Will it Help If I Turn Away from Sin?

Short Version Answer

Yes. But first let me help you gain some clarity about the issue. It is not as important to know what to turn away from, as it is to know whom to turn towards.

That person is Jesus. Whatever you turn away from, turn to Jesus. Make Him the focus. Doing that gives you power. It helps bring God's presence and accompanying power, to experience a life of more profound meaning and purpose. It leads you to greater heights of well being. Think of those things as the primary reason for turning away from the things that hold you back.

Turning towards Jesus helps you exert leadership over the temptations and effects of sinning. You understand what it means to have the upper hand over your decisions. Turning to Jesus can only be accomplished with faith.

If you think something you are doing is a sin, turn your eyes away from it, and turn them toward Jesus. If you are not sure, turn your eyes on Jesus. If you are sure what you are doing is not a sin, turn your eyes toward Jesus anyway! It has much greater benefit than just turning away from sin.

Fix your eyes on Jesus. Draw near to Him, and He will draw near to you. He will generously give you wisdom from above, and perfect peace. These are literally promises from the Bible to those who turn their inner attention onto Jesus.

Although it is not AS important to know what what you are turning from, it is vital to identify and admit the sins in your life as you turn from them.

Long Version Answer

What does it mean to sin? To sin, used as a verb, is a word that has lost its meaning from the original-language. In the New Testament it literally means to be off target, like when an archer is aiming for a bull’s eye and shoots a stray arrow off to the side.

The picture of an archer missing a target implies someone who might want to shoot straight but doesn’t.

That implication is a clue to how we should picture God. In His wisdom and love for us at times when we struggle with sin, He calls it missing the target. He knows us better than we know ourselves. He can see the good He designed into us even when we can't.

Our sins might be either unintentional mistakes or intentional misdeeds that we somehow mentally justify. They could even be intentional wickedness from our heart out of an evil motivation.

God is never surprised or shocked by any of our sins. He has seen it all many millions of times.

When a believer turns from one or more sin, God's stance is to forgive the believer, forgive the sins of the believer, and cleanse us from them.

The blanket prayer, "I turn from all my sins to You, Lord" is not as effective as, "Lord, I turn from my sin of hatred against my boss, and I ask You for forgiveness and the power to stop thinking those angry thoughts." Confess your sins directly to God with specificity and remorse, and then watch God work beauty into your life as a result.

God does not ask you or me to do the impossible by cleaning ourselves up. Of course, it helps for us to cooperate with Him as He cleans us up. He wants to help believers hit “bulls-eyes” in the targets of life.

There are little sins and big sins, but none of them are good sins. It is a promise to believers that Jesus will forgive our sins. He not only took our death on Himself, He took all our sins on Himself.

Jesus carried our sins to the cross, so we would not have to carry them into heaven. Sins on earth do not stop people from entering Heaven. But the sins and our temptation to sin will not accompany us.

There is no tipping point on the scale of sin. There is no amount of good works that earn your entrance to Heaven, and there is no amount of sins that can disqualify you from entering. Jesus decrees that you qualify, regardless of these things.

What good has sin ever done for this planet? Most of the humanity's problems can be traced back to people sinning.

One mistake people make is to look at God as if He is a strict parent, unwilling to accept them until they become better people. Nothing could be farther from the truth. God uses His power in love. He is really much more powerful than any parent and has no desire to punish His children who love Him.

At the same time, a parent who loves his or her child, will correct the child because they love. The child rarely enjoys this. Love requires chastening if the parent wants the child to grow out of their harmful behaviors.

The Bible says "Those God loves, he also chastens" - just like good human parents do. A good parent will then teach and lead the child about how to avoid the wrong behavior. To whatever level the child can understand, the parent reasons and explains why it is to their benefit to grow.

In our natural strength, we cannot become free of sin. With His strength, we are given power to humble ourselves, confess our sins to God, and step away from them.

Some people miss going to heaven because they get confused between the two concepts: “Jesus doesn’t like people to sin”, and “Jesus doesn’t like people who sin”.

Jesus definitely likes people who sin. Sin will never stop Jesus from liking you, even if you hate Him. Human parents might withhold their love from children as a punishment for misbehaving. God never does that. I don’t know why we project this human trait onto God.

