Apicontent

Saying We Are Sorry

Just as we need to make things right with God, so we need to try to make things right with those whom we have hurt by our sin. In fact, Jesus said that reconciliation is so important that it is worth interrupting worship for. “If you are standing before the altar in the Temple, offering a sacrifice to God, and you suddenly remember that someone has something against you, leave your sacrifice there beside the altar. Go and be reconciled to that person. Then come and offer your sacrifice to God” (Matthew 5:23-24).

Unlike in our relationship with God, we do not repent to other people when we have wronged them by our sin. But we do apologize to them. The same humble attitude is required whether we are healing our relationship with God or healing our relationships with other people.

We can take the first three prayers of repentance (“I am wrong,” “I am sorry,” “Forgive me”) and turn them into statements of contrition to use with other people. Someone who has gossiped about a friend, for example, can go to the friend and say, “I have wronged you by telling stories about you behind your back. I am sorry for that. Please forgive me.”

Of course, when we apologize like this, we do not have control over how the other person will react. For our part, we open the door to reconciliation. Perhaps the other person will slam it in our face, or perhaps he or she will step through. All we can do is be ready to embrace the other if we get permission.

And then, along with reconciliation, another part of making things right is restitution.

When a crooked tax collector named Zacchaeus put his faith in Jesus, he volunteered, “I will give half my wealth to the poor, Lord, and if I have overcharged people on their taxes, I will give them back four times as much!” (Luke 19:8). Perhaps Zacchaeus was inspired by provisions of the Old Testament law stipulating that thieves were to pay back two or more times what they stole (see Exodus 22:1-4).

Thievery provides a clear-cut measurement for restitution: if I have stolen a thousand dollars, I need to return the thousand dollars—if not more. With other kinds of sin, the restitution may not be so easy to measure. But that does not mean we cannot still find ways to make amends.

We can set the stage for the Holy Spirit to heal the damage our sin has done to other people and to our relationships with them. Along the way, we will also be completing our duty toward God, who cares not only about how our sin has affected Him but also about how it has affected others. In this way, making things right with others can be considered a part of our repentance to God.

Repentance is essential when we have been caught in a web of sin. It takes us one long step toward healing of the soul. But it is not the last step. We cannot relax yet, because some of the fiercest fighting may lie directly ahead.

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What Do You Believe about Others?

It stands to reason that if we cannot see ourselves as we are, there is no way that our perceptions of others can be accurate either. We look at others through lenses that have been distorted by our own mistaken beliefs. We do not see them as God sees them.

The same truths about humanity that apply to us apply equally to others: we are made in the image of God (that’s good); we have been damaged by sin (that’s bad); we are enabled by God to overcome our sin (that’s really good). And so we should look at people neither as objects we can use for our own desires nor as superior beings who have a right to dominate us. Perhaps that is in part why Jesus said, “Love your neighbor as yourself” (Matthew 22:39) and “Do for others as you would like them to do for you” (Luke 6:31).

We are equal with others in terms of our humanity and how much God loves us. This is the truth that can help us relate to others more wholesomely.

What Do You Believe about How Life Works?

Beyond our mistaken convictions about ourselves and other people, we may not understand how the world really works. And so our choices about how to act may be equally as faulty.

One commonly held false conviction has to do with the purpose of human life. Are we here on earth for our own pleasure, or are we here to honor God? Let’s face it: hedonism makes for a workable philosophy of life. However, those who follow the “eat, drink, and be merry” approach to life discover at the last that they are spiritually bankrupt and that what they had pursued all their lives adds up to a heap of ash. Serving God is the harder road to take. Still, Jesus said, “If you cling to your life, you will lose it; but if you give it up for Me, you will find it” (Matthew 10:39). In the upside-down economy of God’s kingdom, the counterintuitive idea is often proved correct.

Another common falsehood about life is that we can get away with our wrongdoing. Of course, in human justice, this belief is often true. Many a criminal has escaped being caught, and many a guilty defendant has manipulated the court system to escape judgment. As a result, perhaps we have come to believe that we will find a loophole to slip through God’s justice, too. But there is no such loophole. God knows all that we do, and He will call us to account in the Last Judgment. We ought to admit with David:

I could ask the darkness to hide me
and the light around me to become night—
but even in darkness I cannot hide from You.
(Psalm 139:11-12)

True, Christ takes the punishment for our sins upon Himself when we trust in Him, but this does not mean that our sins are not known and will not be revealed (as pardoned sins) on Judgment Day.

