Chapter 6: Repent
This chapter says so
much. I cannot go on sinning when God
has shown me that something I am doing is a sin.
You know, does this work
with overeating. Do I know I should stop
eating or drinking too much soda, but I still keep doing it? I need to quote several paragraphs from
Evelyn’s book because I cannot explain it any better than she has.
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When we have prayed,
“Father, I have sinned, “how does God answer us? Does He say, “Now that you have confessed the fact
that you have sinned, it will be all right”? Oh, no. God commands us to “Repent!”
A bewildered
wife called me asking for prayer. She
said that her husband was sleeping with another woman, then getting up the next
morning and asking God to forgive him. He
told his wife it was OK because God always forgives us when we ask Him to. “Is this true?” the wife questioned. “Does he have a right as a Christian to live
this way?”
“No,” I replied
and then shared a part of Romans 6 with her:
“Are we to continue in sin that grace might increase? May it never be!” (vv.1-2) “Therefore do not let sin reign in your
mortal body that you should obey its lusts, and do not go on presenting the
members of your body to sin as instruments of unrighteousness; but present
yourselves to God as those alive from the dead, and your members as instruments
of righteousness to God” (vv.12-13, NASB)
After we have
identified a specific sin in our lives as sin and have admitted it to God in
prayer, we humans are prone to say to ourselves, “Now, just forget it,” or “Oh,
that’s really not a sin.” Or we may
say, “You really didn’t mean to hurt anybody,” or “That’s not such a bad sin.” But God says, “Repent!”
Wow, God is speaking to my
heart. I believe he told me years ago
that having too much soda in my life was sin. ( Actually, anything in excess can be sin.) I tried hard to run from that thought,
but there was always a nagging that something
wasn’t right. Caffeine in my soda was controlling
me.
I have asked God over and
over to forgive me for my addiction to a certain soda. I would repent and try and change for awhile,
but eventually it went back to normal. I
was consumed by my soda.
I have been wondering lately
why it seemed like my prayers were not going anywhere. Could this be why?
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The first
prerequisite for prayer power in our lives that we study is “no known unconfessed
sin in the life of the pray-er.”
If I want the power of
prayer to be evident in my life I need to confess my sins regarding my soda
controlling me. Then I need to repent
and turn from it.
It is interesting because I
am doing another blog called, www.insideoutsidemakeover.com
The Journey with God that we will be
doing next week is “Do I Really Want to Give Up My Craving?”
It is so like God to bring
these two blogs together so my eyes are opened to the unconfessed sin in my
life.
It is time to surrender and
pray.
Dear God,
Please forgive me for
allowing soda (does anything control you?) to control me instead of you. I want to obey you and repent of my sin and then turn from it. I will need your help to resist my temptation. Thank you for what you are going to do. In Jesus name, Amen.
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