Is It Too Late For God To Restore The Joy Of Heaven Now?
Replied Question: Thank you. You see, it started with porn, then sex outside of marriage, (that brought forth a child), sexual immorality, even to the point of sleeping with someone else's spouse. I am so ashamed and it is and was shameful, but I was an addict and nothing could stop my need for it. I think it may have been the pain of loneliness and fear that started it. All I know is that I was degraded and destructive and full of sin thoughts and actions. How could I take something so precious and sell it for nothing? It was not love, ever. I have never been loved and it was never love. I have been controlled, like a robot under a monster bigger than me. Sexually immoral people receive great judgment. It would have been better I had not been born. I became a monster under the drug of pleasing my flesh and pride. The last word from my sons' father was "whore". That is what I was. How can these sins be forgiven? They are old and done and the destruction finished. I know sex is wonderful inside of marriage and only inside of marriage. I am old. The deeds have been done outside of marriage. I can't hope. I, like billions/trillions of the multitudes took the wrong road. It was the pot that reduced my ability to resist sin, then the men (plural), then death of my soul and dreams and hope for a good life here or after. Like I said, it was long ago when I was young and Playboy and Playgirl and drugs, and living together, and spending "the night together" just wrecked everything. A 'no' is a 'no', but I said 'yes' to sexual sin and it was all downhill from there. I have never had meaningful relationships, very few I know of have. I was born into a living hell. It would have been better to have died young, before I ever thought I was special and sex became my game to be loved (but was really hatred toward God's gift of real love/pure thoughts/a pure, loving, living sacrifice). I'm blinded. Walking in darkness and a lived a life of shame that is now over (57). The thoughts, I thought I could taste and not get burned and now it is too late. I don't have any friends. This sexual addiction destroyed/isolated me from being able to be honest friends with anyone or any joy. I didn't give myself a chance before I dove in. All that is left of me is dying and just judgment from God for taking Him and sin lightly. So, at my age, there can be no hope, just damnation and a wasted life. I would love to be wrong, but how can I? I have already wasted my life on idolatry. It is every man and woman's battle. It would be better that I had not been born. I was forgiven, I felt it once when I was young, but was afraid to sleep and had anxiety attacks, ocd behavior, anorexia (very early teens), trying to control a situation that was completely out of control! '-( I am one of zillions of lost souls. One of the legions. If only I was a child again. They are so pure with good desires and love everyone. So few are pure. We are filthy.
Answer: Thank you dear Sister for sharing again your thoughts back to me. Love you for your honesty. But what I have written in my previous article titled to you, "Will The Consequence Of Sin Stay With Us Forever?", is not my word, but IT IS THE WORD OF GOD THAT YOU MUST TURN TO AND DARE TO TAKE HOLD OF THE PROMISES OF GOD! If possible take a print out and go through all the Scriptures I have referred to, and let the truth of God sink in to your soul. I pray that you might come to know that you are forgiven by JESUS, and come to hold on to HIS ETERNAL PROMISES of a blessed life ahead. We all waste in some way or the other our lives, but God sees our motives and will bless us if we come to Him in sincerity with whatever life we have in our hand. We are not saved by our behavior, but by our belief. But we are rewarded eternally not just by our belief, but by the behavior that has come out of our belief. God has clearly embraced the prodigal son back in to His arms, never once we see in that story the prodigal ceasing to be the son of the father because of his sin. The only thing that he missed when in sin was the lack of fellowship with the father which signifies the believers relationship with his Heavenly Father (Luke 15:11-32). The lost coin was always the coin of the woman represented by God the Spirit who lost it, and he searched for it as it was his responsibility to find it and take it back to Himself (Luke 15:8-10).
John Newton the great saint of God said, "A sheep is a weak, defenseless, foolish creature; prone to wander, and can seldom return of its own accord. A sheep has neither strength to fight with the wolf, nor speed to escape from it; nor has a sheep the foresight of the ant, to provide its own sustenance.
Such is our character, and our situation! We are . . . unable to take care of ourselves, prone to wander from our resting-place, exposed to enemies which we can neither escape nor withstand, without any resource in ourselves, and taught, by daily experience, the insufficiency of everything around us."
Yet we see that the lost sheep was always the sheep of the shepherd JESUS CHRIST who lost it, it was the love and desire of the shepherd towards it that made him go after it to find and bring it back to Himself (Luke 15:1-7). Jesus Christ became our Chief Shepherd not because of our intelligence to succeed, but because of our foolishness and total lack of strength to defend ourselves from the enemies of our soul, (i.e.) self, sin and Satan, and we are hopeless without Him (1 Pet 5:4; John 10:11-18; Isa 40:11). But with Jesus we can always choose to declare victoriously, "The LORD JESUS CHRIST is my shepherd and I shall never be in want!" (Psa 23:1).
