September 23 Daily Devotional

Freedom from sin’s desires

[The desire for righteousness] means a desire to be free from sin, because sin separates us from God. Therefore, positively, it means a desire to be right with God.... All the trouble in the world today is due to the fact that man is not right with God, for it is because he is not right with God that he has gone wrong everywhere else.... The man who hungers and thirsts after righteousness is the man who sees that sin and rebellion have separated him from the face of God, and longs to get back into that old relationship....

But it also means of necessity a desire to be free from the power of sin.... The man we have been looking at... is a man who has come to see that the world in which he lives is controlled by sin and Satan.... He sees that ‘the god of this world’ has been blinding him.... He wants to get away from this power that drags him down in spite of himself [see Romans 7]. He wants to be free from the power and the tyranny and thraldom of sin....

But it goes further still. It means a desire to be free from the very desire for sin, because we find that the man who truly examines himself in the light of the Scriptures not only discovers that he is in the bondage of sin; still more horrible is the fact that he likes it, that he wants it. Even after he has seen it is wrong, he still wants it. But now the man who hungers and thirsts after righteousness is a man who wants to get rid of that desire for sin, not only outside, but inside as well.... Sin is something that pollutes the very essence of our being and of our nature. The Christian is one who desires to be free from all that.... To hunger and thirst after righteousness is to desire to be free from self in all its horrible manifestations, in all its forms ... the man who hungers and thirsts after righteousness ... wants to be emancipated from self-concern in every shape and form.

Studies in the Sermon on the Mount, i, pp. 77–9