The enemy has lied to us and we accept it as basic truth.
When you sin, what is your response? Instant repentance.
What’s the result? The Lord forgives you.
Which means? You cleaned up the mess and are sin-free again. Right?
Yes, that is correct.
The only problem is that many of you never got yourself cleaned up in the first place. In the modern church, it is very easy to supposedly get saved without ever thoroughly repenting. That causes immense problems. You are trying to walk in the Spirit with the Lord Jesus. But you have large piles of garbage filling your soul. I remember, when I gave myself into Jesus’ hands, the first thing my Dad suggested (a couple days later) is that I sit down at a table with a legal pad and write down every sin I could remember. He knew I had been so stoned when I turned to the Lord that many things were in a fog of confusion.
As I recall, I filled five legal-sized sheets with two columns each as fast as I could write, off the top of my head. I showed him the sheets and he told me he didn’t need to see them—I did. Then he told me to ask Jesus to forgive me. I did and what a relief it was.
As a drug-crazed hippy in the sixties, I was a mess
That first major repentance helped, but I still had a lot of sin clogging up my mind and blocking my connection with the Lord Jesus. I had been seriously pursuing the occult, also. I was trying to explain what was going on inside me. I felt like I was constantly dealing with sin. I could accept that I was a dirty, nasty sinner. But I saw no escape. I felt like I was constantly sinning. There was no way to escape that. My Dad looked at me, “David, we are meant to live sin-free. I can show you how.”
Living sin-free, I needed that!
He showed me that there is a simple solution. Ask the Lord to show you all your sin. He’ll do that, but only if you ask Him to do it. “What you do is quietly, out loud, ask the Lord to show you everything. Then listen carefully. The first time it can be nearly overwhelming, but you’ve already repented of a lot of it. When you can’t take it any more, repent, then ask Jesus to forgive you.”
He told me that He still did this every morning and had since he met the Lord nearly twenty years earlier. “After a few days, all the Spirit had to show me was sin I had committed since that last time I asked. As I got cleaned up, I became much more aware of my sin. I developed a strong sense that I wanted to be clean. But I kept on sinning.
“Then one morning, the Lord stopped me and asked what happened to the sin? I knew the answer to that. ‘You forgive me and forget the sin. You justify me making me just-as-if-I-never-sinned.’ And it dawned on me. Once I was forgiven, the sin was gone, and I was free of it.
So, once I’m forgiven, I’m free of sin •••••| until the next sin
“What a joy that was! I began to ask the Lord to show me more often during the day. It transformed my life. I found that most of the confusion was gone. I could pray more freely. And He answered me more clearly.”
I did as my Dad suggested. It worked well. The cleanup routine became part of my relationship with the Lord. I discovered that I could hear Him when I was sin-free. He showed me how that changed things. He showed how to test the spirits speaking to me—using the first verses of 1 John 4.
It really helped, when I was ministering to people in our bible studies, if I cleaned myself up just before the meeting started. I could discern what was going on with myself and others. The Spirit would help me understand the verses we were reading. He would give me cross-references to the verses we were discussing, that I could share.
I’ll share more about this. Especially about how it transformed the ease of dealing with the demonic, and the help I could offer others.
It’s not a big positive thing you can do. It’s simply cleaning up the mess…and learning to keep it clean. It gets rid of the negative & brings you up to zero.
But, it’s amazing what a difference it makes to start clean.
This is REALLY EXCELLENT!!!