I woke up this morning thinking about sin which is quite frankly, unusual for me. I was wondering why it was so hard for so many believers to stay out of sin when we are freed from sin through the cross. The Bible tells us we are dead to sin. Then why is it so hard?

I then realized that the problem wasn’t that sin had power over us but that the pull of the world is what traps us. We get caught in the earth’s gravity and get pulled along with the rest of this world that “the whole world lies in the power of the evil one” (1Jn 5:19). Given that, the key is to stay separate from the world, to love, to be in the world but not of it. In other words, we need to stay in the Kingdom of God, mindful of that.

That becomes impossible as long as we are getting our spiritual cues from this world. As long as we spend our lives reacting to what we hear from the news media, to what is happening in the world around us, we are being controlled by that information source. We have to stay separate from that and stay way over in His kingdom, getting our information, our instruction, our perspectives from Him.

God reminded me that when I was first saved I would sit at home and read my Bible. I would get in my car, dive and pray in tongues. I knew I had discovered something new, something very different from typical life on planet earth. It didn’t bother me that it was different, I knew it was real.

The church should be a place where we help everyone live over in the Kingdom of God. It should be a place where kingdom living is taught, is modeled. Too often, it becomes a place where we try to explain why things are the way they are. That very process is rooted in worldly thinking, in worldly observations. Rather we need to stay in the Kingdom of God and live there.