Hello again.
May the grace and peace of God through Jesus Love find you.
God loves us, but we can't feel it when we feel ashamed and guilty. It is good to confess our sins to God openly and honestly, usually at home in private is enough, but sometimes we need Godly counsel in our lives. I am relating to you in a deep way, and I have been through a struggle with shame and guilt this year, or "unrepented sin." This type of sin is dangerous to us because it can mess up our heart and mind pretty bad. The Key to remember, when it feels like God is very unhappy with you, is to remember that He may surely be disappointed that we ended up in sin, but He is loving and wants to help us up out of the mess once and for all, so we can be clean and sin no more in those areas. He wants to help us repent and turn back our face to Jesus and the people who truly love us, His church, the true body of true Christ believers. Not Christian people helping us, but God Himself, Jesus our only True Friend helping us internally and externally. Yes we should obey the word of God to find the true joy and true love of Christ. Don't keep company with negative people giving you guilt and shame. Tell them to knock it off for goodness sakes, and if they don't, spend less time with them. Yes they may point out your sin to help you be aware of it causing you misery, but then a true friend will be uplifting and helpful. If your "friends" are poking fun alot and bringing you down, consider a strong commitment to have healthy Christian fellowship or friendships as part of your strong commitment to Christ to live on the right path by being involved with some Christian group.
Shame is other people being angry at you and making you feel bad. Guilt is when we are angry and even hateful to ourselves. God wants us to experience His love, so we must commit to not being angry at ourselves because we are recommitting to move forward in the right direction. Shame is especially harmful when it comes from less mature Christians who make you feel like dirt, but most of why we feel like dirt is because of guilt. Jesus did not come into the world to make you feel guilty, but to set you free from the very things that will always bring guilt and misery, that darkness that sin brings.
This road of repentance will only take as long as you decide to remain listening to bad thoughts from yourself, which leads you to feel bad and keep acting bad, to keep sinning. If you are still feeling bad, consider that you have not fully committed to yourself and to Jesus to be changed by His love. Then lastly, there is a big part of it that has to do with relaxing and not stressing. Do not be afraid, for the Lord God is with you. Relax while you do all of your work, not false relaxing that leads into laziness... laziness produces further stress. Read some of the Bible. Pray. Write down what you believe God is speaking to you. Share that with close friends, or even here. Commit your plans to the Lord, and your plans will succeed.
Proverbs 3 will make the most sense when you remember the true love of Jesus is the new law, the old law being passed away as this new law completes the old law. Love yourself. That is a law. You will break that law when you sin against God, man, and yourself. You will feel unloved, that is why Jesus wants to set us free from unloving guilt which is from sin. With man, it would be impossible, but with Jesus, all things are possible. How?
I pray for you to accept true love. Read in John about seek and you will find, knock and the door will be opened, ask and it will be given to you. This is speaking about not only forgiveness, but the gift of God's true love through the Holy Spirit. It is possible to grieve God's love with sin, making it hard to appreciate the presence of His love in our heart which has become polluted by sin. After reading John, read 1 John, a letter to believers.
Again, I pray you accept true love. In 1 John, the very close friend of Jesus reveals that we walk in true love of God (agape), not worldly love or lust, not only friendship love. God can take our love to the highest level when we begin first to relax (while working) and enjoy Jesus in our life, and second, when we fully dedicate our heart to Jesus, and third, when we genuinely ask for God to send and strengthen His love inside of your heart! Ask! Sincerely ask...
Jesus states to consider the cost, the cost is our whole heart, our whole life. That would be impossible to give perfection to God on our own performance, it is not possible. We need a helper. So as you will read in John, the helper Jesus will send is the Holy Spirit, the person of God in our heart to fill us with genuine love, mercy, and grace. Genuine love, grace, and mercy go against human nature, it is an undeserved love, undeserved forgiveness, and undeserved blessings. Every good thing in our life, we did not deserve, God gave us these good things because He loves us!! He wants to keep bad things out of your life (sin) because He is very strict? No!!! Because He loves us!!!! (He doesn't want us to be happy in sin, He wants us to feel a deep respect and love that He gives us from HIM as an undeserved gift through Jesus at the cross).
