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Thursday, March 20, 2014

Live Before You Die - day 9

If you are still breathing, it is never too late for God to intervene and restore what the locust and canker worm have eaten.  Disobedience to God's will is not a trivial matter.  God's grace does not guarantee that we will never have to live with negative consequences of our actions.  Many times, even though God forgives and restores, there are still scars that remain from disobedience, and often the process of correcting our errant route is long and painful.

If you are going in the wrong direction, before you do anything else, you need to stop!  Even if your mistake was not caused by deliberate disobedience against the known will of God, you need to acknowledge your mistake and ask for forgiveness.

For the child of God repentance should be a lifestyle.  To repent means to "turn," to change one's mind and direction.  We tend to think of repentance as primarily turning away from something, as in turning away from sin and making a one-hundred-eighty-degree change to the opposite direction. It is what you turn to that makes the difference. If we think of repentance only as a one-hundred-eighty-degree turn, then we fail to understand that sometimes a minor but crucial fine-tuning is necessary to keep us calibrated with the heart of God.

Repentance is the practice of the righteous.  We must constantly turn our hearts to God - from darkness to light, from the flesh to the Spirit, from the temporal to the eternal, from death unto life.  Sometimes repentance may have nothing to do with sin at all.  It may simply be a slight correction in mind-set or attitude that brings our spirits back into alignment with the Spirit of God.  Turn to Jesus and you will automatically turn from sin.

There is a big difference between learning from the past and living in it.  We need to learn from our mistakes lest we repeat them. But we cannot go back and change the past. We must move on with the remaining time we have and live from this moment forward in obedience to the will of God.  To live in the past is to insult the spirit of grace and the sacrifice Jesus made on the cross.  He paid the price so you could be forgiven from the mistakes of the past.  If you have been washed in the blood of Jesus, God does not condemn you, and neither should you condemn yourself.

Daniel Kolenda, Live before you die

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