Root Causes and Symptoms

by Robert Jacobs

There’s an old saying, “If you want to be cured, treat the cause not the symptom.” While I am not a medical doctor, this advice seems sound enough to me. After all, symptoms manifest a deeper, causal reality that we cannot see yet must be addressed to satiate said symptoms. For instance, my nose (at the moment of this devotional’s composition) is clogged up despite my use of decongestants. This stuffed up noes, while annoying in its own right, manifests a deeper truth, that my body has been infected by a virus. In the same way, a fever could indicate a bacterial infection while pain and swelling in the ankle might indicate a break in the bone. Given all these examples, the adage does seem to hold up; we should indeed seek to treat the cause and not the symptom.

However, we should not be so quick to dismiss the importance of symptoms themselves. While treating symptoms does not fix the root problem, the symptoms do alert us to a deeper problem that needs to be addressed. Accordingly, we should be careful to monitor our symptoms so that we can discover and address deeper problems that are more difficult to see. The same can be said of our spiritual life. But what does this practically look like?

The mission of Living Hope “is to proclaim God’s truth as we journey with those who are seeking sexual and relational wholeness through a more intimate relationship with Jesus Christ.” As this mission indicates, we believe that the root cause of sexual and relational brokenness (well, all brokenness really) is a severed relationship between man and God, a breach that can be bridged by the work of Jesus. Our sinful actions, then, are symptomatic of this deeper reality.

If it’s true that the severed relationship between us and God is the root cause of our problem, and addressing a root cause is the key to fixing a problem, why do we even care about our sin? Or, let me ask it in another way. Why do we spend so much time in accountability relationships, support groups, and the like talking about our sin when the sin is only a symptom of a deeper problem? In our LHM groups and in the online forums, why do we ask symptomatic questions like, “Have you been pure this week?” A puzzling question, right? The answer lies in the role and purpose of symptoms.

Just as physical symptoms reveal a deeper and more difficult to perceive reality about our bodies, so too does our sin reveal much about the state of our heart and its relationship with God. In Matthew 12:24, Jesus asserts the simple truth that “out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks.” In other words, our actions are fueled by the content and condition of our heart. In this way, our choices act as a kind of spiritual barometer, offering insight into the seemingly intangible realities of the heart.

So, what do your actions say about your heart? It could be that your sinful choices demonstrate your lack of trust in His goodness, that His definition of sexual expression—limited to a man and a woman in a marriage covenant—is unjust and therefor He must be a cold and unfeeling monster. It could be your bitterness reveals that you do not trust God because he has allowed your son, daughter, brother, sister, or spouse to abandon you and the faith. Or your actions could show that you trust Him, that you believe that he truly does care for you even when your flesh says something different, that you know that His hand rests on even those who are in the “far country.” No matter the case, remember that our actions, both sinful and not sinful, offer us a window into the often hard to understand recesses of our hearts.

What’s the Big Deal with Sexual Sin

by Robert Jacobs

“What’s the big deal with sexual sin,” one of my family members asked me as I sipped on my ice tea one evening. “All sin is sin and separates us from God, so why do people make such a commotion about sexual sin specifically.”

Although you may not get asked this question in the middle of a busy family gathering, I am willing to bet that you have indeed pondered this very subject. What is the big deal with sexual sin? Is it the same as all other sins?

The biblical answer to this question is both yes and no. From an eternal perspective, sexual sin and any other kind of sin are equal in their ability to separate us from God. This is why when Paul says in Romans 3 “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” he does not specify degrees to which one falls short (Romans 3:23). On the contrary, the literal translation of the word “sinned” is to “fail of one’s purpose” or to “go wrong."[1] In this way, all sin causes us to fail in the purpose set out for us at the creation of Man: to glorify and worship God.

However, Paul also teaches that sexual sin is unique in that we are to “Flee from sexual immorality,” for “every other sin a person commits is outside the body, but the sexually immoral person sins against his own body” (1 Corinthians 6:18). Clearly, Paul does not see “sexual immorality” as the same as all other sins. So, what’s the difference and why does it matter?

While all sin separates us from God—necessitating the sacrifice of Christ to bridge the gap between our sinful selves and a holy God—each act of sin carries with it different temporal consequences, with the severity of said consequences often compounding as we habitually engage in a particular sin. As many of the participants who have come through Living Hope can attest, there are large and often devastating consequences to be paid for sexual sin. In fact, I have found that many people will often not turn from their sin until they feel the sting of consequence. This is in spite of the fact that Christ continually warns them about the danger of their sin.

So, if sexual sin is so consequential, how do we “flee” from it as Paul suggests? Later in the same letter, Paul describes the need for self-discipline through a dietary metaphor. “Every athlete,” Paul asserts, “exercises self-control in all things” so that they can win a prize (1 Corinthians 9:25). The hyphenated word “self-control” here, while absolutely indicating self-discipline in a general sense—can also refer to what one ingests.[2] Taken in light of his earlier concept of sexual sin being internally consequential, this passage can instruct us in how to combat sexual sin.

