NEW EVERY MORNING

This past week was miserable. Nothing seemed to go right and it was topped off by me making a big mistake. Let me take that back. I shouldn't try to make it sound better than it was. I didn't make a mistake, I sinned. I deliberately chose to do something I knew I shouldn't. And while I was sinning, I felt the conviction of the Holy Spirit gently but continuously say to turn from the sin. But I didn't and I pushed forward with the sin. Not long after, a whirlwind of guilt, sorrow, shame and regret poured over me. It was terrible. It literally felt like I had the Devil sitting on my head hitting me with a hammer telling me how bad of a person I was. He had me questioning my salvation, God's love for me and everything in between. And when those condemning comments were being hurled my way, instead of pushing back against them with the promises found in the Bible, I quickly crumbled and began to completely agree with every single comment about me. I found myself saying things like, "I messed up big time", "I can't believe I did that", "What was I thinking?", "I'm such a failure", and "How could a Christian do that"...and of course..."God must be so disappointed in me".

Oh how the Devil loves to tell Christians that God is so disappointed in us and that He doesn't love us anymore when we mess up. He loves to temp us and when we give in or when we sin or fail in areas of our lives, he thumps us over the head with how terrible we are. And then he makes us think that God is totally disgusted with our efforts and that He is ashamed of us. And instead of us running back into the arms of our Heavenly Father...to receive grace and mercy for healing, our failures cause us to run in the opposite direction, so we can hide from God for a period of time. And once we feel like we've been exiled from God's presence long enough, we start looking at how we can modify our behavior so that we can work our way back to a state of acceptance and more importantly...we try to earn back God's love as if He took it away when we sinned. We convince ourselves that we'll do better next time and then we make a few promises to God wrongly thinking it's our promise to "do better" that is the basis of God's love for us.

After I sinned, I immediately went to the Lord, and quoted 1 John 1:9 which says:

"But if we confess our sins to him, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all wickedness."

I confessed what I had done was sin and I didn't make any excuse for it (the way I sometimes I tend to). And then I asked for forgiveness. It was at that moment I assumed the guilt and shame of my failure would leave and that I could go on with my day. To my horror, not only did the guilt and shame not go away, but they began to intensify. I felt anxious as I began questioning why the confession of sin and request for forgiveness didn't work. And I spent the rest of the night in a miserable funk, letting my mind wander and spiral out of control. I couldn't shake the horrible fear that I had sinned past the point of redemption.

The next morning I woke up feeling completely defeated. The heaviness that had fallen upon me the night before was still there. Not only did I find it hard to come to God in prayer, I didn't want to leave my bed. I wanted to stay under the covers and hide for the rest of the day. And for someone like me who tends to get anxious, my mind continued its downward spiral of fear of what I had done. I began to think that the reason I couldn't shake the guilt, shame and fear was because God was punishing me for sinning because He knew that I knew better than to sin. I couldn't take the condemning thoughts anymore so I did the only thing I could think of, I reached out to a pastor at church and asked if we could meet. Thankfully, he was available and later that day I found myself in his office crying while confessing my sin. We talked for over an hour and during our time together, the pastor focused on the truth of God's love. His words were wrapped with love and compassion as he reminded me that my standing with God is a promise, completely determined by Jesus' finished works and not by my own efforts. He also reminded me that my forgiveness is not a feeling, it's a promise, and that I had to choose to believe was true. And what helped the most is when he said that even if I had committed an even bigger sin, I would still be loved by God the exact same amount.

I left church feeling a little better so I found a place near my house and spent the next couple of hours sitting by the water. I didn't pray, I didn't read the Bible, I just sat there listening to the water flowing down the stream and I meditated on what my pastor had said. And then it happened, just as quickly as it came, the fear, shame and sorrow I had been feeling departed and the peace of God's presence fell upon me. As I sat there, thankful that the heaviness had lifted, I asked, "Lord, is there a way you can just hit the reset button to the day I got saved so that I wouldn't have any memories of the sin I have committed as a born again Christian. The sins committed before getting saved were before I knew you. But it's the ones I've committed since knowing you that weigh me down and those are the one I feel the most guilty about." I'll be honest, I didn't really think God would respond, but He did. And His response was a simple, "No."

I sat there on the bench, and if I'm being honest, I was caught off guard by His answer. I would have preferred no answer instead of hearing a flat out no. As I began to question the no, God continued speaking.

"There's no point. If we go back to the moment you were saved, five minutes later you will do something that will make you think you are dirty to me. And you'll want me to reset things again...and again...and again. That feeling of being unclean will always follow you if your performance is the basis of how you measure how clean you are to me. You will never be able to stay perfectly clean by your own behavior. Instead, why not remember that every morning you begin the day as clean as you'll ever be to me. And nothing you do from the moment you wake up until you fall asleep at night, good or bad, will change how I see you."

It was at that moment that Lamentations 3:22-23 came to my mind: "The faithful love of the Lord never ends! His mercies never cease. Great is his faithfulness; his mercies begin new every morning."

I sat there and I couldn't help but let out a deep sigh of relief. I knew exactly what was going on. This issue wasn't a new one. I had been in bondage to the idea of performing well for God for quite some time. When I performed well, I felt close to God. When I made mistakes, I'd feel distant from Him. And this mindset had been hindering my ability to enjoy God's love for me because I was constantly fearful of doing something so wrong that God would once and for all take His presence and His love away from me. I also realized that the reason my initial prayer of 1 John 1:9 didn't work was because God wanted to get to the root of the problem. He wanted to reveal a bigger issue under the surface that needed to be dealt with so that I would get true and lasting healing, not simply just a temporary fix of guilt.

The entire experience was terrifying but it was also a wonderful reminder of God's goodness and His faithfulness. My walk with Jesus has never been and will never be measured by my performance. I can never do enough to deserve God's love and forgiveness and I can never do something so terrible that God will love me any less. So I want to encourage those of you who profess Jesus as your Lord and Savior to remember that God adores you. Your mistakes, big or small, don't change how God sees you. Don't let the devil convince you that God is mad and that He's disappointed in your performance when you fail. Instead, start each morning truly trusting that you are as clean and as perfect as you could possibly be in the sight of God. And hold on tightly, with everything you have to the truth that nothing, and I mean nothing, can separate you from the love of God, that is in Christ Jesus.

† let the light in †