How Can I Fight Off Temptation Successfully?

Fighting Temptation Through Godly Grief and True Repentance

Have you ever been in a heated argument — someone yelling at you, calling you names, spreading false accusations — and felt that overwhelming pull to hurt them back? That moment is temptation in real time. In this sermon, we explore one of the most practical and urgent questions in the Christian life: How do we actively fight temptation? Drawing from 2 Corinthians 7 and Psalm 51, we unpack what the Bible says about spiritual growth, conviction, and the power of repentance. Whether you're new to faith or a seasoned believer who's struggled to navigate conflict, anger, or recurring sin, this message is designed to cut through the clutter and give you a clear, tactical path forward — not just inspiration for Sunday, but tools you can apply every day of the week.

Understanding Conviction, Grief, and the Work of the Holy Spirit

Spiritual growth doesn't happen by trying harder or ignoring what's wrong — it happens by submitting ourselves again and again to the truth of the gospel. The Apostle Paul knew this firsthand. When he wrote a painful letter to the Corinthian church, he grieved them on purpose — because he loved them enough to tell the truth. According to 2 Corinthians 7:9, his goal wasn't the grief itself, but the repentance that grief could produce. The Holy Spirit works the same way in us today. As John 16:8 teaches, the Holy Spirit convicts us of sin — not to shame us, but to awaken us to something better. When we feel that conviction, we have a choice: respond with worldly grief that leads nowhere, or respond with godly grief that produces real, lasting change.

What Gospel-Centered Repentance Actually Looks Like

True repentance isn't just saying "I'm sorry" or promising to try harder — it goes to the root. Psalm 51:10 gives us the model: "Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me." Jesus came to give us a renewed heart, and that heart needs continual renewal through the power of the Holy Spirit and the gospel. According to 2 Corinthians 7:11, godly grief produces earnestness, eagerness to make things right, and a deep desire for change — not just behavior modification, but heart transformation. Getting to true repentance early is one of the most important habits in the Christian life, and it's always available to you — grace meets you before you feel ready. This sermon is part of an ongoing summer series on how people grow in the gospel: in community, through obstacles, with grace, through habits, and with accountability. Join us, and take the first step toward a truly repentant life.

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically from the audio and may contain small errors.

Today we are gonna be in 2 Corinthians chapter 7. If you wanna turn there, that would be helpful. But before we get into Scripture, I need you to emotionally go somewhere for me. I need you to get your mind in the last heated argument that you had. You're like, I'm just trying to have a Sunday morning here. Caber-den, quit being weird. But think of the last heated argument you had, okay?

Are you there? Okay, somebody's like, yeah, move it, okay. Okay, in this argument, in this argument, you are feeling things, okay? And when you are in that heated argument, somebody is saying something to you that is making you angry and they're probably saying it to you at a high volume, and you are tempted to say hurtful things back. They are yelling at you, they're calling you names, they're falsely accusing you, and maybe even they are telling others these things about you, okay? And you want, your temptation is to be mean back.

That's what you want. You want to be mean right back to them. And if you know them well, you may have the perfect way to be mean to them so that it will hurt more and they will be quiet, okay? You are also tempted to take control, right? They are wronging you, you want to wrong them back. You want them to feel what they are making you feel, okay? This is temptation in real time. This is boots on the ground, everyday kind of temptation. And maybe you're not telling it, maybe you're not tempted to yell back, maybe you're tempted to ignore them for weeks, right? You're tempted to do all kinds of things in the middle of that, but the questions arise very quickly. How do we fight it? Is there a diagram for this? Is there any, can we turn to second hesitations 3.14 and find the diagram of, there is no book of hesitations. Can we find that diagram somewhere? Do we just try hard?

Is that what we do? We just white knuckle through it? Do we try to ignore it? How did your family deal with this? That's a fun question. How did your family not deal with this? Also, I'm not sure. How did they handle this? Also a fun question. How do they handle conflict? Look, growing as a Christian can be extremely difficult to navigate, especially when you don't know where or how to begin.

Growing as a Christian is already hard, but it's especially hard in the middle of this kind of temptation. Because emotionally you are all over the place and you feel bad for doing something and you feel bad for not doing something. And you feel bad for saying this and maybe you said what you meant to say, but you didn't say it the right way. And so now you still gotta apologize for that. It's so messy. It's so layered. And it happens so quickly. As pastors in our discussions about this summer, this series, this summer, our heart on this specifically is to clear the clutter and to get tactical.

