Cyclical Sin

I'm about 101% positive that every believer has dealt with this at one time or another. You know. How you get stuck in a cycle of sin and repentance? You sin, you feel bad about it, you repent, it goes pretty good for awhile, then you sin again, again you feel bad, you repent a second time, it goes good, you sin, get struck by guilt, repent, and on and on and on and on and on. Until you've completely lost count of how many times you've sinned, felt conviction, repented, and fallen again. You don't even know if it's in the hundreds or the thousands of times. It's horribly discouraging. Every time you fail, your repentances seem to be weaker and weaker and weaker. Every time you fail you think "Well, I'm one layer of ice down. Who knows when everything's going to crack and then God will get REALLY angry with me!" This drives you to run from God because you fear His anger. The words your parents said to you as a kid come back to haunt you. "Well, sorry just isn't enough anymore!" they said after you made a mess of things for the 10th time that week, that day or that hour. It's a perfectly natural idea. You're simply carrying what you know about your earthly father and thinking about your heavenly Father the same way. Our brains are built to find comparisons between things and it seems a natural one.

BUT "You thought that I was altogether like you," says God. Meaning... what? That God is NOT altogether like we are. The thing of it is that we don't believe the gospel. That's why we grow horribly discouraged. That's why we get stuck in these cycles! We don't understand that our relationship with God has been fundamentally changed through the gospel! "Someday, God's going to get tired of my sin and do away with me!" we think foolishly. "He's only got so much patience! I can tell that it's starting to run low. I can almost see Him up there drumming his fingers and looking unimpressed. It won't be long now! He's going to unleash His fury on me! He's going to give me my due rewards! He's not going to take any more of this crap! I'd better stop! He knows by now that my repentances aren't genuine enough!"

STOP THINKING LIKE THIS!!!

JUST STOP!

This way of thinking is a lie straight out of the pit of hell itself! It's DEMONIC! Satan himself spawned this way of thinking and he takes GREAT delight in getting believers to think that it's the truth because it seems to be righteous to think this way!

So what IS the truth, you ask?

"I love you. You need to understand that I have put you in My Son. You are in Him. You cannot get out of Him. You. are. in. My. Son. You cannot be plucked out of My hand. You cannot fall out of My hand. You can't even climb out of My hand. You're there for good. I've made a covenant with you. This covenant doesn't rest at all on your behavior. It has nothing to do with your performance. If you do something monumental for Me it doesn't make you MORE in the covenant than anyone else. If you fail to do anything of any importance for Me it does not make you any LESS in the covenant than anyone else. It's a document. It's signed. It's a left brain concept; not right brain. You are secure. 'What does the covenant rest on then?' you ask? Well it's quite simple. The covenant rests on Me. Everything is up to Me. Every. last. little. detail. hangs. on. ME! And the best news of all is that I have already done everything necessary to fulfill the covenant. I put you in my Son who died for all of your sins. I died for all of these cycles you get caught in. They're history. Gone. Vamoose. As far as the East is from the West. All my wrath was poured out at the cross. The wrath of all of Me. Father. Son. Spirit. We're completely satisfied now. All of the wrath is gone! I have nothing but mercy, grace, and love for you now. You can fall into your cycles. I'm going to save you from them too. One day you'll be like me. That's another clause in the covenant. Part of my job is to make you like Myself. I promise. One day, there will be no more cycles. No more failure, conviction, or repentance. I'll see to that. Just keep on pursuing Me. I know you will. I've put the desire in your heart. So if you're struggling and discouraged, DON'T be! You're in my Son and could no more exhaust my patience than you could drain all the oceans of the world with a thimble. And even that is a poor, dim, inadequate picture of how great my mercy is. I love you. Always and forever."