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It took a great fall for King David to realise that sin was not just in his act, but in his very nature (Ps.51:5). When Jesus came to save us from our sins, it was not sufficient just to forgive us. He made a way for us to be delivered from the power of sin our life (Ro.6:14;1Jn.2:1). One problem is that we are only aware of certain sins that we have committed, and we don't realise that we are constantly doing many things every day that we don't recognise as being sinful in God's eyes (Ro.7:19,20). How does God try to free us more and more from our sins? By showing us the truth about what we are doing, what He is like and how we can change (Jn.8:32). We can describe this also as God giving us more and more 'light' on His being and ourselves (Pr.4:18).

How we respond to the truth will decide if we will become free from that particular sin that this truth is exposing to us. This is where we will find resistance from our sinful nature which does not want to be put to death, and the deceptions of the Devil who wants to keep us in bondage. There are several ways we can resist the truth. The most common way is to try and deny that we have sinned. It is 'painful' for us to admit our sin and to face the guilt. So, an automatic attempt comes up from our nature to deny it to ourselves, God or other people.

But when we are not able to get away with denial, another attempt is to try and make excuses for our sin. Just like Adam tried to say that it was because of Eve that he ate the fruit, our human tendency is to look for something as a special reason why we did wrong. What we try to imply is that normally we don't do it, but that the circumstances forced us. In other words, the guilt is not ours!

Still another attempt is to say that we were justified in this particular situation for what we did. For example, people say that we are living in this corrupt world and that we have to do certain wrong things just to survive. However, whatever attempt we may make to dodge the issue, until we acknowledge our sin, salvation cannot begin (Je.3:13).

Once we recognise our sin, we have to own our responsibility for it and confess it to God to receive forgiveness (1Jn.1:9). If we have hurt other people we need to confess it to them and set it right. That is how we can respond to the truth about ourselves that we have just seen. Then we seek God for grace and understanding in order to overcome this sinful tendency we have seen, and we allow the Holy Spirit to teach us His ways. It is then that the truth will set us free.

One danger for Christians is to receive the truth, and then treat it merely as a doctrinal explanation or theology. In this way we can become greater in knowledge and not see that as long we don't work out the truth that God has given us, it will not really benefit us. Another mistake we can make is to convince ourselves that 'Jesus has done it all' and avoid our own responsibility. Then how will truth set us free?

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