Can Sin Win?

Been spending a lot of time in the presence of God these days and there are just certain truths that i've been learning and meditating on..

The worship wars are set... satan wants to keep God's people from worshipping Him and from fulfilling their true destiny, what they were created for, which is to worship Him... so he comes along tempting the people of God sin.. he's still doing it now as he did in the garden... but let's look at what happens...

Can sin really keep us from the presence of God? God delights for us to be in His presence.. that's what we're made for.. for fellowship with Him.. and that's what Adam and Eve experienced daily in the garden where they would meet with God, walk with Him and talk with Him... now when sin came, remember that God still came down and kept His appointment... and He was looking for them.. but where were they? They were in hiding.. though man has sinned, it wasn't God who said "I'm not gonna come down there and be among a bunch of sinful ppl.." it was man who went into hiding! And this is a terrible and awesome truth for us to grasp in understanding how we enter His presence cos it's so true even in our lives today... Today when we try to enter His presence, we always look at ourselves, our own limitations and what we have done and we feel guilty and we end up not wanting to enter in.. even after we have sinned, we end up going into hiding and that's what prevents us from accessing His presence.. not that He casts us away but we refuse to meet with Him in the first place and access the throne of grace! And can you imagine how God feels on the other side of it? Here He is just waiting for us to come and meet with Him while we go into hiding...

Now i'm gonna say something so radical that it sounds almost heretical.. do you know that sin doesn't keep us from God?? It really doesn't (unless of course you persistently choose sin over God).. cos God's abundant grace has already made every provision for sin and transgression through the blood of Jesus shed freely for all mankind! At the cross, sin has been defeated! So sin cannot keep us from God! But what will? and what does? We keep ourselves from God... In our failure to approach Him and humble ourseves before Him to ask for His grace.. in our somehow warped view that God is out to get us and is just waiting for that one act of transgression to cut us off from His Kingdom.. How small-minded we are! And it is this mindset that keeps us from experiencing the depths of His love and presence in worship... It is this that prevents us from functioning in our destiny, and what we're created for- which is to worship him and walk with Him.. and spending time away from God destroys us cos we're going against our very purpose, the very purpose by which our constitution as human beings were made, which is to worship Him...

Sometimes we think that after we sin for a particular moment, God has left us forever and it would take a whole lot of pleading and begging with Him to somehow come back... that's a lie.. from my personal experience.. when i've sinned against God, there was a time that the Holy Spirit told me "I am with You"... now how does that work out? i thought i've sinned and therefore You've left me? nope... He's so near.. why? Because He loves us and wants to get us out of the daily things that beset us... cos if He really leaves us all alone, then nothing can help us! And He's just waiting for that one spark of agreement to bring us back.. And he will arrange circumstances in our lives to bring us back, even using everyday people to speak to us.. twice i remember that He anointed my uni lecturers that when they were lecturing at a particular instance, He used their words to speak to me regarding certain things in my life... my marketing lecturer was lecturing and he said what do you do when you offend a customer? Simple- just go and apologise. Sometimes, you need someone higher than you to sort it out so talk to your superior... and to me, that was prophetically speaking of God's call for us to come into His grace and forgiveness if we just repent.. of course it's not enough for us to do it on our own but we have our superior, our boss, our Great High Priest whose blood speaks better than the blood of Abel.. and we have Him speaking on our behalf! it's Him pursuing us.. in this dance, He takes the lead and if we trip somehow along the way, He catches us and continues with us and teaches us how to dance and flow with Him better!

The reason why we feel the pain of sin and feel bad our communion with Him is broken when we sin in the first place is because we are connected to Him.. that's almost like a paradox but it's true.. we feel the pain cos we know the Holy Spirit grieves inside of us.. we're united with Him so we feel it too! and if He's in there grieving, that means He's still in there! That means we are not totally helpless and that we're not cut off from Him and that there's still hope for us to return to that sacred place of communion! So we're not to go off on our own and sulk at our failures.. He's still there!

