Everybody knows what it is to struggle with sin – whether you want to admit it or not. Well, this book is telling you to admit it! At different times in our lives, we all try and fail, we all fall and get up again, only to fall again and feel discouraged.
For the good that I want to do, I do not; but I practice the very evil that I don’t want to do.
(Romans 7:19)
It's so easy to fall back into old ways, that's why we need to ask God to help us.
Do I really want to change? Yikes...what a question.
Well, yes, I want to change, but....
There are no buts...you have to commit to wanting to change. Change is difficult and you cannot do it with any of the hundreds of self-help books at Barnes & Noble...you have to allow God to change you.
Step one is repentance. Repentance involves our emotions and will, but it begins with a chance of mind. All sin has wrong thinking in it. In our sinful nature, we say...just this once...I can handle this...nobody else has to know. Repentance is putting those ugly lies that we tell ourselves out in the open and calling them what they are...SIN. When I sin, I deceive myself. When I repent, I turn my mind from that deception.
When repentance happens, it leads to two things:
First, confession. “If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9). I have to see sin the way He sees it. That's a scary thing. You have to make things right on a verticle level first, you have to make it right between you and God.
The second thing that happens when I genuinely repent is I make restitution. Zacchaeus is the example James gives us for this (Luke 19:8). If you wrong someone, you must make it right with them. If you lie, go back to the person(s) and tell them the truth, if you steal from someone, give it back, if you hurt someone, physically or emotionally, ask for forgiveness. Do whatever can be done to make it right on the horizontal level after it is right between me and God. That’s restitution.
Both confession and restitution are easy to understand, terrifically difficult to do, but the only way to a right relationship with God. – James MacDonald