We wanna put tools in your hands and help you understand what's happening. How do I push forward? What does this look like? We want to clear the clutter. We wanna get tactical. And we wanna help you take that Sunday information and be more weak-minded. I know, it's clever. It's super clever. Here's the first step. Here's what you have to understand. Here's foundation for the summer stuff. Here is first step. People grow in the gospel. People grow in the gospel.

Here we go. This is the perfect setting somewhere, this table. I can't find it just yet, but we're almost there. All right, people grow in the gospel. They grow in the gospel. What does that mean? It means that our part in spiritual growth is submitting ourselves again and again and again to the truth of the gospel. That means if we're in the middle of an argument, we're submitting to the gospel. That means that if we are super frustrated or if we're tempted over here, we are submitting again and again to the truth of the gospel. And the more that happens, the more that you do that, the more that your life stabilizes on a deep and unchangeable truth. And the less your life centers on how other people feel about you. You know how unstable that is?

To build a life upon how other people feel about you, on what kind of grades you make, on what kind of follows you have on your social media, on how much money you make, on what kind of job you have, on what kind of family you have, on how people feel about that, what's your social status? It is completely unstable to build your life on that. And some people don't know it until their life gets completely wrecked, completely destabilized. And they're in the ruins going, I shouldn't have built my life on this thing. I shouldn't have built my life on how other people think about me because how other people think about me is going to change. And if that's what I'm building my life on, then I'm gonna have to modify all of my behavior to make sure that they continue to feel the same way about me. You know people like this. This might even be you. You are slaves to other people's perceptions.

You are slaves to your performance. That if you don't do the thing in the right way and get the grade and make the thing and do... It doesn't stop with high school graduation. I got news. It just changes. You don't get grades on a report card anymore, but you still get graded. And if you are living for that, you will die by that. It is unkind. It is destabilizing. And so the more that we build our lives on the truth of the gospel, the more that we learn to submit on that, the more stability we have because we're basing our life on something that is unchanging. And this is not an overnight thing. This doesn't happen in like one magic sermon that you listen to and you do everything I tell you to do and then now everything's fine. That's not how life works. Thank you for laughing, because that's crazy. Okay. Anybody who tells you different is also crazy.

But we can take ground on this, which is why we're spending a summer on it. And although there are a thousand avenues that people can take to do this, we are going to lock in on five ways, five types, five ways that people grow in the gospel. So people grow in the gospel in community. People grow in the gospel through obstacles. They grow in the gospel with grace, with habits, and with accountability. On any given Sunday this summer, we're gonna be exploring multiple avenues. These are gonna just come up and pop up. The reason that we wanna focus on this is because it kind of narrows the list to a couple of categories for you so you can kind of see it and understand it, kind of manage it a little bit more. You grow in the gospel, you don't just grow in the gospel in a closet by yourself and then come out and everything's fine. It's kind of in front of people. It's in community.

And you don't grow in the gospel when everything's sunny and there's rainbows everywhere. You do it when things are awful and you're doing it through obstacles. You're doing it through hard decisions. You're doing it through conversations that you don't wanna have. And people who don't grow in the gospel by white knuckling it, they grow in the gospel by learning to depend on grace, learning to depend on the fact that God is doing something for you. And you don't grow in the gospel without intentionality. You don't grow in the gospel just like sitting around like, man, I really hope I grow in the gospel today. There's habits that you engage in and you don't do all of this without somebody knowing what's going on with you, without you trusting another person or another group of people to help you through this. And that's with accountability. We grow in the gospel in these ways.

There's more ways to do it, but we're focusing on these avenues. Another way that we're gonna learn to grow in the gospel is by memorizing scripture. And we have these cards available. They are, they're at the Connections Desk. We, for those of you who were here last week, you got a sneak peek, but we have, gosh, scripture memorization cards, right? We're gonna have a verse every week. Our verse for this week is Psalm 51:10. We're gonna have a new verse every week. And that flash card is gonna have the reference and the verse on one side. And on the back side, it's just gonna have the reference. So you can use it like a flash card if you want to. If you don't want to, just put it up on the side that has the reference and the verse and just have it on your mirror or something and put it in your, don't put it in your rear view mirror. That would be a bad place to put it.