A third type of false conviction about life has to do with God’s commands. To many, the biblical refrain “Thou shalt not” speaks only of restriction. They want to shout, “Hey, I can do anything I want.” But when they violate God’s commands, they find that it brings hardship along with whatever fleeting enjoyment the sin may offer. God’s commands are actually designed to keep us safe and give us a life of peace. Our suffering due to sin is a measure of how wrong we are when we behave in ways that are not consistent with the sort of people God created us to be.

God’s commands are given for our good by our heavenly Father, just as a human parent instructs a small child in what the child may or may not do.

As you endure … divine discipline, remember that God is treating you as his own children. Whoever heard of a child who was never disciplined? If God doesn’t discipline you as he does all of his children, it means that you are illegitimate and are not really his children after all. Since we respect our earthly fathers who disciplined us, should we not all the more cheerfully submit to the discipline of our heavenly Father and live forever?

For our earthly fathers disciplined us for a few years, doing the best they knew how. But God’s discipline is always right and good for us because it means we will share in his holiness. No discipline is enjoyable while it is happening—it is painful! But afterward there will be a quiet harvest of right living for those who are trained in this way. (Hebrews 12:7-11)

When it comes to our convictions about life, just as with our convictions about ourselves and others, we have to make a choice: will we believe the messages we receive from worldly sources, or will we believe that what the Bible says is true? If we will let the Bible form our ideas and feelings, we will find it easier to abandon our sinful ways. This takes us to the next step in the process of breaking a sinful habit: repentance.

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A Strategy That Works

In this life “we see things imperfectly as in a poor mirror,” admitted Paul the apostle. Mirrors at the time Paul wrote were mere polished pieces of metal, and so their imperfect reflection, especially in the worst of them, well represented how the truths about life are often murky or incomplete to us. At death or when Christ returns, whichever comes first, we will “see everything with perfect clarity” (1 Corinthians 13:12). But how about until then?

On one of his missionary journeys, Paul and his companion Silas preached to a community of Jews living in a town called Berea in Greece. These people listened eagerly to the preaching, then “searched the Scriptures day after day to check up on Paul and Silas, to see if they were really teaching the truth” (Acts 17:11). They saw that the two men were in fact teaching the truth, and these Bereans believed in Christ.

This gives us our procedure. We can search the Word, not only to test what others are saying, but also to check up on what we ourselves think and feel about things. After all, we pick up ideas from many sources, and these may or may not be accurate. Some older translations of the Bible describe the Bereans as “noble.”¹ It is a noble thing to test all our convictions by biblical revelation.

The Bible lets us see into the areas where we have blind spots. The Bible “is useful to teach us what is true and to make us realize what is wrong in our lives. It straightens us out and teaches us to do what is right” (2 Timothy 3:16). In fact, we will not know that we are mistaken in our convictions until the Scriptures reveal our error. The Bible is a great gift that God has given us for our betterment.

The word canon—often used for the body of biblical writings—means “measuring stick.” Of course, each one of us has his or her own measuring stick for what is right, but our own measuring stick is never as reliable as that of Scripture. Let’s measure our beliefs by the Bible, identifying our false convictions and correcting them according to biblical truth. As our thinking and feeling become more godly, so will our acting. By correcting our convictions about ourselves, others, and life in general, we will be well on our way to beating the sin habit.

What Do You Believe about Yourself?

There are many false ways of seeing ourselves. These perspectives are fueled by guilt, insecurity, selfishness, pride, hate, and numerous other negative emotions. The input of others can serve to establish and reinforce these beliefs. Events in our lives may also seem to validate what we believe and have been told about who we are. The list of possible convictions about ourselves is almost endless. But are these convictions biblical?

We need to develop a scripturally based view of who human beings are. On the one hand, God loves us and has fashioned us in His own image. So we have great worth. On the other hand, we are finite, created beings who have been twisted by sin. Thus we have every reason for humility.