When we say, “Jesus doesn’t like people to sin”, it is more like saying that a mother doesn’t like her baby to get hurt. The baby might be naively pursuing fun that is dangerous to self or others. In fact, it is normal for a mother to let her child know with a sense of anger not to do those things.

The mother might appear to be mean in the child's eyes, but it was done out of love.

We hear too much about God being angry over our sins. His anger is different than human anger. Human anger can have some sin mixed into it. God's anger does not. It has pure love mixed into it. If it feels like God is angry with any believer, that anger goes away the very moment we turn to Him for help, and stop acting rebellious toward Him. There is no need to feel anything but love from Him and for Him when that happens.

God knows that sin is pleasant for a while. But it eventually damages either us, or other people He loves, or both. He is being kind to people by not liking them to sin.

To sin is to produce a self-made setback. It means turning down God’s best for us and refusing His help to make our lives more wonderful.

Before a person first decides to believe in Jesus as their Savior, there are likely some things they need to turn away from. This is just to get to a general sincerity in wanting to be saved, knowing that God will both forgive their sins and help them overcome sin's power in daily life.

So, yes, it is important to turn away from these sins as soon as possible because they are the most dangerous to you. It is a lie that this is difficult to do. It is very simple and easy to do.

Everyone can look at their own motives to see what evokes hesitancy to turn to Jesus. All these attitudes, when revealed by the light, tend to lose their power.

The picture I have painted about sin, is picture Jesus, and all the New Testament writers want you to see. However, I have presented it in a fairly soft way in comparison. They paint the picture in more stark terms, warning us of the seriousness and consequences of sin. The two approaches do not contradict one another. The reason I have chosen my way of teaching about this is to counter the false understandings prevalent in the world, which tend to turn people away from God's love, not toward Him as both a faithful friend and a forgiving, trusted Lord.

Being saved by Jesus is not a religious thing. It is high above all religions and religious matters. It is wise to separate it in our minds completely from religion. Turning from sin to be close to Jesus is also a completely non-religious thing. It is a personal thing. Religious people teach wrongly that to sin is to transgress and offend God's laws. You might find this in a dictionary definition. But Jesus supercedes dictionaries. The world and all its strict religions define sin and sinning in a very slanted and narrow way.

To sin can be reflected in mild or serious misbehavior, but it is one of the things that people do naturally. It means they incline toward being contrary, both morally and ethically. They are immature, and unrounded. They have a lot to learn. But those who sin can learn many things they don't currently know. They can learn that sinning is harmful to them and others, whether they are able to identify that harm or not.

Once a person is saved, and maturing in the process of loving Jesus, they can learn that turning to Him before, during, or after sinning can be a very rewarding experience. This may seem impossible to someone who does not yet know Jesus, but it is true. We never need to hide our face from Him. It doesn't work anyway; He sees and understands everything.

If as a growing Christian you turn to Jesus when you sense the intention to sin, it breaks the power of sin and prevents you from doing what you might later regret. If you turn to Him while you are sinning, it can make a lasting impression. The jolt of viewing truth in light can be a spiritual intervention that turns your life around in positive ways. Turning to Jesus after sinning helps you experientially receive forgiveness and cleansing from unrighteousness.

God is worthy to be trusted, even when we think He is taking our favorite things or sins away from us. I can attest that He will replace them with something better if we keep trusting Him.

If you are "conflicted" about the decision to follow Jesus because you don't want to give up a sinful lifestyle, don't worry. Pray for God’s help to shine His light into you and help you uncover the obstacles, so you make the right decision to follow Jesus. God is very wise, much moreso than we are. He knows how to make your life better.

Pray that God would grant you the ability to make a conscious choice to prefer Jesus over these conflicted attitudes, and help you take a humble child-like stance toward Him.

God exudes the desire that His children will have well-being, contentment, and peace in their long, happy lives. All this takes place in the context of a loving relationship with Him by faith, that naturally leads to greater and greater victory over the sins in our lives.

Rather than point fingers at people who sin, which never works, we should shine the light of Jesus, and pray that they will come to Him and stop adding to the world's ills.

The more we experience God’s love, the less we want to be unloving to others. The more we comprehend what Jesus did for us, the less appealing it becomes to "miss the target" in everyday life.