But other places where you look a lot would be helpful by the coffee pot, whatever you need to do on your fridge if you can do that. And so it's gonna be a different color every week so that you can kind of see the differences. But what we want you to do is we want you to begin to memorize scripture. I'm gonna be talking about what our scripture is at Psalm 51:10, this today. And each week we're gonna be trying to do that to connect the scripture to the question that we are asking. So we're trying to make this thing dovetail a little tiny bit so that this summer, listen, this summer's gonna be nuts. You're gonna go on vacation this summer. You're gonna be in and out this summer. You're gonna have people visiting this summer. It's gonna be a little crazy. If you miss a week and you don't have the scripture memory for that week, here's permission, okay? You got pastoral permission right here.

It's okay to miss a week. Just get the verse card for the next week and go for that. Okay? You don't turn them all in at the end for spiritual stars, I promise. There's no grade here. The point is for you to begin to take in scripture and we'll look at why, but you need to begin to take in scripture so that we can begin to build our lives on something that is unchangeable. Okay, all right. Today's question, how can I fight off temptation successfully?

How can I fight off temptation successfully? So successfully. Back to the heated argument, okay? Remember, you are tempted to be mean and to take control. How do we actively fight off these temptations? Here's what we need to see, and we're about to jump into 2 Corinthians 7. We need to see grief. We need to see conviction, and we need to see repentance. Okay, grief, conviction, repentance. We're gonna walk through that in scripture. So here we go, 2 Corinthians 7, 5.

Starting in verse five. For even when we came to Macedonia, our bodies had no rest, but we were afflicted at every turn, fighting without and fear within. Okay, this is the context for what we're about to hear. There's a letter that, this is a letter from Hall the Apostle to the church in Corinth. It's the second letter that we have, so it's 2 Corinthians. He's telling them about a time where he was been exhausted. He's always looking over his shoulder. He is internally struggling. He is externally struggling, okay. And then he kind of goes into something else that happened, verses six and seven. It says, but God who comforts the downcast, comforted us by the coming of Titus. That's a big deal. So Titus comes and he comforts them. And not only by his coming, but also by the comfort with which he was comforted by you. I'll explain that in a second. As he told us of your longing, your mourning,

your zeal for me, so that I rejoiced still more. Okay, so what's going on? He's saying he's encouraged by Titus' visit and Titus' report about the church in Corinth. You have to remember, this is first century, okay, first century Europe and Asia-Europe. Anyway, he is not sure how the church in Corinth is doing. And so he's freaking out, he's tired, he's exhausted. Timothy comes and he encourages them, right? So that's encouraging, but he's also encouraged by the fact that Timothy gives a good report about the church. Why does Paul care about Titus' report? He's excited that Timothy's, the Titus has come. He's excited that Titus has come. Why is he also excited about the report? Look at the next verse. Second Corinthians 7, 8, the beginning. It says, for even if I made you grieve with my letter, I do not regret it. Okay, smoking gun. Paul wrote a letter previously to this

to the Corinthian church and it hurt them. Okay, have you ever heard the expression, don't shoot the messenger? Yes, okay, you understand what this expression is, okay? That expression, for those of you who do not know, it means I know you're mad at what I'm telling you, but I didn't invent this message, right? I'm just telling you what I've been told to tell you. Don't be mad at me. I'm just telling you what I've been told to tell you. Now I've had to fire people before, I've had to reprimand people before, I've had to confront people before. It is not fun, but it is necessary. It is painful, but it is necessary. Paul had previously written that kind of letter to the Corinthian church. Now we're pretty sure that letter is not first Corinthians. So just to follow along, we have first and second Corinthians in the Bible. Those are two different letters that Paul wrote to the church in Corinth.

There were probably more churches, excuse me, there were probably more letters that Paul wrote to Corinth. What he's probably referring to here is a letter in between first and second Corinthians. We don't know that for sure. He could be talking about first Corinthians, we have no idea. However, regardless of which letter it was, Paul had previously written them a letter and it hurt them badly.

