We want to be freed from our tangled life, but how do we start the path to being forgiven? And how do we truly realize the power of God’s amazing grace and forgive ourselves?
1: We need to have a heart that loves God more than our sin.
Ezekiel 36:26 – “I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.”
When I first realize my sin, I know that God is waiting for me to come back to him. But the first step in being forgiven is learning to have a heart that knows how important forgiveness is. We almost have to come to a point of desperation, a point where we no longer want the sin more than we want God. We have to pray that God will get us to this place, and we have to also pray that God would reveal to us just how stuck we really are in our sin.
2: God’s grace is what covers us – not us.
“For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— not by works, so that no one can boast.” –Ephesians 2:8-9
This is SUCH an important part of learning what forgiveness means. It’s not our ACT of asking for forgiveness that saves us, but the act of God working in our hearts to bring us to that place and forgiving us for our deeds.
There have been many times in my life where I know that there is sin somewhere that I was not addressing. I am a firm believer that when we find sin in our lives, we should immediately pray that God would give us the mind and the means to get rid of it. God forgives us, but he also gives us the power to ask for forgiveness, too. If we didn’t have God teaching us and growing us in this way, how would we even see our sin? It is the blessing of the Holy Spirit that shows us how truly desperate we are for grace.
3: God ALWAYS forgives.
Once we realize the weight of the sin that we’ve become so tangled in, we must realize that there is God who forgives and never stops forgiving us. In the last post I talked about how we can find sin that we never thought was there, and oftentimes I find that God opens my heart at specific times to tell me just how tangled I am.
This is because God wants us to realize the depth of our sins for us to understand the power of his forgiveness. It’s easy to feel completely hopeless at times like this, when our mistakes are all we see. But our God is a God who gives, loves, and holds us through even our darkest of times.
All we have to do is ask.
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