After we fail, it's easy for feelings of embarrassment and shame to come over us. It's easy for us to run further away from our problems and to lack confidence.

If you feel like you "dropped the ball" in your pursuit of following Jesus, you might feel unworthy to be in His presence. Maybe you feel a lack of confidence in approaching Jesus. But the Scriptures teach us that we don't need to come to Him with our tails between our legs; we can approach Him confidently, even after our sin.

Check out these words from Hebrews 4:16: "Let us then approach God's throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need."

God is not an unapproachable God. He is a loving God who made Himself available for you by the death and resurrection of Jesus.

Rather than trying to come to God all buttoned up, as if everything is perfect, what if you just came to God however you are today?

Mike Foster writes, "God doesn't ask us to first clean up our sloppy messes. He does not approach us with a guarded politeness or condescendingly pat us on the head and squeeze our dirty cheeks. He simply invites us to jump into Daddy's arms and let Him be our source of love and identity. He beckons us to live the free way."

Just like Peter, He'll take you as you are, but His grace will not leave you as you are.
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Helping people live life with Jesus everyday,

Confession in the modern-day courtroom leads to prison sentences. Therefore, you may feel like the worst step you could take in your journey to find freedom would be to confess your sins. But God's justice system doesn't work the same as our justice system today.

In God's justice system, confession of sin will not lead to a prison sentence, but to a life of freedom.

Freedom begins with an admission of sin.

Psalm 32:3-5  When I refused to confess my sin, my body wasted away, and I groaned all day long. Day and night your hand of discipline was heavy on me. My strength evaporated like water in the summer heat. Finally, I confessed all my sins to you and stopped trying to hide my guilt. I said to myself, "I will confess my rebellion to the Lord." And you forgave me! All my guilt is gone.
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Helping people live life with Jesus everyday,

John 21:1-3 Afterward Jesus appeared again to his disciples, the Sea of Galilee. It happened this way: Simon Peter, Thomas (also known as Didymus), Nathaniel from Cana in Galilee, the sons of Zebedee, and two other disciples were together. "I'm going out to fish," Simon Peter told them, and they said, "We'll go with you."

After his denials of Jesus prior to the crucifixion, Peter goes back to fishing. Having failed, Peter goes back to a mediocre, lesser life than God has called him to. There is nothing wrong with fishing for fish, except if God has called you to fish for something greater. After we've failed, too many of us believe in the lie of the enemy that says we are unfit and unworthy of what God had originally called us into, so we go back to a lesser life.

Peter was a lifetime fisherman. Fishing was all that he knew. Even though Jesus invited him into another life, Peter failed Jesus badly. And in light of that he said, "I'm going fishing." He just dove back into something that he felt like he could win at. That's what we often do when we fail. Unless we experience God's freedom, most of us, after sin, will just pinball from distractions and busyness and step away from what God wants to do in our lives. We move into what is comfortable - a slow bleed into a lesser, mediocre life than what God had intended.

In the aftermath of Peter's greatest failure, what does Jesus do? He appears to him on the shore, and He recreates the very first moment that He met Peter. When Jesus meets Peter in Luke 5:1-11, He tells him to go out into deeper water and let down his nets, even though the disciples had worked all night without catching anything. When they obey, they catch so many fish that their nets begin to break. Sound familiar? In John 21, Jesus recreates the same fish miracle to remind Peter that their relationship is still open, and the opportunity is still there for him.
 

 It's the same with you...how does Jesus treat you in your failure? He appears to you and reminds you that the opportunity is still there for you.

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Helping people live life with Jesus everyday,

The devil wants you to take your guilt and bring more shame into your lives. Any pursuit of blaming others, trying harder, denying your sin, or minimizing your sin will ultimately keep you in bomdage. Here's why: You are guilty.

The beautiful truth about God and His Gospel is that you don't have to run from your sin any longer. God wants you to face it, but He doesn't need you to fight it. He's already won the battle for you by fighting and destroying sin.

You were saved by grace alone through faith alone. Matt Chandler writes, "Therefore, God gets all the glory alone. And when you understand this one basic issue, you'll stop going into you and starting going into the Lord - just laying out all the smelly, rotten groceries, shaking all the stuff out of your pockets, bringing it all out into the open, and saying, 'Here, would you please get rid of this for me?' If your spouse or your kids or your boss or your parents ever pick out a piece of your character or attitude that needs fixing, you can just take your pitiful self straight before Him and say, 'Jesus, come and get it.' Because your satisfaction comes from His work, not yours." (Matt Chandler, Recovering Redemption)
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Helping people live life with Jesus everyday,

Many of us go about our lives today like the couch sitting in our living room. On the outside, the couch appears just fine - clean and tidy. But underneath the cushions lies all kinds of junk. A life in which we look good on the outside but are wasting away on the inside is not the free and abundant life that God wants for us. In Matthew 23:27-28, Jesus drives home the very point when He compares the Pharisees to whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of the bones of the dead and everything unclean. If all we ever do is stuff away or suppress the worst parts of our stories, we'll never be fully free.
 

In 1 Samuel 16:7 God reminds the prophet Samuel: "For the Lord sees not as man sees: man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart." God isn't interested in cleaning up your life only on the outside. God is interested in the complete removal and destruction of sin in your life. To be made alive in Him requires that a part of you must first die. We cannot have a free and abundant life outside of the presence of God.

Jesus, a sinless man, substituted His life for ours, shedding His blood, and by doing so, satisfied the consequence of sin. Jesus didn't just go to the cross so you could clean cobwebs out, modify your behavior, and manage your sin. Jesus came to kill sin. A free life does not come from training your sin, but killing it.

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Helping people live life with Jesus everyday,

Yesterday we talked about the sin that we have committed. But there is another type of sin that often goes unnoticed and doesn't get dealt with - sins of omission. We see a description of this in the parable of the Good Samaritan in Luke 10:25-28.

Jesus is talking primarily to a Jewish audience, and the one who addressed Him, is in fact, a Jewish expert in the Law. The expert knows the commandments. He even recites the correct summary of all of the laws.

The Jews in the day of Jesus were taught to love their neighbor, but they were also taught to hate their enemy. In this particular case, the man wants to test Jesus; he wants Jesus to specify the boundaries that distinguish who qualifies as a neighbor. That way, he will know if, in fact, he has perfectly held to the Law.

This is the way many of us approach God. We want to know exactly what to do, what God expects of us, because we are determined to try to check the right boxes. Rather than giving specific boundaries, though, Jesus is about to expand this Jewish leader's mindset.

The main point of the parable is that when we have an opportunity to help others and battle the injustices of this world, we are called to do so. Even if the "other person" isn't technically your neighbor or your ethnicity, when you see someone in need, God invites you into this opportunity to help. When you do not step into the opportunities to help that God puts in front of you, that is, in fact, a sin.
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Helping people live life with Jesus everyday,

Romans 3:23-24 For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God and are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.

God uses the Law to expose the depth of how far we've fallen. He uses the Gospel to rescue us out of the depths and bring us to new heights.

Our natural sinful condition, however, will try to turn the Law into something that it is not. Whenever we give too much power to the Law and use it to save ourselves, we walk in further bondage. This sort of thinking, though, is quite natural and found in every other major religion: "What do I need to do for God to love me?" But God's love cannot be earned by our strict adherence and obedience to the Law. The purpose of the Law, therefore, is to bring us to our knees and put us in a place where we are ready to receive the Gospel.

The path of healing and ultimate freedom begins by sharing our struggles in order to receive God's grace. Before we accept God's grace, we must first accept our need for it.
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Helping people live life with Jesus everyday,