And the intent, the intent was not to shout them down, the intent was to grieve them. And this is Paul's wording, to grieve them. Paul wrote a letter, difficult letter, hard to hear letter, gonna hurt their feelings letter. He wrote that letter intentionally, knowing that it would happen. He did it to grieve them. Let's read the whole of verse eight. It says, for even if I made you grieve with my letter, I do not regret it, though I did regret it, for I see now that that letter grieved you, though only for a little while. Many years ago, I had a friend with a fiance

that was completely overbearing. Not a little overbearing, not mildly annoying, completely take over every conversation she is a part of overbearing. Loud, she had an obnoxious little dog with her. It was awful. She was terrible to be around. I actually don't know what kind of person she was, but this whole dynamic of my good friend who was a calm dude, really nice, generous, caring, love the Lord, whole bit. This whole thing of her being so overbearing was driving all of his friends away. It was bad. It was isolating him and it was confusing her. She didn't know that her volume was always at 12. Maybe she was hard of hearing, I don't know. But she was always loud. Her dog was always annoying. She always grabbed the conversation and made her or her dog the center of that time. Now, I gave it time.

That's a bad situation, by the way. Men, look, if you're guys, if you got a good friend who's starting to date a girl that everybody hates, give it some time, but you might have to say, it might have to be you, okay? And it was me. It was me this time. I gave it some time. I couldn't stand it anymore. And so I took them out to dinner. I took them both out to dinner. And what I told them, grieved them. It hurt their feelings really bad. She had to get up and go to the bathroom and cry and come back. It was not fun at all, but it was completely necessary.

I had to grieve her and I had to tell her, your actions are driving people away. Your actions are driving people away at a time when you need to draw people close. It's actually gonna be really important for you to have friends around you when you were in your first year of marriage. Neither one of you been married before. This is a big, kind of big first step. Don't drive your friends away at this point because you will need them later. It hurt them. They understood.

That story does not have a happy ending, but it is what I needed to do. When somebody that you love is living at odds with God's design for their lives, sometimes, not all the time, not self-righteously, not whatever you feel like it, sometimes though, you must grieve them. You must tell them something difficult. When that time comes, you will often have mixed feelings about it. Verse eight, you can see, Paul is definitely back and forth on the regret train on this. I regret it, I kinda didn't, I sorta did. I regret it, but not really. Paul didn't want this grief to cause permanent damage. And that really is the hope, right? As I was grieving my friend and his fiance, I did not want the friendship to be severed forever. I wasn't trying to push them away. In fact, I was trying to do the opposite. I was not trying to cause permanent damage. Paul, whenever he is grieving the Corinthian church

does not want to cause permanent damage. And when he hears the report of Titus, he knows that it did not cause permanent damage. When he receives Titus's report about what's happened in this Corinthian church as a result of the difficult letter that he wrote, he is encouraged. He rejoices, look at verse nine. It says, as it is, I rejoice not because you were grieved, but because you were grieved into repenting, for you felt a godly grief so that you suffered no loss through us. Here's his hope. His hope is that that grief will result in repentance.

So closing the loop on the story, Paul sends the Corinthian church a hurtful letter, a letter that hurts them. And it does hurt the church. It hurts their feelings. It was hard to receive. Titus's report informs Paul that the grief worked. And here, right here, is where we can begin to see this intersect with our lives because there will be times whenever you sin and you feel bad about it, and you will go through something called conviction. There will be times you sin, you feel bad about it. Conviction is what you will feel on the inside. You walk outside of God's design, you're doing life your way, but you come to your senses and you want to repent. How you handle this conviction will determine much of your spiritual life.

How you handle conviction, what your reaction is to it, how you respond long-term, short-term to it, will determine, will spell out your spiritual growth and development. It will put limits or boost your spiritual growth. How you handle conviction. And so we need to know a few things about it first. First, conviction comes straight from God through the Holy Spirit, John 16, eight. And when he comes, Jesus talking about the Holy Spirit, when he comes, he will convict the world concerning sin and righteousness and judgment. Conviction, conviction is when there's something between you and God and the Holy Spirit convicts you. And the aim of the Holy Spirit is not to make you lose self-esteem. The aim of the Holy Spirit is to bring you grief, to bring to bear this fact that you are living in a way that is going to hurt you, others, lots of people. You're living that way, you don't need to live that way.

