Sin Lieth at the Door

By Rev L. N. Ambridge

It is a wonderful thing to walk with the Lord and to know that we have hope, a great expectation of the life to come. We can look forward to eternal rest, where there is no pain, no hunger, no suffering, and no stress.
Our journey is not from mountaintop to mountaintop but its down in the valley where, according to the proverb, "the rubber meets the road." We dont always languish on the grassy knolls, but we walk through the valleys, sometimes skipping happily, other times trudging and struggling to continue. The path that Christians follow King David called the path of righteousness. Proverbs calls it the Path of Life. But there are other paths that can take us in a different direction. These paths lead to destruction.
Some believe that a Christian can never follow that path to destruction and yet there is a presence who will try to turn us to that path. He will contradict Gods Word. He will challenge Gods will. He will try to make every person doubt that God even exists or, failing that, he will try to make every Christian lose their belief in Gods credibility. Hell try to persuade us to follow our natural desires instead of the will of God. He will try to neutralize the importance of God in our lives and remove Him from the throne of our faith. He wants to be in charge, to rule. He tried to rule once and failed. For his rebellion he was cast out of heaven and the angels who followed him were cast out with him. He now rules, but only in the kingdom of darkness. There is no chance for him defeat God. But he keeps trying. He will keep trying until he is cast out once again, when he will suffer the ultimate defeat. He will be cast into the Lake of Fire, where he will have no more chance to come against God or against Gods people. The danger is that he continually tries to get as many to follow him now as he can, and those who have chosen to follow him in this life will have no choice but to follow him into the Lake of Fire.
God is great and life in the Spirit is a great blessing. But do not forget this one thing. Sin lieth at the door.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Oct 18, 2013
• ISBN: 9781493103775

Rev L. N. Ambridge

Reverend Ambridge, an ordained minister, is the Senior Pastor and Founder of Word of Hope Full Gospel Church, with branches in India and Africa. A graduate of American Christian College and Seminary in Oklahoma, Reverend Ambridge is a current member of the American Association of Christian Counselors in Forest, Virgina. Reverend Ambridge has been a member of the International Ministerial Fellowship in Minneapolis, Minnesota since 2001. She is also a graduate and alumnus of the Sure Foundation Theological Institute in Florida.

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Copyright © 2013 by Rev L. N. Ambridge.

Library of Congress Control Number:       2013917107

ISBN:                  Softcover                             978-1-4931-0376-8

                            Ebook                                  978-1-4931-0377-5

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Rev. Date: 10/04/2013

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CONTENTS

Chapter One   What is Sin?

Chapter Two   The Nature of Sin

Chapter Three   The Stages of Sin

Chapter Four   The Origin of Sin

Chapter Five   Some Facts about Sin

Chapter Six   The Identification of Sin

Chapter Seven   A Broken Vow

Chapter Eight   Blood in the Flesh We Eat

Chapter Nine   Rebellion against God

Chapter Ten   Witchcraft

Chapter Eleven   A High Look, a Proud Heart, the Plowing of the Wicked

Chapter Twelve   The Thought of Foolishness

Chapter Thirteen   Whatsoever Is Not of Faith

Chapter Fourteen   Respect of Persons

Chapter Fifteen   Knowing to Do Good and Doing It Not

Chapter Sixteen   All Unrighteousness

Chapter Seventeen   Abominations

Chapter Eighteen   The Consequences of Sin

Chapter Nineteen   The Need for Repentance

Chapter Twenty   The Nature and Effect of Repentance

Chapter Twenty-One   The Good News

All Scripture excerpts are from the King James Version

of the Holy Bible.

All uses of the word man are anthropomorphic, meaning both man and woman.

OTHER BOOKS BY REVEREND AMBRIDGE

A WORD OF HOPE—REVISED EDITION

SEARCH THE WORD—CHAPTER ONE

THE PATH OF LIFE

WHO SAYS YOU CAN’T BE PERFECT?

FOREWORD

God expects His people to walk after the Spirit and not after the flesh, but sometimes, through ignorance or carelessness or spiritual immaturity or plain rebellion, we allow the flesh to take control. That’s when sin happens. Sin doesn’t automatically drop away from us when we accept Christ as Lord and Savior. Although we are born again of the water and the Spirit, and the dominance of the flesh has passed away, the old man of the flesh is still present. Whether we dominate him and walk after righteousness instead of sin depends on whether we make those daily decisions to live holy and resist those unholy pressures from the world, the flesh, and the devil.

God told Cain (Genesis 4:6-7 KJV) that sin lies at the door.

And the Lord said unto Cain, "Why art thou wroth? And why is thy countenance fallen? If thou doest well, shalt thou not be accepted? And if thou doest not well, sin lieth at the door. And unto thee shall be his desire, and thou shalt rule over him.

