Why do you struggle with condemnation?
It’s because you have no peace.
Feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace: Having your feet “Shod,” or “Secure,” in your shoes, is what gives you traction or footing in the heat of the battle. (Whether you know it or not, you are in a battle right now)
We feel condemned so much of the time because we think that we’ve really "missed", God and somehow "can’t make it back". We somehow get a picture of this imagined spiritual landmark that we are certain we "should be at by now," and so we miss the peace.
Without peace, a person will get into a mode of striving, wanting to be at some predetermined "place", that they feel they "should be at by now" in their walk with God. The only trouble is that this kind of mindset opens a huge door that allows frustration to come in. Because now, according to your perception, you are so far from where you feel you should be that you enter into the striving mode.
Striving is trying to compensate for a spiritual position by frantically “seeking God.” (It is equivalent to cramming the night before a big exam. It is usually not a pretty sight.)
We forget, God is always with us, whether we are doing what’s right or not. Our position in God is not lost simply because we fall or fail. What happens though - as we move in our journey – is the inner things in our "being" are exposed. We are only tempted by our own lusts. (James 1:14) This means if you succumb to temptation, you really had a capacity to fall to it the whole time. Adequate pressure was simply applied to your vice.
So if you’ll look at what you feel is "so unforgivable", in yourself, all you are seeing is a capacity that God saw from day one. It didn’t seem to offend Him then, you just made it to a place in Him where the Devil, your enemy, felt it was time to test you and you failed.
Big Whoopee Do! We have lost the whole point of the journey if we think that falling and falling and falling again is utter failure. No! Even in the natural, a baby when growing up will fall. (But you could say they failed.) Even as babies and young children are learning and developing they make mistakes and "fail", but not really. Because who they are in their developmental stages is only learning, and failure is part of the learning process.
I feel that peace can come through understanding. Hopefully you have some peace to keep standing. Step back and assess the situation out of peace and understanding.
Source: www.iktusnetwork.com | Print Version
