When God Turns Away

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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