Sin and Responsibility

I was reading out of Mark today.

Mark 7:21-23 NIV
[21] "For it is from within, out of a person’s heart, that evil thoughts come---sexual immorality, theft, murder, [22] adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly. [23] All these evils come from inside and defile a person.”

I was thinking about how this reality is so different than what we sometimes choose to believe. We would blame external forces, even temptation for our sin, but the reality is that it comes out of us, out of our heart and out of our mind. We need to take personal responsibility for that which we allow to remain in us.

If our house is full of junk, we would like to blame someone else, but in reality, we brought it all into our house in the first place, and have not chosen to remove it, thus it remains. In the same way, I think we must recognize our own duplicity in our sin.

It is this sense of personal responsibility for our sin that will bring us to God. Jesus is our redeemer and the one who died for all our sins. The Holy Spirit has been given to live within us and enable us to renew our minds and give us new hearts. Our call is to have living water flowing out of us, rather than sin flowing out of us. As James 3:11 says: "Can both fresh water and salt water flow from the same spring?"