There is nothing that stays impure after the sprinkling of the blood of Jesus through the confession of sins (1 John 1:7, 9; 1 Pet 1:22; Heb 9:22). When God has sprinkled the blood of Jesus upon our sins, we have no right to call others or even ourselves as impure after it has been done, because if we do that, we are disrespecting the holy blood of Jesus which the Father has sacrificed to atone and appease himself righteously for it all (Acts 10:15, 28; 11:9; Heb 9:13-14; Rom 5:10-11; 2 Cor 5:18; Col 1:21). Then it becomes equal to trampling the Son of God underfoot in disrespect, treating the blood of the covenant as an unholy thing which has already sanctified him, thus having insulted the Spirit of grace, the Lord will judge such a person by allowing the fearful expectation of judgment and of raging fire that will consume the enemies of God in hell, by becoming self-condemned for their sins because of the disregard for the blood of Jesus they showed because of their unbelief (Heb 10:26-31). In other words, the citizen of heaven losing the consciousness of their priestly and royal privilege, and becoming fearful of what the other worldly citizens of earth are fearful of, i.e. the indefinite future that awaits them in hell fire for their sins for which they with their own mind wants to appease their conscience to justify themselves with whatever good works they think they have done. In short, though they are going to heaven, they live on earth as though they are going to hell.
So to avoid such a scenario of hellish condemnation, we should remember the earlier days after we have received the light of God through salvation, and how we have stood for faith until we were lost in our sins and were not able to overcome its lure, and be thankful for the salvation and start to fellowship with God through approaching him boldly through the blood of Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior (Heb 10:32-29; 4:16). God provides grace to all who seek Him for it humbly (2 Cor 13:14; Jam 4:6-7; 1 Pet 5:5-6).
Jesus has promised not to lose even one of the person who has come seeking to him for refuge and to all the person who has received eternal life, he has promised not to lose even one of them as they are all so precious to Him, and also to the Father in heaven who has begotten them through His Word (John 10:14-18, 25-30).
So what are you waiting for except to rejoice that you are being celebrated in returning to the Father God from sin, "I share this secret to you believers like us", the apostles said, "so that your joy may be full and overflowing like you experience it in heaven", and "we experience this ecstasy by having fellowship with the Father and his Son Jesus Christ so that you might experience joy of heaven like us completely on earth by having fellowship with Him now." (1 John 1:3-4, Paraphrased By Me).
So the life of regret no matter what we have done, should be overcome with the LIFE of the SPIRIT, LIGHT of the WORD and LOVE of GOD after we repent to God and start to fellowship with Him (2 Cor 7:10). This is the one and only godly repentance that God longs us to have and not the worldly repentance which produces the grief of the world to lead to death.
NO TIME IS TOO LATE IF WE ARE THE CHILDREN OF GOD.
When you say, "All that is left of me is dying and just judgment from God for taking Him and sin lightly. So, at my age, there can be no hope, just damnation and a wasted life", all I can think about your situation is, you have let yourself become self-condemned and thus in yourself you have decided your future as a fate of what happened to you in your past life. This is not Christian faith thinking, this is the thinking of idolatry where, your future life is something that you cannot change because of your past life which influences it, and they call it Karma. But the God of the Bible, is someone who does not save someone from sin for a time and throw them away because of their sin at a latter time because of their inability to stop sinning. But rather as we have seen above, He is our shepherd, our Father, our Mother, etc...to take care of us for eternity ahead. Once we are saved, even we by our behavior cannot unsave ourselves, though we have have the ability to destroy a good and meaningful life through our behavior because of our poor belief. God has saved you because of his Son whom He sacrificed for you, not because of your guarantee that you will live a good life after you are saved.
So God saves us eternally and keeps us that way for eternity because it was a eternal redemption and salvation (Eph 1:13-14; John 10:28; Heb 5:9; 9:12).
Because you had faith in Jesus Christ before all these things of sinfulness happened, I believe that you were saved, but did not become mature to overcome and be strong in the Lord (Eph 6:10; 1 John 2:12-14). Now that God has shown grace and mercy to look to Him again, trust His promises and rise up in the joy of heaven by having fellowship with God and His people regularly to be a testimony to the work of the grace of God.
