Month: May 2014

Every stressful situation in our life gives us an opportunity to turn to God in a relational faith and free us from the false ideas that we have accepted.  God is at work within us maturing our character helping us rid ourselves of the false ideas and formulas that make us feel comfortable but hinder true growth.  The molding of faith is the process of ridding ourselves of all the ideas and formulas that religious culture has formed in us or that we have formed and come to accept as truth.  Faith will come to him who passionately yearns for ultimate meaning.  Faith is the fruit of a seed planted in the depth of a lifetime of ups and downs.  The greatest obstacle to faith is to settle for half-truths and half-realities.  The Hebrew writer stated:   “But the righteous will live by faith. If he shrinks back, my soul has no pleasure in him.” But we are not of those who shrink back to destruction, but of those who have faith to the saving of the soul.”-Hebrews 10:38-39  Faith walks into the future of uncertainties trusting in God for what only He can do.  A relational faith with God that is not static but moves forward healing the soul.

 

Remorse and vain regrets do nothing to help us in our pursuit of God.  Mostly they hold us in bondage to our selfish thoughts.  Remorse is anguish of mind over a sense of guilt either real or perceived which results in vain regrets.  Living in past regrets is a source of pride.  As believers we should be concerned to live in a way that brings love into the world.  However, when we continue in vain regrets pride gets in the way of God’s redemptive work within our life and the life of others. The Psalmist said, “My flesh and my heart fails, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.” (Psalm 73:26)  Pride holds on to the failings of the past because we cannot understand how we could do such things.  We live it over and over again repeating it to ourselves and to others of the failed event that defined our life.  We continue to beat ourselves up instead of focusing on the redeeming work of Jesus on the cross. We can never go back and change actions in the past. We can only learn from those actions and bad choices and choose in the present to allow God to teach us.  Pride is the instrument by which learning is stifled in the believers life and the process of growing in grace is brought to a complete stand still.  Peter instructed the believer to “Grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ”.  We need to set our minds on the things above where Jesus is seated at the right hand of the Father interceding on behalf of the believer and not on remorse and vain regrets.  The Psalmist also said that “…my bones wasted away through my groaning all day long”.  This groaning of his past failure continued until the Psalmist placed God at the center of his life. Let go of past failures and the remorse and vain regrets that accompany failure and magnify Jesus and His redeeming work on the cross.