I feel very bad for young Christians. For any one, religious or otherwise, doing the right thing in today’s world is hard. The wrong things are often easier, faster and usually infinitely more fun to do. Living right in a world with its default setting at “Wrong”; earth with its broken moral compass and appetite for vulgarity and excess, is hard. Very hard. For a Christian I think it is incredibly hard, for a young Christian more so.

The Christian is trying to do his best to live holy and kind, good and faithful right? The problem is, the Christian is living, communicating, and hanging out in the same world as people living with the opposite ideals. As Christians, our bodies do not automatically transform to spirit when we decide to believe in Jesus Christ and live in line with God’s commandments. We actually remain largely the same, physically. Internally though, things are at work in us but even this process varies from individual to individual. For some people, certain things they formerly engaged in almost immediately become vile and they are able to totally reject their old lives and turn away from their old sins. For others, they struggle with issues for a long time and never seem fully able to break out of habits and sin-cycles. This seems logical; you engage in a certain sin for a long time before you convert to Christianity, it might not take a day or two to break away from that sin. That makes sense. You have thoughts layered on thoughts, actions you’ve acted upon, certain triggers for particular sins, gleeful sin-partners happy to continue to engage you, all of this is often glued together by your own shame, guilt, insecurity and fear. So it’s a pretty potent cocktail and at this point your mind is truly the devil’s playground.

The truth is that choosing to become Christian is just the very first step in a long journey. When you commit your life to Jesus Christ, power to overcome sin is immediately available to you BUT have a role to play in executing that power. I think that the problem for many Christians is that they feel very much alone. But no Christian walks alone, Jesus may not be here physically, but His spirit stays in us all the time. People often get confused by the word ”Holy Spirit”, the Holy Spirit is essentially God’s Spirit. Its nature is Holy, hence the name, but essentially it is simply God’s own spirit.

So we are never ever alone.

Many churches will gloss over the real issues that plague lots of us- especially the growing, active youth; premarital sex, lack of integrity, jealousy, lying, watching pornography, a little stealing, doing drugs, heavy cynicism, self-mutilation, bitterness, domestic violence, idolatory and ‘jazz’, chronic insecurity complex, resentment, masturbation, sexuality confusion, greed, envy and so on. Young Christians are struggling let me tell you! It’s amazing how much your heart can desire to know God, how you can yearn for something more, yet remain in the same place of sin, totally unable to free yourself from the things you fell for even before you became a practising Christian. And many churches gloss over these things, sometime in the focus for more topical issues such as prosperity. Other times though, the church does not even want to mention these things for fear that * whispers* they might actually be present IN the church! Say what now?!

Too many Christians are living in denial.

Other churches though will mention these ‘unmentionables’, they will tell you, “We know about these things, listen to us, you must STOP these sins! “ This is all well and good, I know I need to stop but pastor, HOW? So many Christians are stuck in the rise-fall-rise-fall cycle of righteous living and sin. The truth of the matter is that our God is a holy God and He does call for us to live clean, to live holy, to live right. This is what we, young Christians, know and this is what makes living, doubly hard for us. We now what is evil and yet we do it…then we condemn ourselves and are crushed under the weight of our continuous failure to live right. Our guilt then eats at us and makes us  afraid to even worship. We wonder, “How dare I raise my hands with all these holy people and pray or sing when I know how bad I am? I am a hypocrite.”

We often hear that sin separates us from God but we don’t always think of how sin does this. Let me tell you how.

We know that God is holy and cannot dwell in unrighteousness and so we assume that when we sin, we are detestable to God and therefore cast away from Him until we clean ourselves up and do better. This is a lie from hell, literally. The devil is brilliant. When we sin, although we might want to be forgiven, the devil asks us, “Is there a point? You know that you will do it again.” And in response, we shrink in God’s presence. We want to pray and ask God for something but the devil is ever present in our ear, whispering the details of our last secret sin, mocking us, showing us images he’s happily taken on his sordid little camera just heaving full of us in various compromising positions. The devil magnifies our secret sin and constantly torments us with it. This slowly chips away at our confidence in ourselves, our confidence in our ability to defeat sin, our confidence in God’s love for us or His ability to save us.

