Dear Friends,

It is a vital principle of warfare: you must know your enemy. And one of our most formidable enemies is sin. Today’s devotional will give you important information in your battle with it. God bless you.

Because of Calvary,

John Janney

• I John 3:4

  1 John 3:4   English Standard Version (ESV)
  4 Everyone who makes a practice of sinning also practices lawlessness; sin is lawlessness.

I John 3:4

“Sin…is not an essential part of man as he was created. It is something abnormal, it was not in human nature at the first. ‘God made man upright.’ Our first parent, as he came fresh from the hand of his Maker, was without taint or speck of sin; he had a healthy body inhabited by a healthy soul. There was about him no tendency to evil, he was created pure and perfect; and sin does not enter into the constitution of man, per se, as God made it. It is a something which has come into us from outside. Satan came with his temptation, and sin entered into us, and death by sin. Therefore, let no man, in any sense whatever, attribute sin to God as the Creator. Let him look upon sin as being a something extraneous to a man, something which ought never to have a locus standi within our nature at all, a something that is disturbing and destructive, a poisoned dart that is sticking in our flesh, abiding in our nature, and that has to be extracted by divine and sovereign grace.”

[Charles Haddon Spurgeon, The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit XLIII, (1897), p. 14]