Because Jesus has already taken all your sins when you received Him through your belief, you can never be condemned for eternity ahead. You cannot become saved and then become unsaved to go to hell. Either you are unsaved, or stay saved for eternity ahead. Even though only a God pleasing life of faith can bring you much reward for eternity ahead, yet your eternal life in itself is never at stake because of sin, but the joy of fellowship with God was at stake when you were in your sins. You are saved by your union with God through Jesus, but you maintain your fellowship with God apart from sin by your confession of it to God. The two should never be mixed up to become confused in our faith.
Even the unique BEMA seat judgment that God bring a believer after his or her death is not a judgment for sin, but judgment apart from sin for the right motive behind the behavior we displayed after we were saved (Heb 9:27-28; 2 Cor 5:10; 1 Cor 4:5), where we will be praised for our behavior done with right motives to be rewarded for eternity, or feel regret for the lost time on earth and at the same time feel grateful for the free gift of salvation through Jesus Christ which has delivered us from the disservice we did to God through loving sin which corrupted our motives and made us ineffective to make a difference eternally for God (1 Cor 3:10-15; 1 John 2:15-17; Heb 9:14; Rev 21:3-4).
Seek for an intimacy with God and live life without regret because of godly repentance to enjoy the journey of life. Remember, that God has promised to make the spiritually least and the last to become the first to get rewarded, like the thief on the cross of Jesus who by faith inherited heaven directly before the others who were waiting for thousands of years during the Old Testament times (Luke 23:43; Eph 4:7-9, 10; Heb 11:40; Matt 27:52-53), and also like in the Parable where Jesus shows that God rewards us eternally not according to the quantity of time we serve Him, but rather according to the quality of the motive with which we served Him (Matt 20:1-16). So who knows, may be you take God at His Word to embrace it fully with all your heart, you could be the one to sit and enjoy the specialty of heaven because of the motive and humble attitude with which you served God with whatever time you have left now (Matt 21:28-32). So with God it is how you believe Him and His promises that matters to Him, because that is the only thing that can please Him and secure your reward for eternity ahead (Heb 11:6). All behavior that comes out of belief will only be rewarded by God, behavior that comes through self-discipline needs no faith but only our hard work to attain it, which in fact will not be rewarded for eternity.
God never rewards spiritually for man's work, though He rewards him physically (Pro 14:23; Rom 4:4). God rewards spiritually for His work in man, (i.e.) that which He rewards is the work that which was initiated by Him, for Him and through Him which gets rewarded for eternity (Rom 4:5-6). So let go and let God!
Even though we become old with all our failures and sins behind us, we cannot become childish in our understanding, but rather we can become child-like in trusting the promises of God more and more as we become old (1 Cor 14:20). Thus maturity of trust in believing God's promise is what Jesus emphasized for all believers, by saying as, "Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven." (Matt 18:2-4). As we become old, in regard to evil let us be like infants in running to the blood of Jesus to keep us from bad conscience and maintain our faith (1 Cor 14:20; 1 Tim 1:19). Heart of unbelief is a evil heart that God hates, but the heart that trusts God's promises is the one he loves to spend time with (Heb 3:12; 4:9, 10, 11).
Trust and obey, for there is no other way to be happy in Jesus! Amen!
May the Lord JESUS help you and build you up spiritually till the end. You are never a lost soul to Jesus, because He has come to save sinners like you and me who are all filthy in one way or the other, in one degree or the the other. He will save us to the end as we have committed our lives in to His hand (Heb 7:25).
Much Love and Blessings....
Answer: Thank you dear Sister for sharing again your thoughts back to me. Love you for your honesty. But what I have written in my previous article titled to you, "Will The Consequence Of Sin Stay With Us Forever?", is not my word, but IT IS THE WORD OF GOD THAT YOU MUST TURN TO AND DARE TO TAKE HOLD OF THE PROMISES OF GOD! If possible take a print out and go through all the Scriptures I have referred to, and let the truth of God sink in to your soul. I pray that you might come to know that you are forgiven by JESUS, and come to hold on to HIS ETERNAL PROMISES of a blessed life ahead. We all waste in some way or the other our lives, but God sees our motives and will bless us if we come to Him in sincerity with whatever life we have in our hand. We are not saved by our behavior, but by our belief. But we are rewarded eternally not just by our belief, but by the behavior that has come out of our belief. God has clearly embraced the prodigal son back in to His arms, never once we see in that story the prodigal ceasing to be the son of the father because of his sin. The only thing that he missed when in sin was the lack of fellowship with the father which signifies the believers relationship with his Heavenly Father (Luke 15:11-32). The lost coin was always the coin of the woman represented by God the Spirit who lost it, and he searched for it as it was his responsibility to find it and take it back to Himself (Luke 15:8-10).
