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Your mistakes don’t define you

Proverbs 28: 13 

“Whoever conceals his transgressions will not prosper, but he who confesses and forsakes them will obtain mercy” 

Recently I’ve made a few irrational decisions and for a while, I’ve had to live with that guilt and disappointment. It’s made me unmotivated; it’s made me pessimistic, and it’s disrupted every aspect of my life: including God. If you're like me then when you make decisions that you're not happy with, it can feel like your whole world is going to end.  

One thing the enemy has been trying to plant in my mind is that I’m not deserving of being loved, or I’m not deserving of good things to happen to me. But let me tell you something, all of that is a lie, they are all things the enemy wants you to feel because he knows that if you feel like you're not deserving of love, how will you ever accept God’s love, and if you can’t accept God’s love, how could you ever accept salvation? You see how such a small plant of thought, can lead to so much? We don’t serve a God of guilt and disappointment, and the enemy will try make you think otherwise. The schemes of the enemy are to prance on any little setback you may experience and try to make you dwell in your mistakes, but your mistakes don’t define you, Jesus does.  

 

Looking more closely at the verse “conceal” means to trap and keep hidden, and for me that’s usually a natural response when I do things wrong. When Cain kills his brother Abel, God askes “where is your brother Abel?” (Genisis 4:9) God didn’t ask this question out of curiosity but rather repentance. He is omnipresent and can see everything, so he already knew Cain committed a sin, but the key thing is that God left room for repentance. We serve a forgiving God, and so any mistake you made that you think is too big for you to go back to him, God is given you an opportunity to repent.  

Sometimes we think shielding our mistakes from God, helps us but it only hurts us the more. Part of why God wants us to confess our mistakes to him is not only so that we leave room for repentance through a transparent heart, but it’s also because God doesn’t want you to carry that weight of secrecy. The root of all the enemies' schemes is to attack your faith and salvation, and when we try to hide our mistakes from God, the thoughts of the enemy creep in, and can turn what was once a mistake into a separation from God’s presence.  

So, confess and forsake your mistakes, because we serve a God that will grant mercy and forgiveness.  

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