The Deceitfulness of Sin Heb. 3:13 CLICK TITLE FOR AUDIO

Heb 3:13 says, “… lest any of you be hardened through the deceitfulness of sin.”  The deceitfulness of sin is the belief that you can have:

Sinful pleasure without pain.  Sin will hurt you.  You will hurt yourself and you can hurt others with sin.  Recount the pain of your shame after an angry outburst and the pain of your family’s emotions.  Recount the pain of your infidelity, or of your jilted lover, your hangover, your embarrassment, and so forth.  The pleasures of sin are always accompanied by pain.

Sinful pleasure without payment.  Sin will cost you.  It cost Adam and Eve their lives, their fellowship with God and the garden.  Sin has cost some people their marriages.  It has cost some people their jobs, their finances, their reputations, their families, their peace, their joy, and so forth.  Sin always presents itself as a great liberator from restraint and moral rectitude.  But it is not free, at all.  It always comes with a price and the price is always higher than you want to pay.

Sinful pleasure without propensity.  There is the thought that fulfilling your lust is going to satisfy you and relieve your lust.  However, the tendency in sin is that once you have experienced pleasure in sin your desire to experience that same pleasure will drive you to commit it again.  And to commit other sins, as well, when the first sin is no longer gratifying by itself [Rom 6:19].  You develop an insatiable appetite for more.

Sinful pleasure without prodigality.  Synonyms for prodigality are intemperance, incontinency, excess, lack of control.  What happens with sin is that it goes from propensity to prodigality.  That is, it goes from something that you have a hankering to do to some that you cannot do without, something over which you no longer have control because it has control over you.  You’re hooked.

Sinful pleasure without profligacy.  Synonyms for profligacy are corruption, decadence, degeneration, depravity.  Sin keeps you in bondage until it literally kills you [Jas 1:14-15].  Slowly but surely, if you live through all of the dangers of a life of sin, sin kills you.  It just sucks the life out of you.  You are so deep in sin that, as far as you can tell, you have no hope.  Jesus can always save you if you are still breathing.  But you can’t remove the physical, emotional and spiritual toll that sin has taken on you, if you are older.  And it will take years and years to remove if you are younger.

Sinful pleasure without punishment.  Not only is there physical profligacy in sin but there is also spiritual punishment in sin.  Sinners who die without Christ will spend eternity in the lake of fire [Rev 21:8].  Now Christ died to pay for your sins and to satisfy his Father’s wrath against sin.  You will not be punished in eternity if you will trust the finished work of Christ on Calvary to save you and keep you.

Conclusion: you cannot sin without experiencing all of these.  It is a lie to believe that you can sin without consequence.  The truth of what you have heard today illuminates the lie.  And it helps you to turn to the truth of scripture for the help to not only turn from your sin but to be made free from it in Jesus Christ.