There is an old word for turning away from sin and turning toward God. That word is to “repent”. The noun form is "repentance". We still use these words today among believers because they are easier to say than "turning away from sin and turning toward God."

People often bemoan the state of today’s society. If we want things to get better in this world, we must take seriously that sin is a major cause of the world’s ills - also that repentance from sin is the most direct prevention and cure.

Jesus made repentance a major theme of His message. He would say things like “Repent, because the kingdom of God is at hand.” I have found the more I turn my attention away from sinning and turn toward Jesus, the smoother my life works out. It seems like heaven is breaking into my life, and is close to my heart. I recommend repentance to everyone. It is good for you.

Just by believing in Jesus as your Savior, you are repenting from not believing in Him as your Savior. This is a profound concept. Stop and think about that for a moment. Read it again if you need to.

Believing in Jesus is not only an act of faith, but is also an automatic simultaneous act of repentance. You don't need to do anything more than have faith. When you have faith in Jesus repentance from unbelief in Jesus occurs. Faith is a secret weapon against sin.

Whether you harbor unbelief intentionally or inadvertantly, the absense of believing in Jesus indicates you are missing the target. It is therefore, sin by the definition we have provided. It does not take a genious to realize that unbelief is by far the most dangerous sin on the planet. It is the sin that unchecked leads away from heaven.

Repenting from disbelief opens the door to being saved by Jesus. Once we believe, God will carry us through the rest of the journey.

When we love Jesus, we tend to become repeat-repenters, rather than repeat-offenders. This is because of our love and thankfulness toward Him.

There's no need to beat yourself up if you find yourself making the same mistakes again and again. In fact, it is counter productive to beat yourself up at all. Eventually, each of us learns from experience.

In case you are tempted to think, “I’ll just wait until I stop sinning to become saved”, you should know that never works.

We probably never stop sinning entirely as long as we are on this earth, even if we ARE saved. Conciousness of sins does not make you a bad person. God can use your consciousness of sins to make you a better person.

God has acceptable ways of helping believers overcome their sins. His help in this way does not reduce their happiness in life, but rather sets them free sin’s power over them, free from bondage, guilt, and shame. He knows what He is doing. We are all in process. When you exercise faith with pure and positive intentions, in any situation, it guards you from sinning.

Jesus began the concept of belonging to a community of believers because He knew that we would need the support of one another.

I had a teacher who mixed metaphors by saying "A lone wolf is like a sitting duck." We need each other as believers. There is "strength in numbers". Jesus said if two or more are gathered in His name, He is there in the midst of them.

It is common to avoid turning to Jesus when struggling with sin. I have gotten confused and for a time avoided Him out of fear - fear that He'll take my pet sin away, fear that He has a scolding look on His face, fear that I will have to fight the peer pressure influencing me to sin, etc.

Fears are extremely common and devastatingly deceptive to deprive us of true happiness. They are lies. To overcome them, we need to stop thinking about our fears for a minute. Then we can turn our focus on to Jesus, and obtain power from Him. The apostle John in promised that if we confess our sins, God would forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. God promised that if we ask from wisdom from above, He will always generously fulfill the request.

Sin has empty lies. God's promises have power. His presence has power. Focusing on Him has power.

Sometimes sin-issues make us blind to the love and mercy of Jesus. If even the most horrendous sinners only knew a tiny fraction of God's love, they would adore God and put intense focus on Him. He is our eternal friend and improves our lives as we trust Him to do so.

I have seen some of the worst of sinners become the best of saints when Jesus gets through with them. They become people with intense gratitude for being rescued from their old lives and brought into better lives that they never dreamed were available to them. That gratitude focuses on Jesus as the one we are thankful to and the One we are thankful for.

Our society, with good intentions, tends to call some sins very bad, others not so bad, and still others nothing more than "issues" that are socially acceptable. The danger in doing this is that God, not society, determines the magnitude of a sin.

Society ranks sins on the bases of how much they hurt society. God ranks a sin differently based on how much it hurts both us and those with whom our lives intersect. He rarely bothers to fill us in on any of the rankings of particular sins in our lives, as if to chide us. Jesus died for the worst sins imaginable and the least sins as well.

