Leaving Our Life Of Sin

^{JN 8:}¹⁰ Jesus straightened up and asked her, "Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?" ¹¹ "No one, sir," she said. "Then neither do I condemn you," Jesus declared. "Go now and leave your life of sin."

There are many things that we have done as people and as Christians to try to improve our lives, but one thing that few of us have done is to completely leave our life of sin. Sure we say we love God and want to be obedient to Him, but we tend to keep secret habits of sin that poison our hearts and lives, and keep us from fully receiving God's best for our life. One thing that I always try to do is to be very honest, so I will just try to lay things out as simply and honestly as I can. We sin because we think it works best and gives us a certain level of control, power, and pleasure, that we can use when we want to make ourselves feel better and treat old unhealed emotional pain. We don't find God that gratifying, accessible, or controllable, so we create our own pleasure gods that we can run to when we are in need. We find prayer boring most of the time and our electronic gods seem to relieve that boredom much easier and better. But we are actually just playing a fools game, and we are the fool.

When we go to Jesus and ask Him to forgive us and we mean it He does forgive us and He even says, "Neither do I condemn you", but He is also saying something else to all of us right now, and that is "Go now and leave your life of sin." It is time that we all let go of our fake gods and grab wholeheartedly onto the real God and learn to meet our needs spiritually legally from now on. There are many of us that would never rob a bank or hurt a child, but in truth we are some of the most notorious spiritual criminals in God's kingdom. I don't say this condemningly, just honestly. Most of us if we had to face a spiritual trial today for all of our willful spiritual criminal acts of late, we would be in a pretty bad shape. There was one time I almost drowned in a river rafting accident, and all I could think of under the water was of my unforgiven sin, and that I was not ready to meet God. I never want to face that dread again. We all like to think that we have forever to repent, but many of us die and face God "as is".

Another time I was at a bible study where the guy that was teaching was talking about whether we could actually say no to sin or not, so he had one young guy stand up and he told him to pull his pants down. The young man looked embarrassed and he said "no", and the teacher said "why not?" The young man said "because I don't want to!", so you see, we really can say no if we want to. If someone we wanted to impress were around us we could probably keep ourselves from doing all kinds of wicked things. We are now entering a time in history where we will witness the light getting lighter and the dark getting darker like never before, so we must all sit down and soberly think our life through. Do we really want to keep playing Russian roulette with our eternal future by sinning up to the last moment and then maybe repenting? Or do we want to find lasting freedom from our sin-habits by just refusing them, asking God for His help, and letting Him show us how to find true happiness in Him?

There is true life gratification and satisfaction through God, but we must relearn how to meet our needs properly. When we sin it creates a wall between us and God, so of course we are not going to get what we need from Him. When we fully repent there is usually a boring lull at first, but then God comes in like a flood to start helping us and being what we need. The bottom line is we serve a holy God that placed a bunch of people on the earth to test them to see who would turn to Him, or to sin, so that He could build a future kingdom of people that would truly love, obey, and appreciate Him. He made the rules so we can either acknowledge these rules and conform to them, or ignore them and face a very scary and uncertain future, the choice is ours. Control is an illusion, so we must shake each other and wake each other up. This is your day my friend to step from the twilight into the full light and to say goodbye to darkness and sin once and for all. Are you ready to leave your life of sin?

^{REV 3:19 Those whom I love I rebuke and discipline. So be earnest, and repent. ²⁰ Here I am! I stand at the door and knock.
If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with him, and he with me.}