Satan loves to play with our mind. If he can get us confused, doubtful, or convince us that his way is best for us, he has won a battle in our life. He often uses false guilt, undeserved condemnation, or shame that he bases on erroneous standards of the world.
When God deals with us, He uses conviction, and always gives us way to overcome our failings and shortcomings. God’s Spirit renews our mind (Romans 12:2; Ephesians 4:23), and teaches us alternative ways of thinking, feeling and behaving that lead to life everlasting.
He strengthens our inner being, so that we can overcome our pride and rebellion, and confess our errant ways as sin. His sanctification process makes us a new creation (2 Corinthians 5:17). If we rely on our shear will power to overcome our human tendencies, we will ultimately hit a roadblock.
However, over time in union with God, the mind of Christ replaces our way of thinking, and the attitude of our heart (1 Corinthians 2:16). We give God the glory for all our successes in life, as well as our strides into a deeper sense of spiritual maturity (1 Corinthians 3:5; 2 Corinthians 4:7).
God is never angry with us, disapproves of us, or rejects us. We can grieve His Spirit (Ephesians 4:30), but He loves us even while we are still sinners (Romans 5:6-11). Legalistic regulations are not what God’s commandments are all about. Instead, they are actually safety boundaries that God established to keep us from the results of destructive behavior.
God’s grace in our life forgives our failings and cleanses us from their filthy stain on our life (Colossians 2:13; Psalm 51:7; Isaiah 1:18). We do not have to strive to deserve God’s grace, it is a free gift afforded to us by Jesus’ death on Calvary’s cross (Romans 5:8). We have no condemnation, when we repent and depend on Him (Romans 8:1).
The key in healthy living is to forgive our self as God forgives us – freely and completely. We can enjoy the fruit of His Spirit as He replaces our shortcomings with each one of them (Galatians 5:22-23). We are no longer stuck in the hamster’s wheel of temptation and an addiction to our sinful desires (Romans 7:19), because the reality is that Jesus already set us free from our fleshly humanity (Romans 7:24-25).
Prayer:
Father God, we rejoice that Jesus did an eternal work in the influence that sin and Satan have over us. We are no longer slaves to sin, but to righteousness (Romans 6:15-23). It is not by works of righteous which we do, but Your mercy that saves us and washes and regenerates us (Titus 3:5), as well as the work of the Holy Spirit in renewing our mind with the mind of Jesus.
Teach us that when we strive to be perfect, we end up facing our inability to walk the straight and narrow road, our impossible expectations for our self, the inevitability of us falling back into a sinful lifestyle, and a redundance of failures. However, Your Spirit gives us both the desire and the power to work out our own salvation (Philippians 2:12-13). We finally come to a place of realizing our power rests in our union with Your Trinity within us.
Thought for the Day:
As we give up the notion of our ability to perform for God and to harness our moral behavior in order to make Him love us more, we experience a cleansed conscience granted to us by the work of God’s Spirit in us through sanctification; we come to enjoy Christ’s presence in us, which gives us a hope of glory and spiritual maturity with which to face the challenges of life.
- Hebrews 9:14, 13:18; 1 Timothy 1:5, 3:19; Colossians 1:27, 2:2; 3 John 11
