The Thing You Keep on a Leash

By Pastor Justin Cooper

There is a moment most people miss. It is not the moment you finally give in to a sin. It is the moment before that — when you decide you can handle it. When you tell yourself you will keep it close, keep it small, keep it under control. You put a leash on it and you walk it around like a pet.

I want to tell you the truth about that leash. It does not hold.

"If you're getting to the point where you're keeping your sin on a leash, that thing's gonna turn around and bite you. You ought to kill it."

Think about King Saul. God said destroy it all — leave nothing. And Saul looked at the best of it and thought, this does not seem that bad. Surely I can keep a little. That is the same lie you and I tell ourselves. But the flesh has never once given us good advice.

"There's no sanity in iniquity. There's no logic in lust. There's no discernment in depravity."

So what do you do with the thing on the leash? God does not tell you to manage it. He tells you to put it to death. In Colossians 3 and verse 5 He says it plainly.

Mortify means kill. Not tame. Not train. Not chain in the corner and feed twice a day. Kill it. Because here is the part that raises the stakes past you and me: you have influence. If God has given you a family, a class, a bus route, a seat in the choir, a child who watches how you live — then your sin was never going to stay yours. It ripples. It reaches people you love.

That is your reason to end it today, not next week.

So here is the next step. Name the thing. Not the category — the actual thing. Then take real action against it before the day is over: delete the app, block the number, pour it out, make the call you have been avoiding, tell one trusted person so it lives in the light. A leash gives it room. Killing it takes the room away.

Do not walk it around one more day. End it.