In the case of believers in Jesus, we have been made over anew. “Those who become Christians become new persons. They are not the same anymore, for the old life is gone. A new life has begun!” (2 Corinthians 5:17).

The following verse reveals what is new about us. “All this newness of life is from God, who brought us back to Himself through what Christ did.” Due to our salvation, we have access to a whole new source of life. We are not depending on our willpower, our education, or any other personal resource to live a good life; we are depending on God. And that dependence is rewarded.

There are many reasons why we do not always live like the new creations we are. These reasons include tendencies in our personality, spiritual warfare, and the conviction that these two verses in 2 Corinthians are not really true. Nevertheless, we are new creations—we know this because God said it. And we can live as such, by God’s grace.

God said to the Hebrews, “You must be holy because I am holy” (Leviticus 11:44). Jesus echoed this sentiment when He said, “You are to be perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect” (Matthew 5:48). God makes it possible for us to be holy through the power of His Spirit.

This image of what it means to be human, as revealed by Scripture, is more realistic than any of our false and distorted opinions of ourselves. Furthermore, it gives us a real basis for triumphing over the sin in our lives.

Other opinions about who we are may have their allure, but the truth about ourselves is what we must seek. “Be honest in your estimate of yourselves” (Romans 12:3).

¹ See the King James Version, Acts 17:11.

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Our enemy, Satan, does not like it when we repent of sin. He wants to pull us back into sin as soon as he can, and he will use every weapon in his arsenal to that end. That is why we can never relax our vigilance once we have repented. Life happens day by day, and we have to be prepared for what comes our way.

The great Reformer Martin Luther famously categorized our spiritual enemies as “the world, the flesh, and the devil.”¹ These words may sound old-fashioned in the twenty-first century, but they represent spiritual realities that are just as active and dangerous as they have ever been. The “world” represents values that contradict the values of God. The “flesh” represents our sinful desires that continue to trouble us as Christians. And the Devil is our personal spiritual enemy, who employs schemes to entice us into doing wrong.

As we seek to break a sinful habit, we must use the resources of God to defend against spiritual attacks—the fourth of the five steps. We do this by overcoming the world, putting our flesh to death, and resisting the Devil’s schemes.

Overcoming the World

God made the world and declared it “excellent in every way” (Genesis 1:31). And even though our planetary home has been damaged by sin, we should not think of it as inherently evil. But the Bible uses the term “world” in another way, that is, to represent a system of values that is opposed to God.

We see this perspective, for example, in Jesus’s words to His disciples “I chose you to come out of the world, and so it hates you” (John 15:19). Similarly, the apostle John warned, “Stop loving this evil world and all that it offers you. … For the world offers only the lust for physical pleasure, the lust for everything we see, and pride in our possessions. These are not from the Father. They are from this evil world” (1 John 2:15-16). The “world,” in this sense, is the enemy of Christians.

We are constantly exposed to worldly messages about what is important, and these messages can make it hard to live in a way that is consistent with our repentance. If we do not guard our affections, we will begin to place them on unworthy objects. The world is full of tangible things that can attract us. And of course, one person may place great importance on one thing, while another is interested in something else entirely. But if whatever appeals to us gets in the way of spiritual matters, as measured by our obedience (or disobedience) to biblical commands, it is a danger to us.

An exchange of value systems is possible. We are promised, “Every child of God defeats this evil world by trusting Christ to give the victory” (1 John 5:4). This means we go to Christ again and again for help to understand what He wants us to do and then to do it. We build our lives on the solid rock of His teaching, not the shifting sands of worldly wants. In prayer, we ask the help of His Holy Spirit to purify our value system so that over time we come to desire what God desires.

The apostle Paul told the Romans, “Don’t copy the behavior and customs of this world, but let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think” (Romans 12:2). If we have bought into the values of the world system, God can override worldly influences and supplant our unworthy values with His values. And as He does so, we become holy nonconformists.

¹ Martin Luther, Works of Martin Luther, 6 vols. (Philadelphia: Holman, 1915-32), 3:279.

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Both of your authors know what it is like to be ill. I (Bill) have been diagnosed with a progressive lung disease, while I (Henry) have suffered from Parkinson’s disease for years. For each of us, it was crucial to get an accurate diagnosis in order to begin the appropriate form of treatment for our ailment.

