How is it that we let sin stop us from living for God?
Growing up, all the numerous times I tried living for God, I let my failures and lack of living up to the “rules” get in my way of a constant relationship with Him. I didn’t have the understanding, that I do now, of what it truly meant to have a relationship with God.
I feel a lot of people in the world are being held back about what it truly means to have a relationship with God. Not everyone goes at the same pace as everyone else. Some take longer than others.
If the Church reluctant to be there for them, as they are learning, they will continue in the cycle and never get anywhere. Or, they might just give up, as I almost did.
When I think about my sin, and that which I still struggle with, I think of those that God chose in the Old Testament. We always hold them in the most elite status, yet we forget that they were human too, just as we are. They had their failures, just as we do. And they were constantly seeking God every day, just as we should.
Abraham committed adultery with his wife’s maid. God never left him. David not only committed adultery, but got the woman pregnant and had her husband killed in battle. Peter, THE APOSTLE, denied Jesus. There are countless examples throughout the Bible.
Yet, despite all their failures, God still blessed them and never left them. The countless times Israel turned its back on God, He remained. The countless times we mess up, He remains.
How can it, that we judge ourselves harder than the one who judges us and allow it to prevent us to have an open relationship with Him?
Sin? The constant pain of thinking you failed Him again by sinning? Not feeling you can live up to His list of rules? Here is the kicker; there is no list of rules, except 2. Love the lord with all your heart and love others as you love yourself (Luke 10.27). All the other rules, those are rules set up by organizations to make their club look respectful.
News flash, Jesus didn’t hang out with respectable people all the time.
Yes, we should try to abstain from sin. However, don’t think that you have to stop sinning before you can come to God. In Romans 5.8, it says that, “But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”
If we could have stopped sinning on our own, we wouldn’t need Jesus. We can’t. It is through this understanding that you can start to understand what a relationship with God can be. It is freedom from sin and a life with Him.
The same thing that holds us back is exactly what we need to overcome. Not sin, but the thought that sin makes us unlovable in the eyes of God. It doesn’t. If it did, Abraham, David, Peter and countless more would have not been loved by Him.
Yes, sin is bad. As Paul said in Romans 6.1-2, “shall we continue in sin that grace may abound? Certainly not!” However, this does not mean that if you do sin, all is lost. In chapter eight, Paul said that “neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor heath nor depth, nor any other created thing shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in the Christ Jesus our Lord.”
It is through Christ that we are able to keep on living for God even when we mess up. So when you think that you have failed Him and no longer feel you are worthy to be called His “son,” think again. John said in 1 John 2.1 “if anyone sins, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous. And He Himself is a proposition for our sins, and not for our only but also for the whole world.”
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