My dear Priscilla, don’t feel condemned. That wasn’t the goal of those articles on the ten reasons why you shouldn’t have premarital sex. The Holy Spirit through the word convicts of sin but does not condemn. (John 16:8).
Conviction says, “you’ve messed up but there’s a cleansing for you and an opportunity to turn a new leaf and receive times of refreshing from the Lord.” (Acts 3:19). Condemnation tells you, “you’ve messed up and God will never accept you again no matter how you try.” Conviction though brings soberness and godly sorrow at the beginning ultimately leads to salvation because it introduces you to the saving arms of the Almighty. Condemnation on the other hand leads to death because it ministers hopelessness and depression. (2 Cor 7:10).
Certainly, those who are currently actively living in the sin of fornication and other uncleanness would find those articles convicting except their conscience is already dead – seared with a hot iron and that’s a dangerous place to be; the fastest way to destruction. Haven been convicted, repentance should follow. The blood of Jesus is always potent to blot out all transgressions. The cross of Jesus in turn is ever potent to release power for a new life of practical holiness going forward. Use the blood and the cross.
In your case particularly, I didn’t expect you to have a sense of condemnation because you have actually repented and stopped the misbehavior long before now. You and your man made a decision not to do it again and you’ve since respected that decision. Unfortunately despite your repentance, you continue to harbour a sense of condemnation. You have since lost your prayer life and a sense of God’s presence. Anytime you want to pray, you’re deflated. Guilt prevents your access. More worrisomely, anytime anything negative happens to you, something says, “that’s God punishing you for your past sin.”
But the God of the bible is not vindictive. Whenever anyone repents and asks for mercy, He forgives and moves on. He continues to deal with you as if the sin never occurred. He blots it out of His record totally. God is not man. You can’t understand God if you prognosticate Him from the limited prism of human experience. God is not man. He really moves on. Beyond that, He is good at incorporating horrible human mistakes into His eternal plan so neatly that it will almost appear as though the mistake was His original design.
Remember David. He did worse than you. What did you do really? Through his lust for Bathsheba, he didn’t only “rape”, he murdered a faithful officer of his own army just to cover up his sin. Can anything be more terrible? Of course God was mad at him. But the guy broke down in tears, rolled on the ground in repentance. God forgave him and really forgot about it.
To show you that God forgot about it, the promise God made to David that his house, kingdom and throne shall be established forever (2 Samuel 7:14-17) earlier before the Bathsheba scandal wasn’t revoked on account of the scandal. God stayed committed to that promise. The throne our Lord Jesus will sit upon in his eternal government in the new earth shall still be called the, “Throne of David.” (Isaiah 9:6&7). Just like David, all the promises He made to you before the “fall” remains intact. He remains committed to them. He forgave you and forgot it. He moved on.
Then doesn’t it amaze you that it was Solomon that was adopted to perpetuate the Davidic covenant? Solomon was a product of that “Bathshebagate”. David had other more elderly children who were products of dignifying marriages with other women. Why should it be Solomon? God practically adopted a scandal – a product of David’s backsliding – into his eternal purpose and clothed the scandal with grace. Why He’s called the God of all grace!
Today, most of us can’t even imagine anyone else succeeding David outside Solomon. Solomon looks so perfect and indispensable to the bible that it’s hard to admit he wasn’t within the original contemplation of God’s perfect will. Though God spoke to David about a son he should name Solomon long before “Bathshebagate”, that son would have been another Solomon and not Solomon, the son of Bathsheba whom we all have come to know.
You will remember Jacob also. His destiny was to perpetuate the almighty Abrahamic covenant. That was how sensitive the call of God on his life was. But he grew to be a very careless, thoughtless man. When God was to encounter him at Bethel he wasted the encounter and moved into twenty years of purposeless living acquiring women and sleeping around at Laban’s house. He had no relationship with God those twenty years.
At Peniel, he got to his wit’s end. He cried for deliverance. Do you know that after God delivered him, He incorporated his mistakes into His eternal plan? Today we talk about the twelve tribes of Israel. Do you realise that if Jacob didn’t backslide, he wouldn’t have married four wives and had twelve sons? How many wives did his father Isaac marry? Today, we can’t imagine Israel without the twelve tribes. The eternal plan of God into all eternity involves the twelve tribes. But that was an incorporated mistake now appearing so perfect as though we couldn’t have had it another way.
