A Deep Cleansing

Matthew 6:6 encourages us to pray behind closed doors. This is something I do quite regularly. When I pray in private, it’s usually at the end of my day as I lay in bed ready for sleep. Sometimes I think about my day and share my thoughts and feelings or reactions with God. Lying awake at night, the Holy Spirit will put people on my heart. Without knowing a thing, I’ll pray for them during the night, and then hear about their struggles the morning after. Still, there are times I can’t sleep because the Lord has brought some unconfessed sin to my attention and don’t feel at ease until I deal with it through prayer. After I’ve spent the night confessing my sins to God, I usually wake up the next morning feeling guilty and beating myself up over the previous night’s prayer of forgiveness. King David reminds us that doing so isn’t necessary. In Psalm 103 he writes:

The Lord is compassionate and merciful,

slow to get angry and filled with unfailing love.

He will not constantly accuse us,

nor remain angry forever.

He does not punish us for all our sins;

he does not deal harshly with us, as we deserve.

For his unfailing love toward those who fear him

is as great as the height of the heavens above the earth.

He has removed our sins as far from us

as the east is from the west.

Psalm 103:8-12 NLT

Here, we learn how God treats someone with a truly repentant heart. Verse 8 says He is compassionate and shows us mercy. Charles Finney describes mercy as an act that frees a guilty party. Its exercise consists in arresting and setting aside the penalty of law, when that penalty has been incurred by transgression. What this means is, when the Holy Spirit convicts us of our sin and we bring it to God asking for His forgiveness, having compassion on us, He withholds the punishment we would have received for disappointing Him.

The psalm continues by reminding us when we confess our sins, the Lord doesn’t bring it up again. After we deal with our sin in prayer, He forgets about it. 1 Corinthians 13:4-5 says that love is patient and kind. True love doesn’t annoy us by bringing up our past sins. It won’t because true love doesn’t keep a record of our mistakes. When we ask God to forgive us He wipes the slate clean. David knew this and reminds us by saying just how far God removes our sins. Verse 12 tells us that God removes our sin as far as the east is from the west. David uses this as a metaphor. An aspect of God’s forgiveness includes having our sin permanently gone. Cast away, never to be found again.

Suppose you wanted to find the exact point that east turns into west. So you begin by traveling east, hoping to pinpoint the very moment your compass tells you you’re now traveling west. You could continue in that direction forever. The truth is at no point in that journey would you be traveling west. The same thing would happen if you traveled east. You wouldn’t be able to pinpoint the moment you travel west. You won’t find it because no such point exists. God does the same thing with our sin. When we confess our sins to God, He takes our convictions and throws them away. From that point on they are impossible to find.

I’d like to say every time the Holy Spirit convicts me of my sins, I deal with it right away. Sadly, that’s not always true. Sometimes I ignore the Holy Spirit’s nudging. When I do, I wake up the next morning still prompted to spend time before God asking Him to cleanse me of the sin that separates us. This usually continues until I seek the Lord’s forgiveness.

1 John 1:8-9 says: “If we claim we have no sin, we are only fooling ourselves and not living in the truth. But if we confess our sins to him, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all wickedness.” How have the last few days been for you? Do you have an overwhelming sense of guilt you can never escape? If so, please spend some time before God in prayer. It could be the Holy Spirit convicting you of an unforgiven sin.

Begin Again by Susan Coolidge

Every day is a fresh beginning,

Every day is the world made new;

You who are weary of sorrow and sinning,

Here is a beautiful hope for you-

A hope for me and a hope for you.

All the past things are past and over,

The tasks are done and the tears are shed;

Yesterday’s errors let yesterday cover;

Yesterday’s wounds, which smarted and bled,

Are healed with the healing which night has shed.

Yesterday now is a part of forever,

Bound up in a sheaf, which God holds tight;

With glad days, and sad days and bad days which never

Shall visit us more with their bloom and their blight,

Their fullness of sunshine or sorrowful night.

Let them go, since we cannot relieve them,

Cannot undo and cannot atone;

God in His mercy, receive, forgive them;

Only the new days are our own,

Today is ours, and today alone.

Here are the skies all burnished brightly,

Here is the spent earth all reborn,

Here are the tired limbs springing lightly

To face the sun and to share the morn,

In the chrism of dew and the cool of dawn.

Every day is a fresh beginning;

Listen, my soul, to the glad refrain,

And, spite of old sorrow and older sinning,

And puzzles forecasted and possible pain

Take heart with the day, and begin again.

When you follow the desires of your sinful nature, the results are very clear: sexual immorality, impurity, lustful pleasures, idolatry, sorcery, hostility, quarreling, jealousy, outbursts of anger, selfish ambition, dissension, division, envy, drunkenness, wild parties, and other sins like these. Let me tell you again, as I have before, that anyone living that sort of life will not inherit the Kingdom of God.  But the Holy Spirit produces this kind of fruit in our lives: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against these things! Those who belong to Christ Jesus have nailed the passions and desires of their sinful nature to his cross and crucified them there. Since we are living by the Spirit, let us follow the Spirit’s leading in every part of our lives.

Galatians 5:19-25 NLT