Don't try so hard... it is a Christian song playing on the radio. Allow God to love you. Letting go and letting God, surrendering our life completely to God, these are about primarily deciding to let Jesus be our Father, our best friend, our Uplifting Confidant, our counselor, and our emotional healer. And of course if we genuinely love God, we follow the still small whisper of our heart from Him!!! Healing can take some time, temptation will quiet down after time, but sometimes people are completely washed clean of all the dirt so fast!!!
That happened to me in 2011!!! WOW! What an idiot I was to go back to some of my old sinful ways when I had received the ultimate gift of a lifetime! Now I struggle with feeling like you, just yucky at times. When you decide to get completely out of homosexual stuff and other sexual sin, drugs, and other things that I promise on God's word are open doors of misery into your heart (sin =misery), at first sin gives yourself (your flesh) a temporary emotional boost but you feel even worse later. Once you understand sin is misery, you will hate sin!!! You hate being miserable. Just when you receive God's forgiveness, the only way to keep being forgiven is to forgive others. That is where i fell short. I am writing to you as if you are myself, hoping that you can feel some genuine love from God. Forgiveness is actually freely given love, something you might find in short supply around the circle you have been in. me too. I have to change my life too. I have to let go of the old that I have been hanging on to. Why hang on to misery? (I'm smart in my head, but my emotions are not as smart, and they want me to hang on to old things that will surely bring misery.)
When you are ready to give up misery, then you are ready to start a true walk with God. That is the Good News!!!! Yes God will get you started without being a perfectionist about it!!!
God will help change your heart and mind, God will help you when and only when you are willing to be changed by Him by cooperating with Him, obeying your true heart from Him (not your emotions!) and letting it be rebuilt by studying God's word. Proverbs 3, psalm 23, John, and 1 John are all good places to start reading.
Pray, God you are the potter and I am the clay. Take my life, all of it, mold it, Jesus forgive me and come back into the center of my heart and life. Until you are genuine with yourself and God about not living in self desires (sin = misery), you will not progress much, but you will keep slowly moving forward until that time when you are truely ready. I hope you won't wait too long, no one knows the day or hour that will be our last day on earth. Let's make it worthwhile and stop living in a life displeasing to ourselves, God, and our fellow travelers in this life. Everyone wants you blessed so you can be a blessing, not cursed so you are bringing others down.
Finally, a song for you. If we have to start somewhere, why not here, if we have to start sometime why not now...
Another song for you. Hey, don't write yourself off yet, don't worry if your good enough for someone else. Just do your best, give God everything that you have, and don't worry what the bitter hearts are going to say. It just takes some time, everything will turn out right, just keep on seeking the Lord, keep on walking to the right.
Get in a loving and accepting church, but not a wishy washy place that people won't call you out on being in sin, after all, you want to know what is causing you misery if you can't see it or understand it, get around some loving people that can encourage you on paths of right living and most importantly right believing. Friend, believe the good news of the Gospel. In Jesus Christ, you are forgiven! (you are forgiven when you repent and turn away from misery = sin for good, not just for saying your sorry while planning to continue in misery, how is that going to make a person less miserable? How would that set a person free from misery?)
Don't feel so bad. We have all made bad mistakes. Stop it. Knock it off. Get out of self-pity. Get going toward what I promise you is the most real and true love ever ever, the Only true love of God that comes through Jesus. Be a person enjoying life and God, not wishing you were dead or that somehow everything was different. Make it different. Let God lead you. Allow God to forgive you. Let the Bible ring true in your heart by you reading it yourself!!! Perhaps listen to an annointed reading of the bible through sermons online. And when God points out that you are miserable in sin in the Bible, prayer, sermons, and friendship with other Christians...
it is only because he wants you to come and live a better life of genuine love, one that is challenging and definitely worth it. Jesus is worth getting a smile on our faces because after all, he will wipe away all of your pain and tears when we agree to genuinely follow Him by getting out of sin and genuinely loving others.
This is just to get you started, i hope you find some friends that have gotten out of trouble for longer than myself.
Please reply after you have a chance to digest and chew on what is here for you. Jesus has an awesome gift to give you, it would be a shame to leave it under the cross unopened, it would be a shame to walk away from God embarrassed of being in misery when He wants to clothe us with His love and respect and throw our embarrassment away forever. The cost is wanting to become a new person, and the cost is worth it! Walk away from misery and when it comes calling you back with all of the seductive lies of comfort and acceptance, remember that Jesus loves you, and that misery is from hell through evil and evil does not love you.
Your friend through Christ,
keepgoing