If we seek to receive the prize at the end of the struggle, just as the athlete does at the end of the race, then we must carefully guard what we take into ourselves. What do you allow into your mind and heart through your eyes and ears? Is it fuel to run the race of life in such a way as to obtain the “imperishable” prize, or do you seek to fulfill an immediate desire? Do you train your mind like athletes train their body—only ingesting that which will help you obtain your goal—or do you work against yourself, throwing obstacles in your way as you seek Christ?

Be ever meticulous about what you ingest. In doing so, you fuel your body to “[strain] forward to what lies ahead [and] press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 3:14).

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[1] Liddell and Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), s.v. ἁμαρτάνω.

[2] Several early Greek texts use this word to refer to food consumption, including those by Vettus Valens Astrologus. See Liddell and Scott, s.v. ἐγκρατεύομαι.

How to Overcome Evil

by Robert Jacobs

“Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.” – Romans 12:21

Infants love music. For those of you who have already made your way through the adventure of parenting, this is not news to you. But for me, this discovery was on par with Alexander Fleming’s invention of penicillin or Galileo’s detection of the sun as the center of our solar system.

Whenever my five-week-old daughter can’t seem to calm down, I pop in a CD that my Mother gave me at one of our baby showers (She clearly already understood the connection between babies and song). The album, a project first published in 1991, sets memory verses to music, both calming my inconsolable child and encouraging her with the truth of scripture. As I rocked her and listen to the songs last Saturday, one of the verses—Romans 12:21—caught my attention. This verse was not new to me, but for some reason, I saw it in a new light.

Paul’s charge to “not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good” comes as a cap on a section of his letter that addresses what Christ-centered love should look like when placed into action. The teaching seems simple enough. But as anyone familiar with the rhetoric of Paul will know, nothing is as simple as it first appears. To dig a little bit deeper into his meaning, I first asked myself, “If Paul goes out of his way to teach us to overcome evil with good, then what other forces are we trying to use to overcome evil?” After all, if the church was naturally overcoming evil with good, then he probably wouldn’t have used precious space in his letter to provide such an exhortation.

I came up with two answers to this question based on both scripture and my study of the human condition. The first answer comes only a few verses before the one in question. In verse 17, Paul cautions his reader to not “repay…evil for evil.” Unfortunately, we seem to prefer this self-destructive reaction to evil predicated upon us, to sin against those who sin against us or, in the famous words of Shakespeare’s King Leer, to lash out because we are “more sinned against than sinning.” The problem with this reaction is that it creates a cycle of evil, with each party repaying ill for ill until they are completely alienated from one another or dead.

The second way we attempt to overcome evil is a bit more complicated. Often times evil is not predicated upon us, but we are instead “dragged away by [our] own evil desire and enticed” (James 1:14). When we see this evil rear its ugly head in our lives, we attempt to combat it through behavior modification. In other words, we seek to overcome evil by ending our participation in evil actions. While this sounds like a perfectly logical and noble choice, it does not reflect the admonition of Paul in Romans 12:21. Although I am not advocating that we should engage in sinful behavior, I do think that we must realize that if right actions were the solution to evil, then 1) Paul would have said so and 2) Christ’s sacrifice would have been meaningless because we could simply overcome evil through our own efforts.

So, if we cannot overcome evil through “good” behavior, what does Paul mean when he says that we must “overcome evil with good?”

In his gospel, Mark recounts a moment when “a man ran up to” Jesus and asked, “Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” To which Jesus responds, “Why do you call me good. No one is good—except God alone” (Mark 10:17-18). In this short exchange—which actually goes on for several more verses—we find the answer to our question. The good that can overcome evil is God himself, and by logical extension Jesus, who uses this interaction to assert His divinity.

You see, if we try to overcome sin with sin, all we get is more sin. (How many times have we foolishly reasoned that we have already messed up a little, so we might as well go all the way.) If we try to overcome evil with right actions or behavior modification, we may beat back the darkness for the time, but we cannot truly overcome it. The only way to truly defeat evil is by turning our gaze toward the true Good, toward God and His Son. When we do, we submit ourselves to the transforming power of the gospel through which the affections of our hearts are reordered. The evil that once took first place amongst our loves suddenly becomes less important, eventually becoming completely overshadowed by our love for God.

How do you combat evil? Do you turn to more evil as a reaction to it? Do you vainly attempt to supplant it through good behavior? In both situations, you will find yourself frustrated and more fully immersed in evil then you were at the start. Turn your heart toward God. Contemplate the costly sacrifice of Christ that was so lovingly made for you while you were still His enemy. Let the priorities and loves of your life be transformed through the blood of the lamb.