Despite all the misbehaviours of Jacob, God is proud to introduce himself as the God of not just Abraham, or Isaac (who is a typology of a perfect walk with God) but the God also of Jacob. By this token, God declared eternal affinity with our weaknesses, our frailties, our frivolities. He is God to the fornicator, the porn addicts, the unclean and lascivious. If God didn’t truly forgive, he couldn’t have incorporated mistakes that broke His heart into His eternal purpose.
Now, God had the foregoing disposition when the blood of Jesus had not even been shed. How much more now when it has been shed? That eternal blood that is potent to perfect forever before the Father them that are sanctified. (Hebrews 10:14). Forget it, God has long moved on, you need to join Him.
There are times however when our sins have natural consequences. It’s not the same as God punishing us. For instance, though God forgave Jacob and changed him, the wives and children which he acquired in the days of his backsliding were not changed the day he became changed. They remained children of Belial. They brought him trouble and sorrow all through his life. That wasn’t God punishing Jacob. It was the natural consequences of his actions. God gave him grace to go through them and did His best to mitigate their effect.
Our sins many times have natural consequences. It’s why we don’t go into sin deliberately banking on God’s forgiveness. Forgiveness notwithstanding, some damages can be permanent. But the damages are usually in degrees. In your case, I don’t see any much damage done if any at all. Let’s rejoice for that. Trust may have broken down between you and your fiance but you both can easily reinstate trust by a fresh track record of discipline. You can still enjoy all the other benefits of sexual purity which I shared trough those “Ten Reasons Why Not” by this fresh decision of abstinence that you’ve made.
As to feeling forgiven, my dear forgiveness is not a feeling. It is a product of what the word assures. If you know what the word assures, you’ll be confident you’ve been forgiven. You need to also know that what gives us the right of access to the presence of God was never our righteousness. Even with the best of right living, we still need the blood of Jesus to have access to the presence of God.
“Having therefore, brethren, boldness to enter into the holiest by the blood of Jesus, By a new and living way, which he hath consecrated for us, through the veil, that is to say, his flesh…”
Hebrews 10:19-20 KJV
I want you to rise up from this moment and go to the presence of God not resting on your own righteousness but His. If as you’re trying to pray, the devil accuses you with your past and says “is it a fornicator that is coming to God’s presence?”, tell the devil:
“I have boldness to enter into the holiest of all by the blood of Jesus. It is this eternal blood that cleansed me and blotted out the record of my wrongs. God has no record of it anymore. He promised, “their sins and iniquity I will remember no more” (Heb 10:16&17) and God doesn’t say what He doesn’t mean. I am washed, I am sanctified (made holy and separated unto holy use), I am justified in the name of the Lord Jesus and by the Spirit of our God. (1 Cor 6:11). By this same blood I draw near to God with boldness with a true heart and full assurance of faith, having my heart sprinkled from a guilty conscience and my body washed with pure water (Hebrews 10:22).”
Please meditate on Hebrews 10:10-23. Use every available version.
Remember finally Priscilla when Jesus read the prophesy about Himself contained in Isaiah 61. He read it in the Synagogue of His home town Nazareth. See Luke 4:16-21. He read, “the Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor… bla bla bla.” When He got to, “to preach the acceptable year of the Lord” the bible told us that He stopped reading and closed the book. He was reading verse 2 of Isaiah 61 but didn’t finish the verse. Do you know what the next line could have been? If you read the original text in Isaiah 61, it reads, “to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord………..and the day of vengeance of our God.”
The reason why Jesus didn’t read that portion on vengeance is because this dispensation is not the dispensation of vengeance. This is the dispensation of acceptance – the acceptable year of the Lord. As long as a man is alive and can repent, the acceptable year of the Lord hasn’t closed on his life. No matter how terrible the sin anyone commits, God won’t take any vengeance of the sin in this dispensation. Just be sure of that. The day of vengeance hasn’t come.
Only those who refuse to repent and die in their sins will be welcomed to the day of vengeance of our God.
In your case, what could have even been a future vengeance after death is rolled away because you hid yourself inside the blood that satisfied the wrath of God. That record is gone. It’s a new day. No more condemnation Ok?
Your brother,
Peniela E. Akintujoye
