Its OK, everybody else is doing it..

Last week in a Sunday School class we talked about sin.. It was a good lesson as many begin the new year with resolutions to become better people. I have never been one for new years resolutions.. For me, I feel that if I mess up I set myself up to wait until next year to fix it.. If that were the case I would never succeed. :)

Sin is a sneaky little thing.. We usually know when we are doing the really bad things.. Stealing a car, harming someone, infidelity etc.. But the little ones, those are the ones Satan uses on us.. Cass Sunstein, Obama's "Regulatory Czar", wrote a book called Nudge. The premise of this book is that you cannot change ones ways overnight. You have to nudge them. You change a little here and a little there.. we see it applied today in our own government.. Our current administration is using these tatics to take us further from our constitution.. Satan is doing the same with us in our daily lives.. He tries more and more to nudge us from the gospel.

The more common, the more normal, sins become, the more susceptible we are to them. We even begin to disregard them as sin. We become part of the culture where we do as we wish and pass it off as, we have free will, it must be ok. We see it in all aspects of society. it doesnt happen overnight. We are nudged just a little.. The movies we watch, the music we listen to, our daily activities.. In everything we do we are nudged a little here and a little there to accept the sins as normal behavior. When that happens we become participants of those sins..

Satan has another trick.. Our free agency.. He knows the Lord gave us free will and he uses that against us. We think because we have that agency we can use it as we see fit, which is true.. But using our free agency to follow Satan is not in the plan. We cannot justify our sins by using our free agency for an excuse. If we are not using our free agency correctly then we need to reevaluate our behavior.

We need to remember that we are given guidelines, rules, commandments, that we must follow.. yes we have the choice to do as we wish, Heavenly Father gave us that. We also have repentance and forgiveness. David Bednar wrote in one of his talks, "Our spiritual purpose is to overcome both sin and the desire to sin, both the taint and the tyranny of sin." he goes on to say "The Lord’s pattern for spiritual development is “line upon line, precept upon precept, here a little and there a little” (2 Nephi 28:30). Small, steady, incremental spiritual improvements are the steps the Lord would have us take. Preparing to walk guiltless before God is one of the primary purposes of mortality and the pursuit of a lifetime; it does not result from sporadic spurts of intense spiritual activity."

If we are to be nudged we need to be nudged in the right path. We need to use our strength to stand up when temptation knocks on our door.. We need to remember that we have more than one chance to get it right and we dont have to wait for any magic date to ask for forgiveness and start over.