You need to see that that is bad and that will grieve you. The conviction here is aiming for grief. And it's not just, like it's not just feeling bad. Let's talk about grief. In our grief as the Holy Spirit is convicting us, the aim is for us to be able to put sin to death, the Bible calls it, we'll look at that scripture in a second, put sin to death through repentance. Romans 8, 13. It says, for if you live according to the flesh, you will die. You do life your way, you will die. If you live outside of God's design for you, that will lead to death. But if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, if you kill sin, you will live.

And this, sometimes we read this, we hear about repentance, and we don't really understand what it is to repent thoroughly. Okay, we don't understand what it is to repent thoroughly. I don't know if you've ever had ants in your kitchen. Anybody ever had ants in your kitchen? I've had ants in my kitchens, yeah, yeah. If you've never had an ant in your kitchen, then you don't know the terror that should overtake you when you see an ant in your kitchen. Because when you see an ant in your kitchen, there's always more, you just can't see him.

Right, and so you see an ant in your kitchen, and you're hoping to yourself, oh, I hope that's just like a scout ant. Maybe I can kill it and put bleach where they've been walking, and then they won't know to send the pheromones back to the other ants. Like you are conspiring against this ant takeover of your kitchen, okay? So you're killing the ant, and you're just hoping. But the next day, you wake up, and what happens? There's a line. Oh, the line. It's so depressing. You're like, that's not, that's a Saturday, right? Like I have to clean out my entire pantry, because you see it going from the outside to your pantry.

That's all the grocery, you gotta buy all the groceries again, you gotta, oh. If when you spotted that trail, you like, all the ants that were there, and you were like, oh, done. You fool! No, there's so many more ants that you can't see. You have not solved your problem. You have eliminated a trail of ants, as if they will not rebuild it right when you turn around, okay? This is not how ants work. Can't just kill the trail, and it's also not how killing sin works. You can't just kill what you see.

Often when you and I repent, we do not repent thoroughly. We don't go all the way in. So in order to kill sin, let me just be clear. In order to kill sin, you must repent according to the gospel. And let me give you examples of what I don't mean, then I'll give you an example, what I do. What I don't mean is this, Jesus, I'm so sorry for not speaking up. You know I'm a wimp. Listen, I know you just said sorry in the sentence. I understand that, but that's not repenting deep enough.

It's not thorough repentance. I'm sorry, but I'm dumb. I'm sorry, but, or Jesus, I'm sorry for looking at porn again. I'll try harder next time. You've said you're sorry. But you haven't gone the extra mile. Not the extra mile. You haven't gone far enough. You've only sort of stomped at ants in a trail. Jesus, I'm sorry for stewing on hating that person. They're just so mean. We're not, I get it. Look, and I wanna just give a C plus for saying sorry, okay, as if I'm grading. But I wanna say, yeah, it's good that you're recognizing that you're doing something dumb and saying you're sorry about it. Yeah, okay. I don't wanna penalize too hard on that, okay? I'm not trying to be mean here. What I am trying to say is I'm trying to draw a big difference, a huge, thick, black dividing line between that and biblical repentance, thorough repentance.

The reason that we are killing sin, the reason this doesn't, excuse me, the reason this doesn't kill sin is because it does not apply the gospel, the truth of the gospel, to the root, to the heart. Repenting according to the gospel goes all the way down to the heart. And this is why our memory verse for this week is Psalm 51:10. I'll put it up here. Create in me a clean heart, oh God, and renew a right spirit within me. Let's say it together, because that would be kind of fun. And a little kindergartner, that's okay, we're okay. We're all adults here. Here we go, here we go, Psalm 51:10. Create in me a clean heart, oh God, and renew a right spirit within me. Okay, there's even a little song that goes with it. You can YouTube it later, it's amazing. But the reason that that is our prayer, that that's not even close to I'm sorry, but I'm a wimp. That's not even close to I'm sorry,

but I'll try harder next time. Your problem isn't that you're not trying hard enough. Your problem is that you need a new heart. Your problem is that you need to be, not just a new heart, not just like a refreshed heart. You need the Lord God in heaven to go in your heart and take it out and put a clean heart in there. Create in me a clean heart, oh God. When we talk about biblical repentance, we're not saying I'm sorry, but I'll try harder. We're saying Lord God in heaven, I am hopelessly broken, and I am continuing to go back to this default setting in my own heart where I am rating myself on my own merit.

