Skip to main content

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.  

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Being intentional with Joy

James 1: 2   “Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds”   Have you ever not been in a good mood? Have you ever felt like things are just not going your way? If you answered yes to any of those questions, it shows that you are human. Problems occur and things happen that can make us upset, and that is an unfortunate reality we have to face in this world .   For me, one of my resolutions this year is to be more joyful. If I had to make a book about the year of 2024, the title of it would be “ A sequence of difficulties” . In my life, it seemed I was experiencing problem after problem and issue after issue. I couldn’t escape them. The bitter truth is that problems and issues are inevitable, but our attitude towards them isn’t .   At th at time, I was angry at God for allowing all those things to happen to me, but in retrospect I can be grateful to see the work God was doing inside of me, the resilience he was building, ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Identity built through Christ

John 1:12    “ Yet to all who did receive him, to those who believed his name, he gave the right to become children of God”   Identity is always something I have struggled with. I believed that if I did not act a certain way with certain people I would not be accepted. I built my identity on the perception of others: letting other people's opinion of me dictate my value as a person. One thing I didn’t realise was that my value had already been written , something established long before I was even born. My value: your value, is built through Jesus. And so, we can’t let the opinion of others affect us, whether positive or negative because our identity is not built on the perception of others but of God. We are all seen di fferently by different people , maybe your someone’s brother or sister, a mum or a dad, or something else. The most common association t o our identity is our names. It’s what our friends , teachers and family refer to us by: an associat...
Post a Comment
Read more

Uniqueness through Comparison

Galatians 1: 10   “ Am I now trying to win the approval of human beings, or of God? Or am I t rying to please people? If I were still trying to please people , I would not be a servant of Christ”   In a world where there is so many different o pinions o n how you should act or behave, we see certain people, certain lifestyles and try to emulate and copy the way they walk and talk. But when we compare ourselves to Jesus, we set ourselves a part from this world.   There is nothing wrong with wanting material things: we might see a particular car someone has and wa nt that, or wear particular clothes , but we have to ask a question: do we want these things as simply materialistic things? Or are we wanting these things to seek the approvals of oth ers. If in the act of wanting those things makes us feel in adequate , insecure and less of, then it becomes problematic. I believe there is a innate desire to want better, to live better. I believe that sense of hope was ...
Post a Comment
Read more