The God Of New Beginnings: Hope For The LostSample

Pursuing Victory

The only way forward is not by willpower, not by trying as hard as you can to resist temptation, but by letting the Spirit take over the steering wheel of your life day by day, decision by decision. This is a complete upheaval of the old life in order to set up God’s new rule in the soul. It is allowing God to inhabit the very center of our lives, learning how to speak, think, act, and feel in sync with who he created us to be. 

Believe it or not, many broken people have tried really hard, again and again, to get their act together. They’ve failed every time, to the point of giving up hope. To them we say, “Stop trying. Let’s train instead. Let’s arrange your life around things such as community and worship and prayer and Bible immersion. All of these will help you align yourself with the Holy Spirit. This will be the direction of your life, even if it’s not the perfection of your life.”

This assumes you’re willing to make changes. Too often we are prone to assume we have rights, despite the fact that we claim to have made Jesus the Lord of our lives. Sometimes we have to submit to the higher authority of God, who wants you to live in the wide open spaces of his freedom. He is always calling us to rise above our emotions and passions, so we can be the people he called us to be. We must leave our place of bondage, and then we can figure out what to do with our freedom. If our motivation is to live life differently from the past, we make changes. We rearrange things. We keep up the training.

We let God set the expectations, “being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus” (Philippians 1:6). Our God takes the long view of all of this, and so must we. Jesus took every one of us just as we were and lifted us up from that point. We all start at different places. When you put your faith in Jesus, he forgives and accepts you, but he doesn’t always miraculously fix the damage you’ve caused. And setbacks in your walk toward wholeness and a new way of living are not unusual. But failure is not fatal. God is still the same loving, restoring God he has always been. 

You don’t have a whole lot of control over what’s behind you, but you have so much control over what is in front of you. God’s overall goal is our transformation. We serve a God who has seen it all, processed it all, and forgiven it all. Nothing we do would make him love us more, and nothing we do would make him love us less. The promise of Jesus is that, going forward, you can live in freedom with a clean conscience. At the core of your living, there can be peace, hope—and even joy.

Respond

How do you protect yourself from temptation to sin? What do you do when you have a setback?

Why is putting God at the center of your life key to overcoming temptation? Who in your life has walked with you toward wholeness? 

How can you support someone in their walk of transformation?