I had this default setting in my own heart. You do too, we all have this. We have different measures that we do abide, but we always, if we're not paying attention, if we are not efforting in a different direction, we will always slip back into this default mode where we are justifying ourselves, where we are saying because I've done the right thing, I deserve this, and that's not the gospel. In fact, the starting point of the gospel is that you have done nothing and deserve nothing. That's actually the beginning. And so if you at the outset are saying I've done this and deserve this, look, you are standing at odds with the truth of the gospel. You deserve nothing.

We should understand that we are made in the image of God, but that image has been marred by sin. There is a dividing wall that we could never climb on our own. We need a way through. We need someone to save us. Jesus came to give us a renewed, a fresh, a clean heart. And Jesus lives in us because that renewal must be continual. Jesus didn't just save you and leave you.

Jesus saves you and took up residence in you because there's still a lot of change that needs to happen. And you're sinning, you and I, we sin, not because we, you know, nobody's perfect, or the reason that you and I sin is because we actively believe lies. And that's not some sins, that's not some categories of sins, that's not really bad sins versus really good sins, that's all sin, all sin. The reason that you sin is because you actively believe a lie and you are acting out of that belief. And we know this because of the rest of 2 Corinthians 7. 2 Corinthians 7, Chapter 10 says, "'For godly grief produces a repentance "'that leads to salvation without regret, "'whereas worldly grief produces death.'" So there are two kinds of grief. There are two kinds of ways to feel bad about sin. There are two kinds of ways to the Holy Spirit convicting you of sin. And we've looked at them already,

we've looked at both of those ways. Godly grief leads to salvation without regret, how? Look at the next verse, verse 11. Says, "'Forsee what earnestness this godly grief "'has produced in you, but also what eagerness "'to clear yourselves.'" What indignation, what fear, what longing, what zeal, what punishment, "'At every point you have proved "'yourselves innocent in the matter.'" Godly grief and repentance awakens an earnestness and an eagerness to set things right. Godly grief awakens your heart to say, "'I gotta make this right.

"'I don't even know kind of where to start, "'but I need to make sure that this thing is okay. "'Something's broken and I gotta fix it.'" This is godly grief. Worldly grief is akin to getting caught. And really what worldly grief teaches us is to not get caught next time. This is a mark of immaturity in a person, in a human being, right? What do little kids do when they get caught often? They try harder next time to not get caught, right? I mean, depending on the kid, it all depends on the kid. But the default of our human heart is towards self-justification. The default of the human heart is to build systems that make us look good compared to other people

and to attach value to that, some phantom value that like, I don't know, other people will say, yay, about. When you sin, the Holy Spirit provokes you and convicts you. Why? The hope of godly grief, the hope of producing a desire within you to make things right. Because here's what doesn't happen. Here's why it feels like it's kind of tricky. Because it's not like whenever you sin, God just comes and like thunderclaps and you're like, that was stupid, don't do it again. Oh, okay. That's not how it works. That's not how it works.

Or at least you hope that's not how it works. Okay, yeah. That's not how it works. How does it work? When you sin, the Holy Spirit provokes you, pricks your conscious. You know that you did something wrong. You might not even know exactly what's going on, but you feel something and the Holy Spirit pricks and prides and provokes with the hope that you will come to the realization, with the hope that the conviction will set in and that grief will occur in your heart and that godly grief will lead you to repentance and salvation. And the only way to make things right, the only way that grief comes upon you, that godly grief comes upon you and you wanna make things right, the only way to do that is to ask Jesus Christ for a clean new heart to pray this prayer. I wanna just put it up here. Jesus, I don't wanna live this way. Please change me from the inside. There's nothing special about that.

There was no counsel that put that prayer together, okay? This is what you call vanilla prayer right here. This is basic and good, okay? But this now, this isn't Jesus I'm dumb, I'm gonna try harder. This is Jesus, I don't wanna live this way. Please change me from the inside. Change my desires, renew my heart. Change me to a level that I can't sit there and adjust myself. This isn't like a slider that just needs to be moved a little bit. This is an overhaul that needs to happen and you might think, well man, that's kind of a pain in the butt. Yeah, it totally is. You're a wreck. Welcome to adulthood. It's bad, often. And if you think like, oh yeah, I'm gonna somehow graduate to some spiritual plane where I don't deal with whatever anymore. No, no, you will not. You will always need to pray this prayer. Always, always.

