So What Now?

At this point I’m just over a month out from having been completely freed from a spirit of addiction to pornography and lust. What am I suppose to be doing at this point in time?

I guess it would be important to know the man I used to be...before I was set free. I was a leader in our church. I lead people in worship. I loved to sing songs about God with people. I loved to “usher in the Presence” and see people moved by the Holy Spirit. I watched and encouraged and spoke into life change in other people’s lives while my own life remained unchanged. I knew the words, I knew the moves, I knew all the prayers to bring tears to your eyes and I could convince you to come to the alter.

At least I thought I did.

Interestingly on that note, isn’t it amazing that God will still use people and work through people despite how far they might be from Him? My heart was far from God. It had grown cold and hard from willful sin. I had allowed my conscience to be violated so much that my sin didn’t even bother me anymore. I foolishly argued that Grace will cover me. I’m saved by Grace!

Grace that doesn’t lead to life changing repentance isn’t the Grace of God at all. It’s a lie. It was the enemy convincing me that I didn’t need to pursue holiness.

And I bought the lie.

But then Jesus sets me free. He broke the chains of addiction and then used those chains to bind and cast out my sin. He took that spirit out and then replaced it with the fullness of His Grace.

When you’ve been set free from sin, made right before God, and filled with the Holy Spirit, God does this amazing thing in your life, if you’re still paying attention to His Voice.

It’s not that I do not sin anymore but when sin shows up in my life, the Holy Spirit will convict me and send me straight to the Father in repentance. When you allow the Spirit to invade and possess every part of your life, you begin to hate sin. As you pursue intimacy with the Father, you begin to look more like Him. So when sin is identified in your life, the Spirit will convict your heart and you’ll bring it straight to the Father. And He LOVES when His children seek to be more like Him.

So what now? To be perfectly honest, I’ve got more time in the day! Instead of searching the crevices of the internet for a cheap fix I have been using that time to become more intimate with the Father. Instead of following the rabbit hole that is the World Wide Web or wallowing in the mindless pit of television I have been pondering the Word of God and asking Him to make my life look more like Him.

What if we were more aware of our right standing with God? What if we better understood what God wants to do in our lives to make us more like Him. The Word says that we are to give our lives as a sacrifice as a reasonable act of worship. What if we began to give our whole lives and not just parts? For a LONG time I was only giving a part of my life to Him and that caused a lot of pain, shame, guilt, and condemnation.

Isn’t it strange that so often we offer a confession of faith in Jesus Christ but then only let him have a portion of our life? And the really strange part is that we don’t give him the messy parts that need healing. We only give Him our Sunday Best and the only time we talk with Him is when we’re asking a blessing over our meal or as a last resort in a difficult circumstance.

What if we believed that God expects us to give Him our whole life. What if we died, so that Jesus could raise us up to be “transformed into the same image [His Image] from glory to glory.” Glory to glory sounds way better than upset to upset, disappointment to disappointment, or mediocre to mediocre.

So what now? I’ve been freed from bondage to sin. Now I’m being transformed and living from Glory to Glory.

BriceEugene