Ok.. so now we understand the depths of His grace.. so by His grace we return back to Him and come once again in that place of communion.. But satan of course doesn't want us to give more worship to God.. the truth is that satan is defeated so he knows his end and he's not gonna win.. so what does he do in the meantime? he wants to make sure that God receives the least worship possible and that the saints dun enter in their inheritance.. so he makes them live in the shadow of the past and feel guilty about that sin although they have already repented of it and God has already received them by grace.. so in the end, they dun worship but just live in a benign state of impotence and status quo, contented enough to just get their foot into the kingdom... now that's a sad life! that's cos though they know God's grace to forgive, they dunno the power of the blood of Christ to heal and restore! And recently God just did something prophetic in my life to show me the power of His grace and restoration.

I made a really dumb mistake and as a consequence of many wrong decisions i have undertaken in the past week, i missed this particular Subject Pool slot in school (it's some compulsory survey that we're supposed to go for).. and if you missed it, that means you'll get a penalty.. like if you missed a 1.5hr slot, you'll get 1.5 marks deducted from your total (the highest is 2.5)... and so in order to make up for the penalty, you'll have to sign up for more slots.. the thing was that i missed a 1.5 hr slot and there were not enough slots for me to sign up for to make up for my -1.5hr penalty!! I was angry with the system but i knew that i had only myself to blame for making those bad decisions and reaping the consequences... so i appealed to a higher authority... i emailed the supervisor in charge and asked her what i could do to make up for it... guess wad.. she emailed me back and i didn't have to make up for it... she excused me from that 1.5 hr slot that missed so i didn't have to pay the penalty! No strings attached... so on my paper, next to the course i missed, i have the word "Excused" written courtesy of the supervisor! And so we have a Supervisor up there in heaven who knows our mistakes and who knows that we can't make up for the consequences of the bad decisions that we make.. but when we appeal to Him, His blood is like that "Excused" stamp on my paper.. and He restores and repairs even the consequences of our mistakes so that we dun have the guilt of our past hanging on us! That's the power of the blood of the Lamb!

Ok... but in this spiritual warfare, satan still wants to rob God of worship so he keeps the believer in doubt and timidity.. satan whispers lies to their ears saying something like "you may have escaped this time but you'll end up sinning again in the future".. so although they have escaped their gloomy past, they now have a gloomy future ahead of them when their just waiting to repeat the same mistake and sin that they have committed previously... how now? One of the verses that God gave me recently is very familiar.. He has not given us a spirit of fear/timidity but of power, love and of a sound mind/self-discipline... what that means is that we are not to look to ourselves.. He has not given us a spirit of fear or timidity, looking to ourselves or our own limitations in how weak we are to possibly stumble over the same issues over and over again.. we're not to look at that.. God loves us in our weakness and we have to trust Him to keep us from falling... He's given us a spirit of power to overcome temptations that come our way.. He's given us love that never fails (1 Cor 13) and helps us to see people not as objects to use for our selfish reasons but as people who have the potential to manifest all that God is.. and He's given us a sound mind.. a mind that can carry out self-discipline in the midst of the darkest of temptations.. a mind that can carry out and make rational decisions so that we're able to decide not to sin and please God instead... in other words, he has put within us the ability to overcome and be all that He is to the world.. so we dun have to worry about stumbling over the same issues over and over again cos His power is at work within us (Eph 3) and we have what it takes in the inside of us to overcome... but we must learn to access it.. we must learn to focus on it instead of our weakness and limitations.. and we must trust in Him... :)

So in the worship wars, we know that satan is defeated... can sin really win?? i believe not... maybe for some battles it has won... but the war is not over... and every new day is a new opportunity to experience God moreand and claim territory for Him. We have more opportunities to experience His faithfulness and divine attributes and have a testimony formed within us of who He is, a story written not just for men but for angels and demons to wonder at, causing them to bow in awe at the surpassing power and greatness of Christ. Jesus has won the victory!