Anybody over 70 wanna give me an amen? Okay, thank you. Okay, you got the testimony of those over 70. They've been walking with the Lord for a long time. You don't have to take it from the 48 year old. Okay, take it from them. That's all, listen, that prayer, here's some good news. Here's the good news for us, okay? The bad news is we're awful. Good news. This prayer is always available. Before you give into temptation, that prayer is available to you. After you give into temptation, that prayer is available to you. Grace is available to you even before you think you're ready.

Even before you feel okay. And when you mean it, when you mean it, this prayer is better the earlier you pray it. Let me say that one more time. When you mean it, this prayer, it gets better the earlier that you pray it. Getting to true repentance early is key to your spiritual growth. Absolutely foundational. And look, I'm not saying skip over the part where you feel bad about your sin. Confess your sin, mourn over your sin. Yes, you have betrayed the only person who has ever loved you for who you are. That is what sin is, okay? I don't think I can overstate it. I don't even think I'm overstating it then. You have betrayed your creator. You've betrayed the one who gave you all the hopes and dreams that you have. That's what you've done. That's what sin is. So confess that, mourn that. But can you skip the part where you have to feel okay enough to pray it? Can we just skip that?

Can we move past that quickly, please? You don't need to go away from God and whip yourself enough for God to be like, okay, they feel bad enough. They could, no, no, no, no. A thousand times, no. Let's please skip that part. That part's not from God. Confess your sin, mourn your sin, pray that prayer. Jesus, I don't wanna live this way. Sometimes when you're in the middle of it, I mean, you're in the middle of, you might be in the middle of sinning and the Holy Spirit's just gonna, and you're like, yes, Jesus, I do not wanna live that way. Yes, Lord, change me from the inside. Take those desires away, put new desires in. And look, I'm not saying it's some like spell from Harry Potter. I am saying though, that whenever you pray that, that the Lord is faithful to answer even in the middle of whatever you're in the middle of, Jesus died for you so that you could have direct access

to the Father, so let's use it. Let's not busy ourselves with feeling bad enough before we come before the Lord and lay down at his feet and just say, I need you to make me new. There should be no barrier there. You can always do that. That's how you come to the Lord in the first place. And that's really the only other way you ever come to the Lord is with a prayer like this. Let me leave you with this.

Let me just give you a vision for a repentant life. Vision for a repentant life. And I am remiss, I did not print this out beforehand and it is gnawing at me. Oh, it's terrible. There's a really great little PDF. It's free, you can find it anywhere. All you have to do is search it. I would even give you permission right now to bust your phone out and search it because it's that good of an article. It's called All of Life is Repentance. Okay, some of you have read that, right? It's pretty okay, right? It's a little article, it's like a page and a half. Then it walks you through what repentance can look like. All of life is repentance, okay? If you search that PDF, I guarantee you will find it. It's so easy to find. You can also find it on our website under Life Groups. But that's, all you really have to do is Google that thing. All of life is repentance. It's by Timothy Keller.

It's very good. It will help you if you don't really understand what I'm talking about right now. If this is a brand new subject to you, if you're like, this sounds strange and I've never heard this in church before, hey, that's fine. All of life is repentance, Google that. Okay, a vision for a repentant life. Let's just talk about it. A vision for a repentant life. You are regularly taking in God's word. Regularly taking in God's word.

Read the Bible. Just read the Bible. You can have a cool plan. That's awesome. Read the Bible. Like, do you need to start? Do you need to skip over the genealogy? Skip it. Read the Bible. Do you need to start in the New Testament because you don't understand the old? Read the Bible. Like, who's complaining about you cracking a Bible and reading it? Or are you powering it up on your phone and reading? I'm not. I'm not complaining. Why complain? It's the Bible. It's always efficacious. It's always helpful. Read the Bible. Listen to preaching. You don't have to just listen to me. It's not, I don't take it personal if you listen to other preachers. It's okay. If you have a favorite preacher and it's not me or anybody here at Chisenhall, that's fine. It's okay. Or if it's another person at Chisenhall. That's fine with me too. I'm okay. So I mean, I'll just love Josh Wood.

