Accepting God’s Love When We’ve Fallen Into Sin
We know we need to confess and repent whenever we’ve fallen into sin. But the third step, accepting God’s love and forgiveness, can be hardest to do when we’re struggling with sin.
Holy Spirit gives three things to do when we find ourselves having fallen into sin . . . again. He said we must confess. And we must repent. And then he said something a bit unexpected. He said we must accept His love.
We’re all familiar with the first two steps. Confession—being honest and owning our mistakes. And repentance—turning from our sinful ways and being willing to do what it takes to try to avoid doing these things again. These first two steps are front and center to the decisions we make, and what happens in our hearts, when we decide to follow Jesus. We’ll continue having to confess and repent for our whole lives, but it was through confessing and repenting and believing in Jesus that we began following Him. So, as hard as they may be, we’re all familiar with them.
To even be followers of Jesus, we’ve necessarily and genuinely confessed and repented—to some extent. But it’s not so with the third step—accepting the love of God, even after we’ve blown it, again. There are lots of followers of Jesus out there—mature followers—who have very little understanding of the nature and the depth and the breadth of God’s love.
Because here’s the no-so-secret secret—it’s God’s grace: It’s His power that changes us, that kills sin, not what we do under our own power. So, if we’re cutting ourselves off from grace when we need it most, no wonder we’re still struggling with the same old sins!
So what can we do, if accepting His love is difficult?