Equally, we both know what it is like to suffer from sin sickness—a more serious matter. And we know how important it is to get an accurate diagnosis for this kind of sickness as well. Sometimes the symptoms can be misleading. When it comes to sin, we often have to keep probing beyond the obvious explanation, because it may turn out that we have multiple cases of habitual sin at one time.

If you are reading Soul Prescription, chances are that you have one particular sin in mind that you want to deal with. Before you start trying to treat your troublesome sin, do a careful self-diagnosis. Consider whether there may be other sins in your life that you are overlooking or downplaying. Ask God to show you all that is wrong with your behavior. While we may have one dominant sin, rarely if ever do we have just one sin acting in our life at a time. We have many.

Sins often interact and feed on each other. It is best to treat them all, not just one of them. Otherwise, while one symptom may improve, others will likely grow more grave, and you could be worse off than when you started.

We cannot afford to take a simplistic a view of our sin problem. “The human heart is most deceitful and desperately wicked. Who really knows how bad it is?” (Jeremiah 17:9). Only God knows. With His help, we can keep testing and examining our lives to expose ever more thoroughly the wickedness that is lodged there.

The Bible as a Mirror

The sins in our lives are not like the stars in a constellation, with the number never varying and their positions remaining fixed. Instead, our sins are more like a flock of birds on a fence rail, with some birds joining their fellows, others flapping away, and the whole flock milling about. In other words, sins may disappear from our lives and then reappear, perhaps joined by others, recombining in a somewhat different form every time. There is, in fact, an infinite number of formations that sin may assume.

Because our sin diagnosis keeps changing, we need to constantly remain on the alert. First we need to be alert to what we are doing and thinking. Then we need to be alert to how our actions and thoughts line up with the Bible’s teaching.

We glance at ourselves in a mirror several times a day to see how we are looking. In the same way, Scripture is like a mirror that shows us who we really are. And we need to keep turning back to it to remind ourselves of how human beings are capable of going wrong.

The laws and commands of Scripture tell us what kinds of behaviors make God frown. The stories contained in Scripture show us the ways that real (that is, sinful) people like us have interacted with a holy God. In other words, both the Bible’s “prescriptions” and its “descriptions” help us understand our condition better.

Not only do we need to listen to what Scripture tells us; we also have to obey it. That was the apostle James’s point. “If you just listen and don’t obey, it is like looking at your face in a mirror but doing nothing to improve your appearance. You see yourself, walk away, and forget what you look like. But if you keep looking steadily into God’s perfect law—the law that sets you free—and if you do what it says and don’t forget what you heard, then God will bless you for doing it” (James 1:23-25).

The broad diversity of human sin appears in Scripture. These include sins of action, thought, and feeling. They also include sins of commission and sins of omission—that is, doing things that we should not and not doing things that we should do. “Remember, it is sin to know what you ought to do and then not do it” (James 4:17).

Identifying all our sins in a biblical way, then, is a prerequisite to successful healing of the soul. We have to know what sins to go after in our lives if we want to defeat them. What symptoms of a sin-sick soul have cropped up in your spiritual system?

One tool that may help you identify your sins is reflection on your own personality and how that predisposes you more to some sins than to others.

Select the right arrow (below) to continue reading Chapter 8. You Sin Diagnosis.

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Since the beginning of Campus Crusade for Christ, I (Bill) have made it my policy never to be alone with any woman other than my wife, Vonette. I have seen the way other Christian leaders have failed in the area of sexual purity and have brought disaster upon their ministries as a result. Even the appearance of wrongdoing can be harmful. So although I love Vonette dearly, and although I do not fear other women, I have made the choice not to be alone with women. I take sin seriously and want to make matters easier for myself by cutting off this potential for temptation.

That sort of definite action in avoiding temptation is in keeping with Jesus’s shocking words when He said, “If your eye—even if it is your good eye—causes you to lust, gouge it out and throw it away. … And if your hand—even if it is your stronger hand—causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away” (Matthew 5:29-30). The Lord was clearly using exaggeration to make a point. But it is equally apparent that, according to Jesus, we should be willing to take radical action to keep from sinning. To do that, we need to follow the fifth and last step of breaking a sinful habit: flee from temptation.

