Those who are in the flesh cannot please God. You, however, are not in the flesh, but in the Spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God lives in you… Now if Christ is in you, the body is dead because of sin, but the Spirit gives life because of righteousness. (Romans 8:8-11)
The gospel doesn’t just make it possible for us to be forgiven of sin, but it also makes it possible for us to beat sin! Through the work of Jesus, indwelling sin meets the indwelling Spirit. This means you win every time. But only when you live not according to your ways, but “according to the Spirit” (8:5). You put sin in a chokehold and make it tap out, when you have your “mind set on the Spirit.”
So, you want to beat your sin of apathy toward others, bitterness, gossiping, lusting, fits of anger, addiction to a specific substance? Don’t put all your energy in trying to beat that sin on your own, God has given you a Helper (Jn. 14:16). So put all your energy into focusing on that Helper, the Holy Spirit. And what does that look like? Well, one of the purposes of the Holy Spirit is to teach you about Jesus and his words. This is what Jesus told us, saying, “But the Counselor, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you all things and remind you of everything I have told you” (Jn. 14:26). So pour over the Scriptures. Grow in your knowledge of Jesus. Focus on him as the greatest role model for your life. Watch every move he makes in the gospels. Listen to all that the Apostles say about him in their New Testament letters. And absorb every single word that Jesus has spoken. And then follow and obey him!
When you follow Jesus by living according to the Spirit of Jesus, you beat sin. Absorb these life-changing truths about our Lord Jesus, “Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. We all, with unveiled faces, are looking as in a mirror at the glory of the Lord and are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory; this is from the Lord who is the Spirit” (2 Cor. 3:17-18).