It is extremely serious to let a sin psychologically allow a person to separate from a close relationship with Jesus. Perhaps to choose that separation is a more serious sin than the one that prompted us to shrink back from God. We could have easily turned to Jesus and saved ourselves a lot of self-caused heartache.

Even if a sin has a tendency to separate us from Jesus experientially, He never leaves us. Jesus died to remove that separation, and it is the power of His death and resurrection, applied to us that reconciles us to God.

Repentance seems to work best when we appreciate the seriousness of our misdeeds. At the same time, there is no such thing as a sin that is too shameful for God to forgive. Nor is there a sin that is too horrendous that we should not release the thought and memory of it to God, rather than dwell on it.

When we put the problem of our sins in His hands, it lifts a burden within us that cannot disappear any other way.

There is never a reason to hide our faces from Jesus. He wants to have us close to Him in loving relationship. When we are, His power makes it just as if we had never sinned.

We can return to Jesus innumerable times after falling or sinning, and He never gets fed up. He keeps wiping away the power of sin from our hearts so we can commune with Him once again in a love relationship.

The apostle Paul said we are saved by grace, through faith, and that not of ourselves; it is the gift of God. Grace is God's undeserved love for each of us. We don't deserve it, we don't merit His favor, but He gives us salvation anyway. He lets us off "Scott free". The Bible says, "as far as the east is from the west, so distantly has He removed our sins from us."

Sometimes the word "sin" is used as a noun, meaning a condition of having a tendency to sin. That meaning applies to everyone, and we should not be in denial of it. We are all "sinners", in that sense.

In ourselves, we fall short of God's best for us. In this physical life, it is good to adopt the saying, "He who thinks he stands, take heed lest he fall."

We will always be susceptible in this lifetime to sin. That is why we should focus on Jesus even when we aren't sinning. When we do that, we are protected in a mighty fortress as Martin Luther's hymn declared.

There is another hymn that says "Turn your eyes upon Jesus. Look full in His wonderful face. And the things of earth will grow strangely dim in the light of His glory and grace.

God answers prayer, and I have prayed many times that God would by His power reduce my sinful self-promptings and increase my righteousness. As you see Him answer that prayer, you will find it is healthier to stop focusing on sin itself in an attempt to get it out of your life.

Instead, each of us should focus on growing in faith, doing good, listening for God's presence and voice to lead us each day, bringing the Kingdom of God to earth, helping the poor, healing the sick, comforting the broken, and leading people to salvation. Those are activities Jesus wants us to do with our lives.

I have found, that if we focus on Jesus and do these activities, it will be rewarding and fun. We won't have the time or inclination to sin as we used to.

When I was a new believer, still in public high school, my literature teacher had the class read many works, one of which was the sermon, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" from 1741. Jonathan Edwards prefered the approach that it is best to frighten people into repentance. I found this to be my favorite of all the works I was assigned to read. It was exhilerating and motivational. If you are up to it, I encourage you to read it. Either the longer original sermon or an abbreviated version will help you see his approach.

These versions are available through any search engine. They were written in 1741 grammar and vocabulary, so you might want to keep a dictionary handy. You can see how far the style of presenting the good news has come since then. I'm sure Jonathan Edwards won more people to eternal life than I have, so who am I to criticize his style if it was right for him? It might also be the right approach for certain people who would suffer great harm if they didn't think about the seriousness of their predicament.

The apostle Peter wrote, "The Lord is not slack concerning His promise, as some count slackness, but is longsuffering toward us, not willing that any should perish but that all should come to repentance." In context, the promise was that Jesus will someday return for a fully grown body of believers. Peter reminded us it is a promise, and God keeps His promises. But He is patient to the point of suffering as He watches it take place over time.

God is NOT WILLING that any should go to Hell, but that all should come to repentance and go to heaven. God will put up with any amount of suffering to get every last person to turn away from their sins, turn to Him, and enter His kingdom of love. Going to Hell is against God's will, so be quick to do God's will for your life: Let Him save you and you will see Heaven.

If all the gentle reasoning I presented above concerning repentance does not work, then maybe Edwards' famous sermon will. When I first read it, it made me feel SO happy that I had already received Jesus as my Lord and Savior! I still do.
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