The apostle Paul instructed the Corinthians, “Flee from sexual immorality” (1 Corinthians 6:18, NIV) and “Flee from the worship of idols” (10:14). He told Timothy, “Flee the evil desires of youth” (2 Timothy 2:22, NIV). In other words, get away from temptation as fast as you can.

As a tool to help us in avoiding temptation and preventing relapses in our spiritual healing, we can remember the acrostic FLEE. The four aspects of FLEE are capable of leading us away from the danger of temptation and toward the holiness we seek.

Focusing on Your Relationship with God

People who are struggling with sin often get fixated on their most troublesome temptation. Such a reaction may be natural enough. But is it any wonder that they go back to the sin?

Imagine you are on a diet and someone sets a freshly baked chocolate cake on the kitchen table. If you hang out in the kitchen and keep eyeing the cake, how long will it be before you cut off a piece and take your first bite? Probably not long. The more you look at the cake, the more you want it. But if you leave the kitchen and get involved with something else, you will most likely be able to resist the temptation to break your diet.

In the same way, someone who has a problem with alcohol might keep thinking about taking a drink. Or someone who is bearing a grudge might spend time crafting the next cutting comment with which he will wound his enemy. Sometimes our thoughts can get caught in harmful loops like this. We need to break out of these loops and establish more profitable pathways for our thoughts.

If you have been a Christian for any time at all, you have a history with the Lord. Think about what you have learned of God. Think about all He has done for you and the victories He has given you. Spend time cultivating your relationship with God through such spiritual disciplines as worship, prayer, and devotional reading. With your mind on higher things like these, you will be far less susceptible to the pull of sin. Not only will you have distracted yourself from temptation; you also will have garnered greater confidence in your ability to be healed of your habitual sin.

The writer of the book of Hebrews compared the life of faith to a footrace. He encouraged his readers to strip off every weight that would slow them down, “especially the sin that so easily hinders our progress.” Then he said, “Let us run with endurance the race that God has set before us.” How? “We do this by keeping our eyes on Jesus, on whom our faith depends from start to finish” (Hebrews 12:1-2).

While fixing our eyes on temptation makes us more liable to give in to it, fixing our eyes on Jesus gives us strength to use against temptation. He is standing at the finish line of life, beckoning us on. We have His help in our struggles against sin day by day.

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The truth. It is sometimes hard to discover and even harder to accept. As much as we may like to think that we are smart people who have got life all figured out, we actually get off base in our thinking or our feelings in many ways. As we have already seen (chapter three), we may have a distorted image of God. But it goes beyond that. We may also have false convictions about ourselves, about others, and about life in general. These false convictions can contribute in a major way to our sin problem.

We might say that wrongdoing starts with wrong thinking. Step two in the process of breaking a sinful habit, therefore, is to revise your false beliefs. We need to start believing what is true. Being mistaken is not necessarily a sin itself (we might have just had an honest misunderstanding), but it can lead to sin. That’s why having convictions based on truth is so important.

But someone may jump in here to ask, “Can we really know what is ‘true’? I mean, is your truth necessarily the same as my truth?” Let’s consider that.

How True Is Truth?

If we had written Soul Prescription fifty years ago, we would not have needed to defend the concept of truth. Back then, if anyone had been asked, “Do you believe there is such a thing as absolute truth?” he or she would almost certainly have replied, “Well, sure there is.”

Today that is not the case. It is far more common nowadays for people to think of truth as an unstable quality, varying from situation to situation and from person to person. Ideas about truth develop differently within different cultures, relativists insist, and therefore what anyone believes to be true is just that person’s opinion. Truth is a human “construct,” not an objective reality.

Is this perspective—dare we say it—true?

First let’s make some admissions. To some extent, one’s upbringing and culture do color how one looks at the world. Also, there are areas where the issue can be one of preference rather than rightness. Sometimes people are too dogmatic, close-mindedly promoting a certain viewpoint even though what they are talking about lies in a genuine gray area. We do not know all the facts, and in any case, facts always require interpretation. Even when we know the truth for certain, our attitude in defending it can turn others off because it contains none of the love and respect that we ought to have for those who disagree with us.

