To silence the silent screams of a desperate conscience that longs to be free and forgiven
Help! I keep sinning!!!
Join us as we sit down with Sam Storms, author of "A Dozen Things God Did with Your Sin (And Three Things He'll Never Do): And Three Things He'll Never Do" (Crossway), and discuss assurance, doubt and rest.
“It’s called a defiled conscience... everyone knows exactly what I’m talking about when I refer to those occasions when your conscience feels dirty. I’m talking about what you feel and sense deep within as you lie on your bed at night and reflect on the events of the day: the harsh words you spoke to your kids, the lie that you told your boss hoping to gain advancement, the pride you felt in your heart when someone praised your efforts. I’m talking about what you feel and sense deep within when you wake up in the morning and lustful thoughts and sinful fantasies race through your mind. 'Where did that come from,' you wonder aloud? 'What will God think of me now?'... The fact that we could treat God with such indifference is profoundly unsettling.”
“The single overriding and most debilitating factor that threatens to undermine everything in our Christian lives and in our relationship with God is the failure to understand, embrace, and enjoy the full and final forgiveness of our sins. The reason you and I struggle to enjoy God is because we live in constant fear that he doesn’t enjoy us."
“Let me tell you why we think this way. Let me tell you why you aren’t living in the fullness of the joy and peace and satisfaction in your relationship with God that you so desperately desire. It comes down to one thing and one thing only: you and I have failed to believe what God himself says he has done with our sins. What consumes us is what we have done by sinning. What ought to consume us is grateful meditation on what God has done with our sinning.”
“This is what I mean when I speak of your eternal union with God. It is your position as a saved, redeemed, forgiven, justified, adopted child of God. It is eternal in the sense that it lasts forever. Nothing can change it, undo it, or reverse it. But these are also nonexperiential realities. In other words, you don’t “feel” justification when it happens. You may feel an emotion of joy and gratitude because you are justified, but justification is not something that you experience in your body or your hormones or even in your emotions or affections. Nothing that happens in this life can affect your eternal union. Your obedience doesn’t add to it and your disobedience doesn’t detract from it. It is perfect and complete and final. But that doesn’t mean your disobedience has no effect whatsoever on your relationship with God.”
“David had committed adultery. He had stolen from another man. He had defiled a woman who wasn’t his wife. He had defiled himself. He schemed to have her husband killed. But worst of all, he had violated the honor, glory, and goodness of his God. Is forgiveness still possible for someone like that?”
“Whereas God is now and always will be my Father, my experience of that truth can go up and down. One day, I might enjoy his fatherly affection, but on another day, I may have lived in such a way that this enjoyment diminishes. My sonship didn’t diminish. My status as God’s child is unchanged. But my capacity to enjoy and feel the glory of being a child of God can be undermined by unrepentant sin. Many have failed to properly differentiate between these two realities. They don’t fully grasp the distinction between what is eternal and what is experiential, and they don’t carefully differentiate between what is true of my union with God and my communion with him.”
