Most people think repentance and joy are opposites.
Repentance sounds painful. Joy sounds happy.
Yet one of the greatest statements about joy in all of Scripture comes immediately after God’s people are deeply convicted over their sin.
How did brokenness become celebration?
Why did Nehemiah tell the people, “Do not sorrow, for the joy of the Lord is your strength”?
And why is that same truth just as powerful for believers today?
We’ll also discover how God uses different spiritual gifts to accomplish His purposes, why understanding His character gives us confidence, and how He faithfully works even through the storms we face.
I don’t have to tell most of you that life can get messy. Much of that messiness is the result of our own choices. Those messes and the consequences are often what God uses to get our attention. As a result, we experience sorrow and regret. But is sorrow or regret what God requires? Rather than regret, He calls us to repentance. But what exactly is that? Is sorrow, depression, or something more?
And on a wider scale, have you taken some time to think about your plan to grow spiritually this year? We are never standing still with God. We are either growing or slipping backward. Let’s always be growing.
False religion and prosperity can both have an intoxicating effect on men and women.
In its extreme, false religion enables people to become suicide bombers, terrorists, and even radical defenders of abortion or gay rights. But there are other forms of false religion that can be just as dangerous to us personally.
Prosperity, on the other hand, can lull people into a materialistic stupor that renders them blind to what’s really important.
Also …
When we experience sorrow over sin, is it worldly sorrow or godly sorrow? This is important to understand because one leads to life and the other to death. And, finally, what do we have in common with lions, greyhounds, goats, and kings?
“I know it’s wrong, but I’ll just ask God to forgive me afterward.”
Have you ever entertained that thought?
Perhaps we don’t say it quite that bluntly. Instead, we tell ourselves:
God understands.
Everyone sins.
I’ll deal with it later.
After all, God promises to forgive us.
And every one of those thoughts can contain enough truth to make a dangerous lie sound reasonable.
God is patient. He is merciful. And He does forgive His children when we genuinely repent.
But does that mean we can deliberately choose to disobey Him while planning to repent afterward?
Scripture calls sin deceitful, and one of its greatest deceptions may be convincing us that we can choose the sin while somehow controlling what happens next.
We can’t.
But there’s an even more sobering problem with the attitude, “I’ll sin now and ask forgiveness later.”
It may reveal something far more serious than a moment of disobedience.
What could it reveal about our relationship with God?
We’ll talk about that today, along with chocolate-covered dirt, foolish talk, and why something we dismiss as “just a joke” may not be funny to God.
Blended Families Part 12: Seven A’s of Confession In last week’s post, Blended Families Part 11: How to Start Dealing with Ex’s, we talked about some of the reasons for conflict and the beginning steps of working toward a...
