removing sin from our lives

Wow! Three posts in two days . . . I must be on a role!

Anyways, I've been thinking a lot lately about the times in Scripture where it tells us that we need to remove sin from our lives . . . and that we need to remove it all costs.

God has been challenging me a lot on this in my life recently. It's one thing to be convicted of sin and confess it and ask for forgiveness. It's another thing to get serious about removing that sin, particularly if it's a habitual sin, from your life completely. I mean, I have sin in my life and I've confessed it to God and asked His forgiveness for it many times . . . and yet I always seem to fall back into it.

Well, lately God has been challenging me to get serious about doing something to change this in my life. And that has meant giving up some the activities that I fill my time with and some of the movies and tv shows I usually watch. And it's not always easy . . . especially when you have to explain to friends why you won't do a certain activity anymore when there's nothing inherently wrong or sinful about it . . . it's just something that causes you to stumble.

But sometimes with this kind of conviction it can be easy to get depressed and down on yourself. And I did and was. Yet, even in the midst of it all, God still loves us. He wants us to be becoming more like Christ and He will point out areas of sin in our lives where He desires change to come. But, He doesn't do that and then leave us to ourselves and to feel bad about ourselves. He loves us still and He walks beside us through the process of changing that area of our lives.

For the past week, I've been trying to make sense of all that went on between me and God at the retreat I was at last weekend. (Besides being a time of building on some existing friendships and beginning some new ones . . . which was awesome! Every chance that there is to build community with brothers and sisters in Christ should be taken advantage of. But that's a side rant.) I think this is another one of the major lessons that God had for me while I was at that retreat. That even in the midst of the mess of my life as I try to sort things out and change those areas, with God's help of course, that aren't pleasing to Him, God still loves us with an unfailing, unchanging love that we will never fully understand this side of eternity.

What an amazing God we serve!