WHAT IS CAUSING YOU TO OFFEND?
What is causing you to offend God? What is taking away your peace with God? Food? TV? What is it? Whatever it is, frankly get rid of it and go on with the work lifestyle--trusting in the Lord to help you as you go forward. If you cannot get rid of it because someone else keeps it around, let it be theirs, and not yours.
Acts 19:18 And many that believed came, and confessed, and shewed their deeds.Acts 19:19 Many of them also which used curious arts brought their books together, and burned them before all men: and they counted the price of them, and found it fifty thousand pieces of silver.
Acts 19:20 So mightily grew the word of God and prevailed.
2 Corinthians 13:5 Examine yourselves, whether ye be in the faith; prove your own selves. Know ye not your own selves, how that Jesus Christ is in you, except ye be reprobates?
I came across something in my notes today, "Every right action weakens the sinful habit." When we go forward, it does not take long to feel better, God is helping us and he is helping our weakness. We need him in order to make it--not our old futile attempts at self-reformation. Making deals with the flesh does not work. Just start going toward your normal work lifestyle, a satisfying lifestyle of productivity and of varied interests that arise out of that lifestyle of doing things for yourself. I'm walking out of something right now--and feeling a lot better by God's grace alone--but I also know what it means to be delivered from strongholds that are no longer issues in my life--even many years later. God is a deliverer--we just have to read our Bibles and walk away from our lusts and let him work out the rest, that invisible part. If we start feeling "nervous," we just talk to our Father about it and go do something productive that needs to be done--and do it. After we finish that job, we go on to the next. In my experience, my brain starts calculating things differently and adjusts to the new way and also experiences the pleasures of it; meanwhile, the old way fades away. A quiet afternoon walk is a time when I can read, pray, talk with God, and meditate. We work six days a week and on the seventh day, we rest.
Once delivered, we keep under our bodies so that nothing else will ever jump up on us and seize us again. We look around at our lives, our relationships, our homes, our business affairs, etc. and keep them tidy. We must be sober and vigilant because our adversary, the devil, walketh about as a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour (ref. 1 Peter 5:8).
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