HOW TO REPENT WHEN YOU WANT TO BUT YOU DON'T WANT TO

Greed.  Lust.  Envy. Anger.  Immorality.  Dissension.  Drunkenness.  Pride.

Without exception, dark matters have a strong grip on each of us.  We are snared, trapped, and guilt-ridden.  Church attendance, Bible study, and Missions orientation help some of us some of the time.  Yet, the struggle is a monster haranguing our consciences if we don't know how to stop doing what we don't want to stop doing.  (Are your reading me here?)

Jesus is the answer. 

Each of us can say he is the answer and all of us have ears to hear it.  But how?  In giving up a sin, how do we do what we so very strongly want to do; but even more strongly don't want to do? 

I have been deeply blessed by reading about Rosaria; a Lesbian gone Straight.  Her war for learning to do what she wanted to do, but didn't really want to has opened my eyes to the answer each of us carries deep within the regions of simple and sheer reality. 

In the process of treacherously breaking from a habitual lifestyle into the form God would wish, Rosaria wrote, I learned the first rule of repentance: that repentance requires greater intimacy with God than with our sin....Repentance requires that we draw near to Jesus, no matter what.

Try not to think less of me for sharing this; but until I read her lines, I assumed repentance was one of the steps to being saved.  Those in our circle sorta begin at believing and fly by repentance on our way to baptism.  I knew it was a serious step, understand.  Too, I knew it to be more than a part of conversion.  Yet, I have struggled with our addictivations as how to get to effective repentance beyond our ever-failing human determination. 

Repentance requires greater intimacy with God than with our sins!

Intimacy with God is still out on the frontier for many who have been in the church for decades.  Closeness with God has been suffocated by sincere (yet often empty) intimacy with church attendance, brand of church attendance, projects to involve the church attenders, and the ever-famous "decent and in order" form of the church attenders.  Much of church has been everything but intimacy with God.

But we are learning.  We are learning to sing, give, pray, listen, reach with heart more than with rule.  Even His call to sing from the heart developed into a battleground for religious contention rather than a worship palace for praising the King of Kings.

How one repents when one doesn't want to repent and yet wants to badly is found in learning to love God more affectionately than we do the sin which demands our reverence.