 Whether it's homosexuality or any other sexual lust, whether it's lying or cussing or anger or fighting, whatever it is, there is a way to avoid sinning. Hey smart Christians, I want to welcome you back. One of the things that every believer has to deal with, I don't care who you are, I don't care how long you've been a believer, whether it's been one day or whether it's been 40 years, we all struggle with this one thing and that is sin. The Bible does say that if anyone who says he doesn't sin, the Bible calls him what? A liar, because we all have this issue to deal with. Paul talks about this issue and that's Paul's. So every Christian is going to have this in common. So what do you do about sin? You've got people that are going to spend money after money on books and seminars and going online and researching, going to counselors and so forth. But is that really the way that God wants us? Is that God's recommendation to kind of combat sin? Well no it's not. He gives us through his word different ways or really one way to combat sin. Now what I'm not saying is that there is never a need to sit down with the counselor, a pastor or someone maybe in professional capacity to go over something that may be a stronghold or some sort of physical addiction. That's not what I'm saying. What I am saying is don't go to any counselor after having bypassed the great counselor. Again, there are times where you do need to sit down with someone professionally. But remember the person who has all the solutions to whatever the issue is is obviously God, right? So what I wanna do is give you two things to focus on when it comes to dealing with sin. The first step in dealing with sin is to one, recognize and acknowledge that you do have sin. The Bible says to acknowledge or to confess your sins just the simple fact of acknowledging that you do struggle and we all do, so there's nothing wrong with that. Just that simple act can go a long way. But then the most important thing is this, your issue whether it be some sort of sexual sin, some sort of physical addiction, anger, lust, lying, whatever it is, all of our issues can be lumped into one category and the solution to all of those props to the problem is gonna be this. Proximity, how close you are to God, the further you are away from God? Well then obviously the further you are away from getting a breakthrough in whatever it is, the further you are from overcoming sin, imagine sin being on one side of a room and God on the other side of the room. The closer you get to God, what happens? The further you get away from sin. However, if you wanna sit and go back and deal with that sin, the closer you get to sin, the further you get away from God. And so what we do sometimes is we spend more time focusing on the issue, the sin, instead of focusing on the person, in this case God, who can root out sin. Because I don't know what I can tell you to get you past dealing with racism or some sort of sexual issues or what have you. Whatever the issue of sin, there's nothing too much that I can tell you to fix it. I can't say very much to fix your heart issue because ultimately that's what it's gonna boil down to. But I know someone who can and so if you first acknowledge that you do have an issue and then get closer to God, the Bible says draw near to him and then he will draw near to you, do that and watch what God will do. And when you do this, you're gonna notice something. I don't know if then you've ever paid attention to a stock chart, but it's like this, the stock goes up, goes down, goes up, goes down. There'll be some good days with the stock and there'll be some bad days. But if it's a good stock, you'll notice these ups and downs, up, up, up, down, up, up, up, up, down, up, down, down. You may be having a down week, but what you're gonna do is just like that stock, you're gonna look back and even though you might be down for that particular day, you'll look back and notice you're up a lot higher than you were in the past. Same thing with sin. You'll notice that there'll be some days that you won't, that you will sin and you'll never become sinless on earth, but you'll look back and see that you do sin a lot less than you used to because you're closer to God. You'll never, as long as you live on this planet, have a lifestyle where there's absolutely no sin involved. That's just not gonna happen. At least that's what John tells us. But the closer you get to him, the closer he'll work in your heart and start changing some things. He'll start working in your mind. The things that you struggle with, you won't struggle with as much. The small things that you used to sweat, you won't sweat them as much. Why? Because your focus is him and who's the one cleaning your heart? He is rather than you.