From my own experience, I have found that the key to victory over sin is not praying for God to take away the evil desires. God didn't give them to us in the first place. God already has provided a solution to the sin problem. It was the cross whereby we we died to sin and the Holy Spirit whereby we were raised in newness of life in Christ. I am a big fan of the writings of the late Watchman Nee. His book, The Normal Christian Life is a classic on this subject. I heartily recommend it. I will also share the following he wrote from "The Present Testimony":
THE REASON GOD ALLOWS US TO FAIL
God has no need to know our failure and falling. Whether we are standing up and overcoming or falling down and stumbling, God knows that the flesh is corrupt all the same. God knows our natural form. God has no hope that we will fulfill His righteousness by our flesh. He knows that we have nothing but sin. When we do good, He knows we are corrupt; when we do evil, He also knows we are corrupt. He does not need to wait until we fail or fall to know we are incurable. But we need failures and falling because, if it were not so, we could not know the self. When everything is going smoothly, when favorable winds are in the sails and we are victorious and filled with happiness, we think we are quite good and have what others do not have. Although we dare not boast in an obvious way, when we have a slight advancement in spiritual life or a slight success in spiritual work, it is hard for us not to think of ourselves and consider that we are indeed holy, able, and far superior to others. At such times, we unavoidably lose our trust in God and become careless. Therefore, God allows us to fall from glory to dust. He allows us to sin, fall, and backslide, in order that we would know that the self is unbearably corrupt, beyond cure, and that we ourselves are the same as the worst and most evil sinner in the world. As a result, we dare not assume anything in ourselves or glory in ourselves or boast in ourselves; rather, in everything we trust God with fear and trembling. Brothers, we need failures and fallings to humble us, to cause us to know the self and to know the flesh.
THE WAY GOD LEADS BELIEVERS
TO KNOW THEIR SELF
The first work of the Holy Spirit in a believer is to bring him to know the self after he is saved. This is so he will, according to God's will, forsake all that is from the self and completely depend on God. But how difficult it is! How unflattering it is to know the self! How unbearable it is to forsake the self! A believer often does not know the self or want to know the self. Because he does not know the self, he thinks the self is reliable; because he does not want to know the self, the Holy Spirit has no way to reveal to him his true character under God's light. Under such circumstances, God has no other way than to use a more painful method to cause a believer to know the self. This method is to deliberately allow him to fail.
Just as the failures in the wilderness caused the children of Israel to realize their self-motives, failures similar to those in the wilderness also cause believers to know the hopelessness of the self. Because believers are self-confident and think that they themselves are competent, able, capable, and perhaps talented in many ways, they lose a heart of complete dependence upon God. Therefore, God allows them to fail in all their affairs and have no true abiding fruit. This makes them realize that they themselves are not reliable. Many believers imagine that they are naturally patient, kind, gentle, and pure. For this reason God causes various things to come upon the believers to bring them to the point that they can no longer be patient, kind, gentle, and pure, to make them know that not one thing that comes from the inherent self is reliable. Believers may consider that they love God. They may want to boast of the completeness of their consecration or the diligence of their work. But God allows the world and its people to attract them and cause them either to be secretly corrupted or openly unfaithful. As a result, the believers realize that their love for God is very shaky. Other believers may feel that they are completely for God, that nothing is for themselves. God will cause these ones to experience the praise and welcome of men so that they will see how they steal God's glory and covet men's exaltation. Sometimes when believers have progressed slightly in their spiritual path, they feel that they are victorious and sanctified. But while they are satisfied, God permits them to fail and sin just like others, or even worse than others, thus making them realize that they are not any better than anyone else.
Brothers, if you do not misunderstand me, I would like to tell you one word: God likes His children to sin more than He likes them to do good. The more believers sin, the more God is pleased. Please do not misunderstand what I mean or deliberately misunderstand my words. I am not persuading you to sin, nor does God want you to sin. However, the believers' self-confidence, self-boasting, self-satisfaction, and every selfish thought, feeling, and act cause God to prefer that they commit sin rather than do good. If they did not sin, they would not know themselves and break away from their pitiful, ludicrous, and detestable self-life.
We must know where God wants us to arrive. We must know out of what and into what we have been saved. It is true that we will go to heaven and not to hell. But does God's purpose stop there? No, God wants to save us completely from the self into His life. He wants us to live absolutely apart from the soul-life. From God's point of view, there is nothing more filthy than the self. The self is the source of all sins and is God's greatest enemy because the self declares independence from God in everything. God considers everything of the self to be utterly filthy, unacceptable, and useless. What is the self? It is all that man has, all that he can do, and all that he has done without seeking God, waiting on God, and depending on God. This is the self and the things that result from the self.
Although God hates the self very much, the believers' view of the self is totally different from God's. They depend on the self, admire the self, and glorify the self. They do not know the true character of the self. They do not know how filthy, corrupt, and weak they are in God's eyes. They do not have God's view. They still have no self-knowledge, that is, they do not know the self. Under such circumstances, if they have more progress, success, or are continuously victorious, their self-life will become stronger. It will become even more difficult to forsake it. At this point, the more good or righteous work that they perform, the more they will be alienated from God. The more strength they have, the more veils there will be between themselves and the Holy Spirit. The more success they have, the more the self will gain the glory, and the more the detestable self-life will be prolonged. This is why I say that God would rather have the believers commit sins than do good. The more they commit sins, the more they will realize the untrustworthiness of the self. The weaker they become, the more they will realize their vanity. The more falls they have, the more they will know the incurability of the self. God is not bothered by believers committing sin because sinning causes them to know the self and depend on God.
The above can be found in unabridged form at:
http://www.ministrybooks.org/Chapter.cfm?id=%21%28P%20%20%0A
May God help you to come to see that Christ is our victory. May we come to know our utter dependence upon Him.
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