It Is So Easy to Sin

I realize it is so easy to fall into the trap of being legalistic, ritualistic or even helping God further His Kingdom. Earlier in my journey after being convinced that I have received healing and daily thanking God and claiming His promises, I had begun to spend lesser devotion time with God. Partly, I didn’t have much to plead with God so I felt guilty I spent lesser prayer time with Him. Thankfully, King Wai brought me out of that “feeling”. He said we are already IN His presence, so it didn’t matter if we spent 10 minutes or 10 hours with Him. Let’s not be ritualistic about it.

Last night, I shared with my cell group on how to pray and Wendy said not everyone is at my level of prayer and King Wai said let’s not get into a formula. I just wanted to share what I learned and to apply it. If I hadn’t shared our knowledge would be limited to what we have learned all the while. But fair enough, it goes to show how easily we can be caught up in formulas and rituals or worse still feeling our prayers are not heard if we forgot to bind a certain spirit.

Once, on a dry period, I had nothing to blog and feeling discouraged that there did not seem to be anything revelation from God to blog about. Then, when I visited Fee’s blog, I started to cry when I read one of her articles referring to me. I asked God to forgive my sin for really, it is when I share my own personal experience with God to all of you is when others are blessed in one way or another and not if I just wrote an article on my own strength. If I wrote on my own strength, it would be easy to fall in the sin of judging others and not taking the log out of my own eye first.

That day on 24 August 2009, I wrote this in my journal as a reminder of how easy it is for me to sin and lose focus from God AGAIN:

“Help me Oh Lord not to judge others. Help me to see from who I really am and what you have done in my life. Let my focus be on You and only You. How sinful I am Oh Lord. Help straighten my path again and help me seek Your face again. I am sorry Lord for hurting you. Oh, how fallen I am. I really need your grace. Stretch your hand again to me. I love You Lord. You mean everything to me.”

I want to share with you then how easy for each of us in First Baptist Church to sin. We have been an unrepentive church for the past 20 years maybe. Can we say we are without sins?

Romans 1:21,22,25

“For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools. They exchanged the truth of God for a lie….”

The scary part is "There can be no revival without repentance."

I was reading Henry Blackaby’s book “Experiencing God in Church” in Glad Sounds recently and there is this church called Faith Baptist Church in Saskatoon, Canada serving a community of about 135,000 people. Similar to our church, they must have faced trials for being far away from God. They had similar thoughts of whether God was still amongst them. Their church dwindled to only 95 people! I was so shocked! Could this be what we will see if we continue to see unrepentance in our church. I am at a lost how we can get everyone to repent because we can’t force people to repent. Only the Holy Spirit can convict of our sins and self righteousness but God cannot work in us if our hearts are hardened. Will our soul – our mind, will and emotion - choose to listen to God the Spirit or the devil?

I speak life to First Baptist Church that soon, we will come together to wash each other’s feet and hug each other and forgive each other. We will choose to REJECT all scheming, lobbying, manipulation, campaigning amongst us and just trust in the Lord and fully wait upon Him. We will let the Holy Spirit guide us.

Ephesians 4:21-25

“Surely you heard of him and were taught in him in accordance with the truth that is in Jesus. You were taught, with regard to your former way of life, to put off your old self, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires; to be made new in the attitude of your minds; and to put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness.
Therefore each of you must put off falsehood and speak truthfully to his neighbor, for we are all members of one body.”

Let the Holy Spirit guide us and renew our minds. Let us seek intimacy with God and ask Him to reveal to us in what areas in our life that we have to deal with.

Psalm 27:4
4 One thing I ask of the LORD,
this is what I seek:
that I may dwell in the house of the LORD
all the days of my life,
to gaze upon the beauty of the LORD
and to seek him in his temple.