Loving and Trusting God
The Happy Penitent
All people want to be happy. We certainly don't want to be miserable. People search for happiness in many of the wrong places. Happiness is found in finding God in Jesus Christ and in being very close to Him, as those who have experience saving faith, will be in heaven. We must however be dealing with what hinders us from God's fullness and does violence against ourselves which is sin. We can be a happy a penitent.
10/9/20244 min read
To be penitent means to be repentant. How can you be happy if your repentant? Is this truly the way to happiness? It seems contradictory. Often spiritual matters seem at odds with the natural man. Those who have received Jesus and thus the Holy Spirit through repentance of sin and faith in Jesus Christ know the importance of repentance of sin. Jesus came preaching “Repent for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand” (Matthew 3:2) This is Jesus’ central message. Yet repentance and faith are the beginning of the journey with God in Christ. We must also grow in both of these aspects.
Man’s basic sin is that He wants to be in opposition to God like Satan and go against what God says is the way, the truth and the life as stated in the Bible. (John 14:6) Man wants to be God. This is the foundation of sin.
The central issue is whether we trust God and what God says. Satan temped Eve and thus Adam not to trust God or His word. He still does that today. (Genesis 3:4-5) As John the Apostle states, “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God… And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:1,14) Here the Word is Jesus Christ the second person in the Holy Trinity. God's Word is Jesus and His word as recorded in the Bible and it is life.
To come to Christ and be accepted by Christ, we must repent of sin. (Genesis 4:7) We must forsake our love for sin and instead choose by God’s grace to love Jesus. To sin is to not trust God or His word and in fact to be in opposition to God.
When someone is born again, they don’t become without sin. They will not be without sin entirely until heaven. There is therefore a lot of room for growth. We grow by repenting of sin and be formed by the power of God in Christlikeness. At first, we may have some more obvious outward sins and we must repent and God cleanses us as the scripture tell us. “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9) As we mature in Christ, we may think we have arrived when we deal with those sins that others might see, but like the Pharisees our heart might still corrupted and in love with some sin. Jesus said of the Pharisees that they were like whitewashed tombs, looking beautiful on the outside but full of dead man’s bones. (Matthew 23:27) As we mature in Christ we must deal with the more subtle sins of attitude, stinking thinking and other sins of the heart. Some of the monks listed seven deadly sins. They are lust, greed, wrath, envy or jealousy, gluttony, sloth and pride. These sins must be confessed and exposed in all their subtleties to grow in our transformation in Christlikeness. If you spend time in prayer with God there will be a time of gentle correction by God. Perhaps this is why so few spend time in prayer or extended time in prayer making much room for God. In prayer Jesus calls us for repentance of specific sins. We could likely repent of pride every day and ask the Lord for humility. Of course, prayer is also sweet communion with God.
When King David sinned by committing adultery and being the reason the husband was killed said to God, "Against you, you only have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight" (Psalm 51:4) David didn't sin just against God, there was grave sin and consequences against others as well. However, David's sin was primarily against God. Sin is always primarily against God.
Before Martin Luther came to saving faith, he was an Augustinian monk whose life was devoted to God and prayer. The point was He was a man of prayer. As a Protestant he said, “I have so much to do today that I will need to spend at least 3 hours in prayer.” He also said, “When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, ‘Repent,’ he willed the entire life of believers be one of repentance.”
The closer we are to God the happy we are. Sin gets in the way of being very close to God. We must forsake sin every day, every moment, even though in this life we never will be without sin, but we can get as close to God as possible. In the Beatitudes in Matthew 5:1-11 Jesus tells us the way to walk in the way of blessing or happiness. In heaven we will be ultimately happy and that happiness is found there in being close to God.
The way to freedom from sin and victory over the devil is to be very close to God in Jesus Christ. As God’s word states, “ Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you” (James 4:7) This is a huge issue of trust and confidence that God’s way is the best way, the way to fullness and joy. (Jeremiah 29:11)
We don’t want to be in opposition to God like the devil, we want to be in full union with God in and through Jesus Christ to His glory. We find the way of happiness not in seeking our glory but His and forsaking sin in repentance. We are the Happy Penitents.