Repentance And Forgiveness
Wednesday February 24, 2016
One of the greatest obstacles to receiving and living in God’s absolute forgiveness is that we haven’t truly repented. We haven’t changed our mind and our heart attitude about God, and we have not acknowledged our way of living in sin is abhorrent.
For the kind of sorrow God wants us to experience leads us away from sin and results in salvation. There's no regret for that kind of sorrow. But worldly sorrow, which lacks repentance, results in spiritual death. (2 Corinthians 7:10 NLT)
When we struggled in the chaos of our addiction we acknowledged that some of our actions were harmful. However, in general, we used negative events in our past to justify our behaviour. Other people or circumstances were to blame. We became greedy, self-indulgent and self-centered individuals and decided to shape our lives around what we thought we needed, deserved, or what we deemed needed fixing. The building block for living life in recovery with God is changing our mind about who is responsible for our brokenness and how we got to where we are.
God created us in love. God breathed life into us. God invites us to live in a loving relationship, with Him as the center of our focus each day. His plan for a meaningful life is that we will find our heart’s desire by seeking Him first in every situation. Sadly, in the past, many of us never knew about God or even believed that He existed. However, even when our lives were in chaos from the ugly circumstances many of us have gone through, God was pursuing us with His love. We may have ignored Him and did whatever we thought we needed to do to get through life, but after many years in our self-centeredness, we have discovered that our plans don’t work. Our plans didn’t fix the problems we already had and only created more.
Life in recovery can begin for us when we actually turn away from sin – the sin of running our own lives and excluding God. Our chance at having a real life will only come when we accept responsibility for our sinful responses to life events, and are sincerely sorry for how wrong we have been to try and sort things out on our own.
Repent, then, and turn to God, so that your sins may be wiped out, that times of refreshing may come from the Lord. (Acts 3:19 NIV)
When we start out on our journey to new life in Christ there will be times when we will fail to live in love. When this happens, we will likely experience genuine sadness over what has occurred and will be willing to repent and return to God for cleansing and healing. True repentance honours God and restores our relationship with Him.
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