Our Favorite Sins

Today I read Genesis 35 where God changes Jacob's name to Israel, where Rachel gives birth to Benjamin and dies, and Reuben has sex with Bilhah. Jacob has had a really hard life, he really has. Yes the Lord has blessed him immensely and he has many, many good things that happened to him, but if you look at the harsh realities of his life, he was tricked into marrying the wrong woman, his father in law tried to cheat him on multiple occasions, his sons are willful and disobedient and some of them are murderers, one of his sons has sex with one of his wives, his favorite wife dies during childbirth, he really does have a lot of trials in his life. It makes me wonder what he had to learn from all of this, because I firmly believe that nothing happens by chance. There is always something to learn from it.

What has always seemed weird to me is the story of Reuben sleeping with Bilhah, I mean, in what way did he think this was ok? Every conceivable way to look at this is just wrong. I don't really want to dwell on it, but this is really a type for the rest of us. We all have our favorite sins that we can't shake either because we don't want to, or because it is too hard to overcome. We keep going back to this sin, or sins, over and over again even though we know for a fact that it is wrong and perhaps even harmful to us. It could be a Word of Wisdom problem, or perhaps a Law of Chastity problem. Perhaps we have anger issues, the list is honestly too long to go into, but in every case, we know it's wrong but we either try to overcome it on our own, or we just flat out don't want to overcome it.

I have a friend who left the church because of personal sin, honestly I believe that is why everyone leaves the church no matter what reason they might give. When I talked to him about it once, he admitted that the reason he did not come back to church was not because of the sin, but rather that he had no desire to overcome the sin. He knew it was wrong, but he did not want to stop it and so he chose instead to stay away. It was a very sad thing for me and I think that this is more common than we think. There are people who have testimonies of the truth and know what is right, but don't want to stop sinning to live those testimonies. I was talking with my father on Sunday for our weekly talk and he mentioned that he once had a friend who stated he did not want to make it to the Celestial Kingdom. He only wanted to go to the Terrestrial Kingdom. My dad did not go into details, but I suspect this person had a favorite sin they were unwilling to give up, or perhaps found it too difficult to give up.

If we are ever to reach our full potential as children of God, we have to be willing to give up our favorite sin or sins. We have to be willing to put what we want aside and do what God has asked us to do. This is important and ranks right up there with performing the necessary ordinances to return to live with our Heavenly Father. All the good we do will not be enough if we can't or won't give up our sins. We have to be in this 100%, it's not enough to be at 90% or even 99%. Until tomorrow.