Thursday, April 27, 2023
When God Turns Away
Listen! The Lord’s arm is not too weak to save you, nor is his ear too deaf to hear you call. It’s your sins that have cut you off from God. Because of your sins, he has turned away and will not listen anymore. (Isaiah 59:1-2 NLT)
After years of walking with the Lord, the apostle Paul said, “I don’t mean to say that I have already achieved these things or that I have already reached perfection. But I press on to possess that perfection for which Christ Jesus first possessed me” (Philippians 3:12 NLT).
The great apostle was saying, “I have so far to go. I have so much to learn. So much is still before me. I’m going to forget what is behind me, not only my past failures, but also my past victories. I want to keep growing. I want to press on.”
If we can look at our lives and say, “I don’t really need to study the Bible that much anymore. I think I have it down. I don’t know that I need to go to church that often. I think I’ve heard all there is to hear,” then we are far from where we need to be.
If we have a sense of self-satisfaction about our spiritual lives and a resulting complacency, that is an indication that we’re in bad shape spiritually.
Certainly we have things in our lives for which we need God’s cleansing on a regular basis. There are sins of both commission and omission. A sin of commission is breaking a commandment, while a sin of omission is not doing what God tells us to do.
If we don’t confess our sins, then our prayer lives will come to a halt. And if we are holding on to some kind of sin, then we won’t have our prayers answered in the affirmative. The psalmist wrote, “If I had not confessed the sin in my heart, the Lord would not have listened” (Psalm 66:18 NLT).
The closer we are to God, the greater our sense of sin will be.
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