This defeat of our spirit, not just the sin, is what separates us from God. This is how sin works in separating us from God. We despair, quite sure that God can never forgive us for what we have done because even we can not forgive ourselves. Every time we want to forgive ourselves or turn to God, the devil arrives with his facebook album of compromising happy snaps. My aunty, said something so profound to me a few weeks ago. She believes that the greatest sin is…despair, when we believe that we are so irredeemable, so beyond saving that even God cannot and will not help us . Despair so deep that it makes us turn away from and reject God’s love. In my aunt’s opinion, Judas’ only true sin was not returning to the master. Believing himself so far gone into sin to ever be able to be loved by God, He chose instead to kill himself. The wicked person is different from the person who sins. Most Christians that sin have good hearts, we so badly want to do right but we fall often. The wicked person is one who does not forgive himself, because it is in self-forgiveness that remorse lies and through remorse, we find our way back to God. There is a certain pride, a complex self-indulgence, self-love, that lies at the base of self-pitying and unforgiveness of our self, that stops us from even seeing God or believing He can do what He promised; forgive us and love us without asking for anything in return.

This is only one part of sin’s tactics. Another HUGE way sin gets us is through secrecy. Every Christian struggling with sin is sure that she is the only one that is unable to defeat this problem, this shameful habit, this disgusting pattern in her life. I recently joined one of the bible study groups in church (thewaterbrook.org), and in the course of our classes, we trade war stories and sometimes share struggles and anxieties. The things I hear in that class consistently surprise me. I am not shocked by the things I hear in themselves, what I am stunned by is the fact that one young person has been struggling with this major issue or that challenge alone and has not keeled over! My pastor at Worship Tabernacle in England often said to us, “The church is a hospital.” I don’t think I ever understood that more than I have in the last few weeks. Every one of us in church is broken and struggling, we are there because we realise that what we deal with is beyond our capacity to handle, we need more and we have chosen to find it in God.

From these bible study classes too, I realise that the power of sin is SO incredibly reduced once you share it. It’s literally like once you open up and let some light into your sin, guilt and shame, that sin literally shrinks into a ball. Sin has the ability to fester and grow within us because from the first time we fall into it, it wraps its tentacles around us and chokes us with its assurances that people will judge us or look at us differently if we ever, EVER tell them our secret sin. STORY! The bible says that nothing afflicts us Christians but that which is common to man. I wish more young Christians understood that they are not alone in their struggle to live right. It is a journey. Do NOT carry your burden alone!!!! The animal that breaks the ranks and walks alone is easy prey. There is a reason for the church; a true church is the fellowship of a collective group of good, loving Christians. It is a hospital. No one has malaria everyday. Some days, I am the one being plagued by illness and you have to help me get better; feed me with nourishing, good food, give me a cold, shocking bath to wake me up when my temperature gets too high, give me medication on the hour, watch over me to make sure I don’t fall. Other days, you are the one ill and I will do everything in my power to help you get better. That’s our role as Christians; to hold each other up so that no one ever feels like their sin is enough to separate them from the pack or God’s presence. My aunty also often says this, “…we are not called to be ‘condemnors’, we are called to be intercessors. “

And I’m writing to remind myself as much as to tell you, that everyday we must, must, must try our best. The way you baby proof your house to protect a little baby is how you must sin-proof your heart, your eyes, your ears, your mind. Perhaps this might require a radical change of what you listen to, what you watch, who you hang out with. When you are ready for a change, go for it. In the fight against sin we don’t live day-by-day, we live moment-by-moment. We rely on God every moment and working hard on curbing our baser desires, EVERY. SINGLE. MOMENT. With brokenness before God, accountability to our brothers, openness and freedom from secrets, and a consistent protection of our minds every single moment, we will conquer sin.

It will surprise you that righteousness will become your habit. Soon, you won’t have to make a conscious effort to live right. If you keep walking honestly and openly with God, with others and yourself, you will look back one day and say, “Wait! I haven’t done X since January!” And just like that, you’re living right.