Luke 11:41, Give as alms those things that are within, and behold, everything is clean for you.
An intriguing statement I had never noticed before. If we give God what He’s looking for, in other words a heart that is molded by Christ after His own, then everything else in life becomes clean for us because we are no longer tempted by that evil God does not find tempting (consider Galatians 5:16). Once our heart is in line with God's, we no longer have to set up external boundaries to keep ourselves from sin because sin will not appeal to us. This is the task of the Christ-follower, complete conformity with the Father’s heart reflected best in the person of Jesus (Paul's point in Philippians 3:8-10, 14, 17).
As with everything else in this blog, this post is nothing more than you already know. But I hope it will simply serve to remind us where to keep our focus while in the thick of our battle against sin. Eradicating evil in our lives can itself be a distraction from God if we simply focus on making ourselves sin-free. We will never succeed in our attempts to exterminate our inclination toward wrong if we do not first develop a taste for what is right! Only by filling our lives with more of our Savior does sin, our former master, lose its power over us and its appeal.
At the risk of sounding trite and offering Christian clichés, here's what I've discovered in my own spiritual walk: In the end, the Sunday School answer––JESUS!––is the only right response to everything in the Christian life. And the sooner we learn this truth, the richer our lives will be for there is nothing better for us than the One we were created for, our Savior.
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