Okay. Okay, that's fine. I don't need to be better or worse. That's not the point. You need to listen to preaching. Why? Well, because it's God's word applied. That's really helpful, actually. You need to talk to other people about God's word. You need to talk to other people about what you're learning. You might say, well, I don't work with a bunch of Christians. I don't care. Just tell them about what you're learning. Tell them about how the Lord is teaching you something. If they look at you sideways, who cares?

Just, look, just be a Christian at work. Can we do that? It's not, I'm not telling you to like, to like proselyze people under threat, you know? Like you got them in a headlight and be like, love Jesus! I'm just saying, I'm just saying, just be a Christian at work. Just say like, here's what the Lord's been showing me as I've been reading scripture. They'd be like, well, that's weird. Okay, so what? Talk about what God is doing in his word. Pray for, as you read, pray for strength, wisdom, clarity, hope, reminders. Pray for all these things that you cannot do on your own. But use God's word, take God's word in, and just say, Lord, I need this. I need some hope. I need some perspective. I need some assurance. That is a good thing to do regularly. Cannot say that word. I never have been able to. I'm not gonna start today. Second, you need to push from conviction to repentance.

Push from conviction to repentance. Sometimes we feel conviction, and then we feel bad that we feel conviction. And then we never get to repentance. What a waste. What a waste. I know people, I know people. I can name people that I will not name right now. I know people. They were convicted that they were doing something wrong and they just never came back to church ever. They just left. It happens. Do you know why? Because they feel bad about feeling bad. Or they're trying to run the other direction so that they can forget about feeling bad. They're under conviction. It's actually, and I've heard this said several times, it's the worst position to be in spiritually in the whole world to know God and to be running from him. It's awful. Push from conviction to repentance. Get to true repentance early by the Holy Spirit's power. And this is where community comes in clutch.

Because in home groups, and your friends, whenever you're talking, somebody will say something like, I did this thing and I feel really bad. And be like, let's repent right now. How would that home group go? Okay. That'd be like, okay, let's repent right now. I've done that to people before, actually. Good friends of mine, I don't just randomly tell people to repent on the street.

But I have in conversation, I'd be like, can we just pray right now? And they're like, I guess so. It creeped them out a little bit. But then we prayed and they were like, thank you. That was so great. I'm like, yeah, how easy was that? Prayer's free. They're half off on Sundays. That's where community can really come in clutch. And then third, lastly, experience slow growth. Experience slow growth. Look, Jesus Christ in his wisdom may grant you a quick healing over something. I don't need to tell Jesus how he can heal people. And that's not what I'm trying to do. However, however, most of what we see in scripture, most of what we see in our own lives is a slow healing, a slow growth. And I gave you this illustration a couple weeks ago. It's perfectly appropriate here. When you, if you would get a nine year old girl and you'd say, okay, run a 40 yard dash and you time her on running the 40 yard dash.

And then you do the same thing a year later. Same girl a year later, she's 10. She runs the 40 yard dash. Odds are, if she was healthy in both of those scenarios, odds are she's faster at 10 than she was at nine. Okay, let's just pretend for this illustration that she was. She's faster at nine than 10. What if you interview that girl later and you say, hey, little girl, do you feel faster? No, well, why? Why don't you feel faster? You are faster. Yeah, I don't feel.

Look, that's you guys. That's me on our spiritual journey. That's us. We don't feel faster. We don't feel more spiritual ninja from year to year. You know, we don't feel more able to bring somebody through a crisis. We don't feel that, if anybody would tell you that is crazy actually to even think that. It's just a weird thing. Now you can get training and whatnot, that's fine. You can make progress and know that you're making progress, that's fine. But aside from that, to just know that you're getting better at repenting. Like that's hard to track. Take heart. Take heart that the Lord is in charge of your spiritual growth. Take heart that the Lord has a plan for you and that he's bringing you through it. Take heart that the absolute terrifying obstacle that you are facing right now is put there, put there, plan there by the Lord God in heaven so that you can call on his name and grow

so that he can bring you through that and that you can trust him more. God cares so much about the refining of your soul way more than you do. And he will do lots of things, put lots of things in your life. Scary things sometimes. Think unimaginably, terrible things sometimes. Really horrible diagnoses sometimes. But he'll put them in there and he wants to bring you through it. Trust the Lord.