John Newton the great saint of God said, "A sheep is a weak, defenseless, foolish creature; prone to wander, and can seldom return of its own accord. A sheep has neither strength to fight with the wolf, nor speed to escape from it; nor has a sheep the foresight of the ant, to provide its own sustenance.
Such is our character, and our situation! We are . . . unable to take care of ourselves, prone to wander from our resting-place, exposed to enemies which we can neither escape nor withstand, without any resource in ourselves, and taught, by daily experience, the insufficiency of everything around us."
Yet we see that the lost sheep was always the sheep of the shepherd JESUS CHRIST who lost it, it was the love and desire of the shepherd towards it that made him go after it to find and bring it back to Himself (Luke 15:1-7). Jesus Christ became our Chief Shepherd not because of our intelligence to succeed, but because of our foolishness and total lack of strength to defend ourselves from the enemies of our soul, (i.e.) self, sin and Satan, and we are hopeless without Him (1 Pet 5:4; John 10:11-18; Isa 40:11). But with Jesus we can always choose to declare victoriously, "The LORD JESUS CHRIST is my shepherd and I shall never be in want!" (Psa 23:1).
There is nothing that stays impure after the sprinkling of the blood of Jesus through the confession of sins (1 John 1:7, 9; 1 Pet 1:22; Heb 9:22). When God has sprinkled the blood of Jesus upon our sins, we have no right to call others or even ourselves as impure after it has been done, because if we do that, we are disrespecting the holy blood of Jesus which the Father has sacrificed to atone and appease himself righteously for it all (Acts 10:15, 28; 11:9; Heb 9:13-14; Rom 5:10-11; 2 Cor 5:18; Col 1:21). Then it becomes equal to trampling the Son of God underfoot in disrespect, treating the blood of the covenant as an unholy thing which has already sanctified him, thus having insulted the Spirit of grace, the Lord will judge such a person by allowing the fearful expectation of judgment and of raging fire that will consume the enemies of God in hell, by becoming self-condemned for their sins because of the disregard for the blood of Jesus they showed because of their unbelief (Heb 10:26-31). In other words, the citizen of heaven losing the consciousness of their priestly and royal privilege, and becoming fearful of what the other worldly citizens of earth are fearful of, i.e. the indefinite future that awaits them in hell fire for their sins for which they with their own mind wants to appease their conscience to justify themselves with whatever good works they think they have done. In short, though they are going to heaven, they live on earth as though they are going to hell.
So to avoid such a scenario of hellish condemnation, we should remember the earlier days after we have received the light of God through salvation, and how we have stood for faith until we were lost in our sins and were not able to overcome its lure, and be thankful for the salvation and start to fellowship with God through approaching him boldly through the blood of Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior (Heb 10:32-29; 4:16). God provides grace to all who seek Him for it humbly (2 Cor 13:14; Jam 4:6-7; 1 Pet 5:5-6).
Jesus has promised not to lose even one of the person who has come seeking to him for refuge and to all the person who has received eternal life, he has promised not to lose even one of them as they are all so precious to Him, and also to the Father in heaven who has begotten them through His Word (John 10:14-18, 25-30).
So what are you waiting for except to rejoice that you are being celebrated in returning to the Father God from sin, "I share this secret to you believers like us", the apostles said, "so that your joy may be full and overflowing like you experience it in heaven", and "we experience this ecstasy by having fellowship with the Father and his Son Jesus Christ so that you might experience joy of heaven like us completely on earth by having fellowship with Him now." (1 John 1:3-4, Paraphrased By Me).
So the life of regret no matter what we have done, should be overcome with the LIFE of the SPIRIT, LIGHT of the WORD and LOVE of GOD after we repent to God and start to fellowship with Him (2 Cor 7:10). This is the one and only godly repentance that God longs us to have and not the worldly repentance which produces the grief of the world to lead to death.
NO TIME IS TOO LATE IF WE ARE THE CHILDREN OF GOD.
