Innocent

The enemy entices us to sin and tempts us to break God’s laws. Then when we do, he condemns us and tells us to keep it to ourselves, that we are alone in our guilt and shame.  And it works.  And until a few brave or “had enough of it” people step forward to break the silence, the pattern is continued over and over, generation after generation. 

All it takes is one person to break the silence.  I feel that is me in reference to losing my daughter at my own hands in 1987. Would it have been easier to keep quiet?  I don’t think so, not in the long run. Suffering in silence never leads to healing.  Exposing my crime to the world, laying down my pride and letting God do the necessary work in my heart and mind was the only way out of that one.  

You may find yourself in a man-made pit or a pit of another kind but either way a pit is a pit.  So anywhere life takes you, you’re always dragging your pit along with you.  (Do you like my play on words☺)  Do the brave but ultimately easier thing and expose it. Someone else’s healing may lie in the balance. We have a responsibility to share our healing.  

I learned something recently, or should I say I relearned something to a deeper level.  I am not only forgiven, which is cool, really cool.  I am now innocent in God’s eyes.  He doesn’t look at my past list of sins and give me a check mark that He forgave me of numerous things; He doesn’t even see the list.  He looks at my past and sees a clean empty slate, and says, “Yeah, that’s my Sue.” So we have gone from being forgiven to being innocent.  If forgiven was good, innocent is even better.  The word justified means, “just as if I had never sinned.”  Justified also equals innocent.  I know I have never looked at myself as being innocent before in my life, not even as a child growing up, but I am innocent.  Jesus did that for me.  And He did it for you too.  There is only one thing to do and that is to take hold of the truth and walk in our new identity.  

In a way it’s like I feel I should not go there – Innocent.  Like I am accepting something I didn’t earn. And the truth is I haven’t earned it aside from the love of God.  He calls me innocent.  And if I wasn’t a believer I could think He isn’t seeing things clearly because for some reason He isn’t seeing my past clearly.  But here is the truth. He is seeing me clearly, I am innocent and He wants me to take hold of it despite what religion has taught the world for generations.  We are God’s innocent children.  It doesn’t give me a license to sin but to focus on living up to His expectations. He says I’m innocent so I live an innocent life.  I live up to my Daddy’s name, the one He gave me. It has taken all the rules away and all I want to hear from my Father is, “Well done, my good and faithful child.”

I wonder sometimes how much more He can download into me because each lesson like this just blows my mind a little bit more.  Like every day I woke up until this day in history and believed something else, then He comes along and tweaks it to be even more clear.  Now tomorrow or next week He will undoubtedly take something else and blow my mind some more.  And it is not like I get into pride because as He tweaks away, I am more in awe of Him, fully knowing “but for the grace of God go I.”

All I can say is, get to know Him, be open to hearing His voice and let Him lead you.  Fear, shame, guilt and condemnation are NOT from Him.  If you are locked into a pattern of those things please know the enemy is behind them and here’s the good news, if you have given your life to Jesus they are a lie.  You are a new creation with an innocent past.  Almost sounds too good to be true but it isn’t.  He’s the real deal made in love.  The love coming from Jesus’ blood which runs warm to each of us this very day.  You have one small but profoundly large thing to do, receive Him.