your life?

Loving Father, please uproot the sins from my life so I can grow closer to You and others.

INSIGHT​

The apostle John reminds us that “God is light” (1 John 1:5) and encourages us to walk in fellowship with Him (vv. 6–7). Elsewhere, Paul reminds us that we “are not in darkness” but are “children of the light” (1 Thessalonians 5:4–5). In 1 John, the apostle challenges us to “not sin” (2:1). But because we’re still not perfected, we do continue to sin (1:8). John assures us that when we confess and repent, God will “forgive us our sins” (v. 9).

Our “advocate with the Father—Jesus Christ, the Righteous One” (2:1), “through the shedding of his blood” (Romans 3:25), is “the atoning sacrifice [propitiation] for our sins” (1 John 2:2; see 4:10). The NIV Zondervan Study Bible describes “atoning sacrifice” as what Jesus did on the cross in “removing guilt and purifying sinners (expiation) and appeasing God’s anger toward sinners (propitiation).”

By Xochitl Dixon|March 18th, 2023

Sin 1 John One:5, 2:2

5 This then is the message which we have heard of him, and declare unto you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all.

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1 John 2

2 And he is the propitiation for our sins: and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world.

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Love, Walter and Debbie

 

[Tenchi]

Loving Father, please uproot the sins from my life so I can grow closer to You and others.

Dealing with sin is such an important topic! Nothing hinders a believer's walk with God more than sin, so it's vital to deal decisively with it.

Where does my sin come from? Does God say in His word what the source of my sin is? Romans 6 explains not only where sin originates but what God has done to deal with the source of sin. A believer can continue all their life to stamp out "sparks" of sin, never dealing with the "bonfire" that is the "old man" from which those sparks continually arise. But God has actually already dealt with the "old man," separating him and the sin he produces from the born-again believer. As the child of God lives by faith in the truth of this fact, the constant stamping out of sin ceases and they become conformed in their living to the truth of who they are in Jesus Christ, the "bonfire" of the "old man" increasingly unable, as a result, to produce more "sparks" of sin.

Romans 6:1-14 (NASB)
1 What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin so that grace may increase?
2 May it never be! How shall we who died to sin still live in it?
3 Or do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus have been baptized into His death?
4 Therefore we have been buried with Him through baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.
5 For if we have become united with Him in the likeness of His death, certainly we shall also be in the likeness of His resurrection,
6 knowing this, that our old self was crucified with Him, in order that our body of sin might be done away with, so that we would no longer be slaves to sin;
7 for he who has died is freed from sin.
8 Now if we have died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with Him,
9 knowing that Christ, having been raised from the dead, is never to die again; death no longer is master over Him.
10 For the death that He died, He died to sin once for all; but the life that He lives, He lives to God.
11 Even so consider yourselves to be dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus.
12 Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body so that you obey its lusts,
13 and do not go on presenting the members of your body to sin as instruments of unrighteousness; but present yourselves to God as those alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness to God.
14 For sin shall not be master over you, for you are not under law but under grace.

It is the mature believer who has turned from pulling out "sin-weeds" to living, by faith, in the truth of their death to the "old man," living daily in submission to God as His bond-slave. This is God's "way of escape" from all sin. (See also: Galatians 2:20; Galatians 5:25; Galatians 6:14; Colossians 3:1-3)