My Journey Journal

Often those of us that follow Jesus can find it emotionally challenging to let go of the shame of our sins.

 

 

It is valid to experience shame that accompanies our guilt before the only holy God when we are in our sinfulness for He is perfect and we aren’t.  The sense of shame that accompanies our recognition of how we’re sinful, however, isn’t God’s ultimate goal.  Our recognizing Him, coming into a right relationship with Him on His terms then worshiping, glorifying and enjoying Him is.  Once we’re forgiven based on the blood sacrifice of Jesus, He sees us through His grace as perfectly sinless; the shame should lead to repentance and then freedom and a deep sense of value as we realize the living God loves us but often we get hung up on what demons, our messed up human brains and our fellow humans tell us.

 

 

Demons seek to “… steal, kill and destroy” and the prince of this earth moves about seeking to find people to devour spiritually.  In that process we are assaulted by demonic doctrines.  Some of those doctrines include how disappointed God is  with us (He isn’t!), how we should continually be ashamed (we shouldn’t) or that God wants to make us healthy and wealthy (our self esteem or comfort aren’t very high on His list; according to His Word we are to be servants and consider others as more significant than ourselves among other things that don’t fit the goody, fru-fru health and wealth doctrine).

 

 

Everyone IS guilty of rebelling against the holy God of the universe and must personally be forgiven by Him based on His plan and requirements.  We cannot disregard that truth.  God is holy and the requirements of His holiness must be met.  Thankfully He has created a way in which His holiness can be satisfied, our sin can be forgiven and He can pour out His love upon us.  That plan required the sacrificial death of Jesus.  He came to earth as the King of the Universe but we refused to recognize Him and those who were alive put him to death and any of us would’ve done the same.

 

Israel, God’s chosen nation, demonstrated how far people are from our perfect God when they stood as the example for all time, showing that even humans who are amazingly blessed by God will repeatedly turn away from God in their hearts.  David points out in the Jewish testament that it’s the desire of our hearts that God wants turned towards Him, not just our actions.

 

 

Sadly, many of us who have entered into an eternal relationship with God will cling in an unhealthy way to the shame we feel when we are guilty.  God has declared us clean and He sees us as though we’ve never sinned before or as though we’ll never sin again in the future.  He treats us as clean to that degree.  He knows we will sin again.  He’s always known that.  He had to know every sin we’d ever commit in our lives or else He didn’t place them all upon Jesus in order to completely, once-for-all-time punish those sins and the one who bore them.  Either ALL sins have been placed upon Jesus when He was crucified or someone else must come to be punished again for those leftover sins.  I believe God has taken the price of all of those sins out on Jesus already and forgiveness can be freely found when someone confesses their sin and calls out to God, asking for that forgiveness based on Jesus sacrificial death.

 

Thankfully, God knows our sinfulness but through Jesus’ sacrifice He makes us right with Himself in His holiness and even goes farther.  He chooses to adopt us into His family.