Nevertheless, we have to accept that there is such a thing as absolute truth, or what the twentieth-century theologian Francis Schaeffer called “true truth.” This is truth that is true for all people at all times and in all places. As a matter of fact, we cannot go forward in addressing our sin problems unless we believe in this kind of truth. And we have good reason for such a belief.

When relativists declare, “There is no absolute truth,” they are making an absolute statement. Theirs is a self-refuting claim. If everything is relative, then the idea that everything is relative is itself relative.

Furthermore, no one can consistently live according to the belief that truth is relative. Law, society, and relationships are impossible to sustain in an environment of thorough relativism. We cannot invent reality for ourselves at every turn.

The way it usually works is that people trot out relativism when they want the freedom to do something that deep down they know is morally wrong. In fact, there is a close connection between a relativism of truth and a relativism of morality—this is a valuable warning for those of us who want the wickedness rooted out of our lives.

There really is such a thing as absolute truth. If there were no God, then perhaps human beings would have to make up their own “reality.” But since there is a God, He is the determiner of truth and reality. Truth is rooted in His unchanging nature. “I am … the truth,” said Jesus (John 14:6). It is no wonder, then, that “the word of our God stands forever” (Isaiah 40:8).

Furthermore, because God’s nature is truthful, people who have entered into a relationship with Him through His Son can know truth. “Jesus said to the people who believed in Him, ‘You are truly My disciples if you keep obeying My teachings. And you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free’ ” (John 8:31-32, emphasis added). Faith enables us to have convictions based on truth.

More specifically, we believers have God’s personal guidance in knowing what is true. Before departing this world, Jesus said that He would send the Counselor, or the Holy Spirit, to dwell in the hearts of His followers. Jesus added, “When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all truth” (John 16:13).¹

The primary way the Holy Spirit guides us into truth is by opening our minds and hearts to the truth that God has inscribed in His Word, the Bible.

¹ See also John 14:16 and John 15:26.

Select the right arrow (below) to continue reading Chapter 4. Step Two: Embracing Truth.

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The New Testament word for “repent” means to turn around—we turn away from sin and toward God. After adopting a correct view of God and revising false beliefs, step three in the process we are outlining is to repent of your sinful habit.

Over the years, I (Henry) have defined a five-part process of repentance that we can use when we are dealing with a habitual sin we are prepared to turn away from. Each of the parts of the process can be summarized in a particular prayer offered to God. The five prayers are progressively more difficult to say and to mean, but each is a vital part of repentance.¹

This five-part process dovetails neatly with Bill’s concept of “spiritual breathing.” As you are reading about the five prayers, notice how the first three correspond to exhaling guilt, while the remaining two correspond to inhaling grace. (See “Spiritual Breathing”)

Prayer 1: “God, I am wrong.”

Repentance begins with acknowledging before God that we have willfully violated His holy standards. We must understand what we have done and we must admit it to God.

The little word “I” that begins this prayer is more important than its size might lead one to expect.

Some of us might be too quick to feel guilty or to feel more guilty than we deserve. Many others of us, however, have a tendency to look around for someone else to shift our blame onto. Blame shifting will never do. Others may be at fault too, but we have to admit our own part in the wrongdoing. We pray, “I am wrong.”

The word “wrong” is important too. What we are talking about is sin. If we have broken the law of God, it is not an “error in judgment,” a “peccadillo,” or a “misdemeanor.” We stand in the position of a wrongdoer before God.

Without knowing ourselves as sinners, we either will not see a need to repent or else any supposed “repentance” of ours will be a selfish attempt to manipulate God. It is not enough to say, “I messed up” or “I lost my head”; we have to say, “I am wrong.”

The apostle John implied the importance of acknowledging our wrongdoing when he wrote, “If we claim we have not sinned, we are calling God a liar and showing that His word has no place in our hearts” (1 John 1:10).

Prayer 2: “God, I am sorry.”

Admitting wrongdoing (the first prayer) is no easy thing. Yet there are any number of reasons why someone might admit to doing wrong without really being sorry for it. A person might mean to go back to wrongdoing as soon as it is convenient—that is not being sorry. Or a person might be sorry for getting caught but not be sorry for the sin itself. Or someone might be sorry about hurting other people but have no sense of having grieved God.

A lack of sorrow over one’s sin is revealed when we begin to make excuses. However, contrary to excuses, repentance requires us to feel truly sorry for what we have done and to say so to God.

