In my own journey towards greater purity, I had to learn many, many lessons. Some lessons were easy to apply while others had to be repeated a few times before I finally caught on. One such lesson had to do with repentance and what it really meant. In my life I treated repentance for so long as something that I needed to do so that I could feel better – and quickly. I obviously didn’t enjoy the consequences of my sin, so I wanted to rush through the process of confessing my sin to God, informing one of my accountability partners, etc., so that I could go back to a normal life as soon as possible and forget about the little “blip” I had just done.
I also used to think that we all sin simply because we live in a fallen world. While that is true, I also used it as an excuse to not really look inward and find out what and where the root issues were that drove me to sin in the first place. I learned after falling time and time again that my act of repentance must consist of several things. It needed to consist of a conviction by the Holy Spirit, learning to confess from the heart and not just my lips. It also involved asking God to expose the root issues in my heart so that He could bring healing to whatever brokenness was there.
That is my prayer for all of us. Let’s continue to go to Him and pursue the purity and wholeness that He desires to bring about in our life. This quote from Max Lucado describes this process so well: “Our Savior kneels down and gazes upon the darkest acts of our lives. But rather than recoil in horror, he reaches out in kindness and says, ‘I can clean that if you want.’ “
End of article.