“But now that you’ve found you don’t have to listen to sin tell you what to do, and have discovered the delight of listening to God telling you, what a surprise! A whole, healed, put-together life right now, with more and more of life on the way! Work hard for sin your whole life and your pension is death. But God’s gift is real life, eternal life, delivered by Jesus, our Master.” Romans 6:22-23 MSG
We give so much power to sin. We say to ourselves, "enemy tempted me," "it's my flesh," or "my sinful nature."
Through Christ, God's gift to us is freedom from sin, guilt, shame and condemnation which rob you of joy and distract you from your heavenly calling. He frees us from always having to meet the standard...giving you freedom to be yourself!!
My husband and I made a choice to stop sleeping together before we were married, we were new Christians and so making this change was new to us too, but God prompted us and we listened. We stopped focusing so much on our downfalls and instead focused on his love, forgiveness and compassion for us.
He didn't judge us, He loved us,
He wasn't disappointed in us, He saw our potential,
He didn't want to stop us from having fun, He wanted us to experience more of life in its fullness!
It's not that Jesus is looking at us saying, "you must, you must, you must," he is saying "there's better, there's better, there's better!"
We get to listen to God; we have a relationship and an intimacy with Him.
Until we learn to focus more on this and less on sin, we won't truly know what a full and "put together life" feels like.