Cain was angry because he thought God favored Abel over him. The Lord reminded him that this is not about whom we think God loves more or favors more. It’s about how each of us lives our lives before Him. Sin, that is, Satan, desires us, but if we do well in following the Lord, we will rule over sin and experience the ultimate victory through Christ Jesus, if we acknowledge Him as Lord and stand fast in the faith.

Sin is always on the threshold of our lives, waiting for its chance to take over. God has given us the capability to resist. We must walk after the Spirit and not after the flesh. We need to keep our priorities in the right order. We need to make good life decisions based on wisdom from above. We need to know what sin looks like and what to watch for. We need to accept that sin is real and that it has a consequence. A mistake in violating the will of God is something we do when we don’t know any better. It’s a sin we commit in ignorance, not knowing the will of the Lord, but it is sin nonetheless. A mistake is only a mistake the first time. After that it’s a decision. And yet we are commanded to grow in grace and knowledge; therefore, ignorant sin should happen less and less frequently.

God expects us to live according to what we learn from Him. Shall we continue to live in sin after He has imparted to us the Spirit of holiness? God forbid.

INTRODUCTION

It’s easy for us to be wrong and believe we are right when we don’t know what wrong looks like. It’s easy to believe we are without sin when we don’t know what sin looks like. What we believe about righteousness and sin can be just that… . our belief. But is it the truth? That’s the problem in leaning to our own understanding. We tend to act upon what we believe. If we believe that the sins we commit are not actually sinful, then there is no motivation to change. We say that we have no sin, and we deceive ourselves. And we become liars, which is sin itself.

We find the truth about righteousness and sin in the Word of God, which is truth. What matters is what God says about righteousness and sin. He is the only righteous Judge. He sets the boundaries. He makes the rules. Jesus reserved our place in the kingdom when we accepted Him as Savior. The responsibility for maintaining that reservation is ours.

Wherefore, my beloved, as ye have always obeyed, not as in my presence only, but now much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling. Philip. 2:12 (KJV)

We must resist sin. We must locate and identify sin to resist and remove it. When I want to locate and identify sin, I look in the mirror where I can see myself, because that’s where sin affects me the most. My mirror is not the opinions or belief systems of other human beings. My mirror is the will of God as revealed to us in His written Word.

It’s wonderful to be saved, but we get caught up in the wonder of being saved and don’t pay enough attention to the need for sanctification. It’s not easy to look in that mirror, but if we want to be the person that God wants us to be, it’s necessary. I could deny the sin. I could refuse to look in the mirror. I could re-interpret what the mirror shows me about sin. I could call it a mistake. I could blame it on someone else. I could excuse my sin and say that I’m still growing. I could say that other people are judging me. But the mirror is the Word of God; therefore, if I’m being judged it’s the Word of God that is judging me, not other people. If I feel condemned, it’s because in my heart I know I’ve sinned. The only effective way to deal with sin is acknowledge it, confess it, seek forgiveness, and forsake the sin. That’s what repentance is all about. Repentance requires that we acknowledge the sin. You can’t seek forgiveness if you won’t admit the sin is there and that you need to be forgiven. The sin remains. God, because He is holy, cannot, and will not, tolerate sin in His presence; He will not allow sin in heaven. If He did, He wouldn’t be God. How will you get into heaven, while abiding in sin? God is love; God is peace; God is grace; but we must never forget the indisputable fact that God is holy!

1

WHAT IS SIN?

I asked a question in Sunday School. What is truth? Surprisingly, I got almost as many answers as there were students in the class, and not a little debate. Everyone had an idea of what truth is, but the one thing they all seemed to agree on was their belief that truth is relative. What one person accepts as true for one may not be accepted as true by others. It’s as if we believe we can change reality by the way we perceive and interpret life. We decide what we will accept as real according to how we view the world.

Our current society is one that can be viewed as postmodern. One of the characteristics of a postmodern society is that everyone does his own thing. There is no real right or wrong, no absolute truth. It’s called relativism. In the words of Sean McDowell,

Truth is relative to the group or the individual. It’s up to us. We simply do our own thing. (McDowell 2009)

In the words of the atheist philosopher, Fredrich Nietsche,

Cursed I call all who have only one choice: to become evil beasts or evil tamers of beasts; among such men I would not build my home. (Walter Kaufmann 1982)

This—is now MY way—where is yours? Thus did I answer those who asked me the way. For THE way—it does not exist! Thus spake Zarathustra. (Walter Kaufmann 1982)

Nietsche was saying that we each choose our own path. No one has the answer. No one really knows the way. That’s what people are saying today. The postmodernists say that there are no absolutes, that there is no absolute truth. I find in this a contradiction. To say that there are no absolutes is an absolute statement within itself. Truth, by the very definition of the word, means a state of reality, of facts that exist.

Was Nietsche saying that the facts that are real in one situation are not