Church,
Adolescents, many times, do stupid things, things that they all get to regret in their later years. Regardless of how many “good” things we have done, it never gave us the right to neither do a bad thing, nor deny any “bad” thing we had ever done. I learned my lesson.
Fear of punishment is never a friend of any man. This is why religion, while it seems friendly to any man, is mankind’s worst enemy. Because once the standard is violated, regardless of how many times it is violated, the consequences are most often merciless.
We need to acknowledge our weaknesses and maintain an awareness of them so that at the very least we keep them under control at their very first sign of manifestation.
Man don’t change. Man is natural. Man remains man. What can change is his understanding of himself.
The best anyone can do under whatever the influence, be it alcohol, drugs, stress, trauma, will always be the best they could do by their own might according to the challenged understanding they have at the time.
Without the knowledge of the love of God for us in spite of our wrongs , we will always succumb to seeking satisfaction for our natural senses.
Though we can’t always go to every person and apologize for our wrongs as much as we would like, being clear about them and acknowledging our weaknesses then and now are our first steps toward our attempts at not repeating the same errors.
Nevertheless, our hope and rest should never be in what we can do or want to do but are weak or prevented from being able to do, though naturally that’s what we want. Our hope and rest should never be in our ability to defend ourselves and fight, though naturally that’s what we’ve been trained in since infancy. Instead, our lasting hope and rest is in the mercy of God, the love of God who makes it rain both on the evil and the good and makes his sun shine on the righteous and the unrighteous.
Why didn’t an angel hold our hand like it did to Abraham? Why didn’t God change our mind and cause us to deter from the path of evil? Whatever our question be, God alone is our Redeemer. God alone, by his grace through Christ Jesus, redeemed us from both fear of shame and fear of punishment. When we remember such, we breathe and rest by grace through faith and neither by sight of what we suffer, nor by sight of what others suffer from us. There’s only one Savior for both the victim and the perpetrator.
“And so we know and rely on the love God has for us. God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them” (1 John 4:16)
Our sole dependency is the love of God shown through Christ Jesus.
Rejoice in Christ by grace to the glory of God , and not in reputations or works.
Jesus is the well of the living water, the Holy Spirit. 