We live in a society that places a high value on feeling good as much as possible. But when we have sinned, it is appropriate to meditate on how we have hurt ourselves, other people, and God by what we have done. In other words, that is the time to let ourselves feel the bad feelings for a while. As the apostle James urged his readers, “Let there be tears for the wrong things you have done. Let there be sorrow and gloom and deep grief. Let there be sadness instead of laughter, and gloom instead of joy” (James 4:9).

Did you know that feeling remorse for sin is a lot like grieving a loved one’s death? We see this, for instance, in one of Jesus’s parables when a repentant tax collector “beat his chest in sorrow, saying, ‘O God, be merciful to me, for I am a sinner’ ” (Luke 18:13). Beating one’s chest was an extraordinary sign of mourning in Hebrew culture. The only other time it is mentioned in the New Testament is when Jesus’s friends “beat their breasts” at His death (Luke 23:48, NIV). Just so deep should be our grief over the way we have let down God with our sin.

When we sense the true gravity of what we have done, we are ready not just to admit our sin but also to tell God we are sorry—and mean it. Certainly, we do not want to overdo our sorrow over sin, groveling in it and refusing to get past it; nevertheless, feeling remorse is an important stage to pass through. This sort of sorrow over our sin is what Paul was referring to when he said, “God can use sorrow in our lives to help us turn away from sin and seek salvation. We will never regret that kind of sorrow” (2 Corinthians 7:10).

¹ For more on the five prayers of repentance, see Henry R. Brandt and Kerry L. Skinner, The Heart of the Problem (Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 1997), pp. 73–83; Henry R. Brandt and Kerry L. Skinner, The Word for the Wise: Making Scripture the Heart of Your Counseling Ministry (Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 1999), pp. 102–106.

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The Purification Process

The ways in which people have gone wrong in their opinions about their Creator are almost as numerous as the human race itself. The diversity of religious beliefs in the world bears witness to how we can be misled about God.

First of all, of course, it is important to believe that God exists. “Anyone who wants to come to Him must believe that there is a God” (Hebrews 11:6). Certainly atheism has been responsible for some of the most dreadful abuses in history, as people have gone astray through the rejection of God. The psalmist was right:

Only fools say in their hearts,

“There is no God.” (Psalm 14:1)

But of course, most people in our land do believe in God. In fact, only 8 percent of Americans describe themselves as atheists or agnostics.¹ Naturally, though, this does not mean that 92 percent of us have an accurate or adequate view of who God is. Misunderstanding about God’s nature, even when it comes to the basics, is widespread, despite the prevalent belief in the existence of God.

One key reason why so many misunderstand God today is the current do-it-yourself approach to religion. At one time, Christianity was the starting point for the theology of most Americans (whether or not they actually had a saving faith in Christ). Today, though, many put together pieces of Christianity, New Age spirituality, and whatever else appeals to them, then endorse the resulting hodgepodge as their theological doctrine. Consequently, while they may be enthusiastic about “God,” the God they have in mind bears little resemblance to the God of the Bible.

Having flawed convictions about God is not necessarily a sin in itself—your education in this area may have been at fault. But do not let yourself become comfortable with unexamined convictions. Get to know God better in His self-portrait, the Bible, and start erasing those parts of your image of Him that do not fit what He says about Himself. Then fill in the picture with true ideas about God’s nature. You will benefit from knowing more about both who God is and how He acts toward you.

Who God Is

Some years ago I (Bill) wrote a book about the attributes of God, called God: Discover His Character.² I got the idea for the book as a result of being interviewed by Dr. James Montgomery Boice on the Bible Hour radio program. One of the first questions Dr. Boice asked was “What is the most important truth to teach any follower of Christ?”

No one had ever asked that question of me before, so for a moment I was speechless. Finally I answered, “The attributes of God.” Later I thought about my answer (prompted, I believe, by the Holy Spirit) and realized that it really was true. Human problems are commonly due, at least in part, to a faulty or inadequate understanding about God.

This is why I would urge you to learn more about the attributes of God. These attributes are primary qualities or characteristics belonging to God.