When you say, "All that is left of me is dying and just judgment from God for taking Him and sin lightly. So, at my age, there can be no hope, just damnation and a wasted life", all I can think about your situation is, you have let yourself become self-condemned and thus in yourself you have decided your future as a fate of what happened to you in your past life. This is not Christian faith thinking, this is the thinking of idolatry where, your future life is something that you cannot change because of your past life which influences it, and they call it Karma. But the God of the Bible, is someone who does not save someone from sin for a time and throw them away because of their sin at a latter time because of their inability to stop sinning. But rather as we have seen above, He is our shepherd, our Father, our Mother, etc...to take care of us for eternity ahead. Once we are saved, even we by our behavior cannot unsave ourselves, though we have have the ability to destroy a good and meaningful life through our behavior because of our poor belief. God has saved you because of his Son whom He sacrificed for you, not because of your guarantee that you will live a good life after you are saved.
So God saves us eternally and keeps us that way for eternity because it was a eternal redemption and salvation (Eph 1:13-14; John 10:28; Heb 5:9; 9:12).
Because you had faith in Jesus Christ before all these things of sinfulness happened, I believe that you were saved, but did not become mature to overcome and be strong in the Lord (Eph 6:10; 1 John 2:12-14). Now that God has shown grace and mercy to look to Him again, trust His promises and rise up in the joy of heaven by having fellowship with God and His people regularly to be a testimony to the work of the grace of God.
Because Jesus has already taken all your sins when you received Him through your belief, you can never be condemned for eternity ahead. You cannot become saved and then become unsaved to go to hell. Either you are unsaved, or stay saved for eternity ahead. Even though only a God pleasing life of faith can bring you much reward for eternity ahead, yet your eternal life in itself is never at stake because of sin, but the joy of fellowship with God was at stake when you were in your sins. You are saved by your union with God through Jesus, but you maintain your fellowship with God apart from sin by your confession of it to God. The two should never be mixed up to become confused in our faith.
Even the unique BEMA seat judgment that God bring a believer after his or her death is not a judgment for sin, but judgment apart from sin for the right motive behind the behavior we displayed after we were saved (Heb 9:27-28; 2 Cor 5:10; 1 Cor 4:5), where we will be praised for our behavior done with right motives to be rewarded for eternity, or feel regret for the lost time on earth and at the same time feel grateful for the free gift of salvation through Jesus Christ which has delivered us from the disservice we did to God through loving sin which corrupted our motives and made us ineffective to make a difference eternally for God (1 Cor 3:10-15; 1 John 2:15-17; Heb 9:14; Rev 21:3-4).
Seek for an intimacy with God and live life without regret because of godly repentance to enjoy the journey of life. Remember, that God has promised to make the spiritually least and the last to become the first to get rewarded, like the thief on the cross of Jesus who by faith inherited heaven directly before the others who were waiting for thousands of years during the Old Testament times (Luke 23:43; Eph 4:7-9, 10; Heb 11:40; Matt 27:52-53), and also like in the Parable where Jesus shows that God rewards us eternally not according to the quantity of time we serve Him, but rather according to the quality of the motive with which we served Him (Matt 20:1-16). So who knows, may be you take God at His Word to embrace it fully with all your heart, you could be the one to sit and enjoy the specialty of heaven because of the motive and humble attitude with which you served God with whatever time you have left now (Matt 21:28-32). So with God it is how you believe Him and His promises that matters to Him, because that is the only thing that can please Him and secure your reward for eternity ahead (Heb 11:6). All behavior that comes out of belief will only be rewarded by God, behavior that comes through self-discipline needs no faith but only our hard work to attain it, which in fact will not be rewarded for eternity.
God never rewards spiritually for man's work, though He rewards him physically (Pro 14:23; Rom 4:4). God rewards spiritually for His work in man, (i.e.) that which He rewards is the work that which was initiated by Him, for Him and through Him which gets rewarded for eternity (Rom 4:5-6). So let go and let God!
Even though we become old with all our failures and sins behind us, we cannot become childish in our understanding, but rather we can become child-like in trusting the promises of God more and more as we become old (1 Cor 14:20). Thus maturity of trust in believing God's promise is what Jesus emphasized for all believers, by saying as, "Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven." (Matt 18:2-4). As we become old, in regard to evil let us be like infants in running to the blood of Jesus to keep us from bad conscience and maintain our faith (1 Cor 14:20; 1 Tim 1:19). Heart of unbelief is a evil heart that God hates, but the heart that trusts God's promises is the one he loves to spend time with (Heb 3:12; 4:9, 10, 11).
Trust and obey, for there is no other way to be happy in Jesus! Amen!
May the Lord JESUS help you and build you up spiritually till the end. You are never a lost soul to Jesus, because He has come to save sinners like you and me who are all filthy in one way or the other, in one degree or the the other. He will save us to the end as we have committed our lives in to His hand (Heb 7:25).
Much Love and Blessings....
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