1. God is all powerful. “Lord, there is no one like You! For You are great, and Your name is full of power” (Jeremiah 10:6).
2. God is ever present. “I can never escape from Your Spirit! I can never get away from Your presence!” (Psalm 139:7).
3. God is all knowing. “How great is our Lord! His understanding is beyond comprehension!” (Psalm 147:5).
4. God is sovereign. “Everything in the heavens and on earth is Yours, O Lord, and this is Your kingdom” (1 Chronicles 29:11).
5. God is holy. “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty! The whole earth is filled with His glory!” (Isaiah 6:3).
6. God is truthful. “It is impossible for God to lie” (Hebrews 6:18).
7. God is righteous. “Everything He does is just and fair. He is a faithful God who does no wrong; how just and upright He is!” (Deuteronomy 32:4).
8. God is just. “Mighty king, lover of justice, you have established fairness” (Psalm 99:4).
9. God is loving. “See how very much our heavenly Father loves us, for He allows us to be called His children, and we really are!” (1 John 3:1).
10. God is merciful. “God is so rich in mercy, and He loved us so very much, that even while we were dead because of our sins, He gave us life when He raised Christ from the dead” (Ephesians 2:4-5).
11. God is faithful. “Your faithfulness extends to every generation, as enduring as the earth you created” (Psalm 119:90).
12. God is unchanging. “He never changes or casts shifting shadows” (James 1:17).

For you as someone who is seeking to overcome a habitual sin, these attributes of God all relate to the issue of trust. Can you trust God to help you with your sin problem? In what ways is He trustworthy? Only when you know God will you be able to trust Him with all your heart.

¹ Barna Research Group, press release, “American Faith Is Diverse, as Shown among Five Faith-Based Segments,” January 29, 2002, http://www.barna.org/, accessed September 2003. An atheist is one who believes there is no God. An agnostic is one who is undecided about the existence of God.

² Bill Bright, God: Discover His Character (Orlando, FL: New Life, 1999). See also the related website at http://www.discovergod.org.

Select the right arrow (below) to continue reading Chapter 3. Step One: Knowing God.

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How God Acts Toward Us

Learning about the nature and attributes of God, as revealed by the Bible, is far from being a mere academic exercise. We discover in the process a God who cares about us, who is intimately involved in our lives, and who wants to help us heal from our sin problems.

Let’s consider the twelve attributes of God listed above in terms of how they relate to our problems with habitual sin. Each attribute should be an encouragement to us.

1. Because God is all powerful, He is stronger than the hold that sin has over us.
2. Because God is ever present, He is always with us in our struggles against temptation.
3. Because God all knowing, we can go to Him with all our questions and concerns about becoming holy.
4. Because God is sovereign, we can submit to His will for our ethical actions.
5. Because God is holy, He offers the model of morality we strive to copy.
6. Because God is truthful, we can believe what He says about sin and holiness and live accordingly.
7. Because God is righteous, He provides the standards we seek to live up to.
8. Because God is just, He always treat us fairly, even when we disappoint Him.
9. Because God is loving, He is unconditionally committed to our spiritual well-being.
10. Because God is merciful, He forgives us of our sins when we sincerely confess them.
11. Because God is faithful, we can trust Him to always keep His promises to help and to forgive.
12. Because God is unchanging, His commitment to our spiritual health is fixed and dependable.

What a God we serve! His every quality is suited to drawing us nearer to Him and to helping us become the kind of people He wants us to be.

Furthermore, the fact that God is a Trinity—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit together—teaches us that God values fellowship. God enjoys fellowship among the three Persons that make up the unity of the Godhead, and He enjoys fellowship with us, His most beloved creatures. And so the three divine Persons work together to solve our sin problem: The Father established the standards of justice. The Son sacrificed Himself to earn our forgiveness. And the Spirit comes alongside us to aid us in our attempts at living holy lives.

Isn’t this a God you want to know better? We promise that as you get to know Him more fully, He will begin to change your thoughts and feelings in ways that will make you more ready to part with your habitual sin and to embrace holiness.

How good it is to know God as He really is! A revolution in our view of God can start a revolution in our behavior, but adopting a correct view of God is only the beginning. We move from there to evaluating other ideas and feelings that may underlie our sinful behavior.

Select the right arrow (below) to continue reading Chapter 4. Step Two: Embracing Truth.

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