Challenge 44. Blog 8.
God’s Victory Over My Dirty Little Secrets
Praise God, the Bible promises us God’s victory over our Dirty Little Secrets!
Thanks be to God! He gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. (1 Corinthians 15:57)
In Parts 1 and 2 of this blog series about Dirty Little Secrets, I shared some of my own biggest, longest lasting, and most life-altering sins, failures, and hurts, and God’s transformational work through them. And I shared with you from the Bible how God redeems our Dirty Little Secrets. (Click here to read Part 1. Click here to read Part 2.)
But even though we might know intellectually that God forgives our sins, works His good from our failures, and saves the brokenhearted, it’s often hard to believe or feel it’s really true. When you keep committing the same sin over and over again, when you can’t gain your confidence back after failure, or you can’t get over how someone hurt you so deeply, it’s hard to know how to apply what we intellectually know.
So, today, in Part 3 of this series, I want to give you some practical steps for experiencing God’s victory over your Dirty Little Secrets, no matter how long you’ve been carrying them.
Your Dirty Little Secrets
What Dirty Little Secrets still plague you?
3 Kinds of Dirty Little Secrets:
- Sins, especially the biggest, longest-lasting, and most life-altering ones. Examples include lying, stealing, gossip, sexual sin, uncontrolled anger, pride, and disobedience.
- Failure in something very important to you. The failure could have been very public, very private, or a mixture of both. Examples include a failed marriage or career, failing to come through in a big way for someone who really needed you, mistakes that proved very costly to you or someone else, etc.
- Being hurt deeply by other people, to the point of not being able to let it go and move ahead.
Why Does God Allow Us to Be Hurt So Deeply?
This is the age-old question: Why does God allow bad things in the world, whether someone does bad things to us, or whether we cause the bad things ourselves?
The short theological answer is that it’s because we live in a sinful world, caused by the fall of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. God gives us a choice, and we sometimes choose to do great evil.
Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?”
The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, 3 but God did say, ‘You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.’”
“You will not certainly die,” the serpent said to the woman. 5 “For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it. Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.
Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden. But the Lord God called to the man, “Where are you?”
He answered, “I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.”
And he said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?”
The man said, “The woman you put here with me—she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it.”
Then the Lord God said to the woman, “What is this you have done?”
The woman said, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.”
But from the very beginning, immediately after Adam and Eve ate the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, God started the redemptive process that would culminate in the redemptive death of Jesus on the cross and His resurrection to give us eternal life:
And I [God] will put enmity
between you [the serpent] and the woman,
and between your offspring and hers;
he [Jesus] will crush your head,
and you will strike his heel. (Genesis 3:15)
Even though we are eternally grateful for God’s blessing of victory over sin and death, we still struggle to recover from the consequences and pain of our own sins, failures, and hurts.
And, of course, we feel guilty because we can’t pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and just march confidently onward in the complete health and power of our salvation.
And in fact, the apostle Paul tells us:
Continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling. (Philippians 2:12)
Paul’s admonition to “work out your salvation” does not mean we need to add to what Jesus started, proving ourselves worthy of Him, in order to be saved, because salvation is a free gift, not something we can earn:
For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—not by works, so that no one can boast. (Ephesians 2:8-9)
Working OUT our salvation is different than to work FOR our salvation. So this verse means that we have God’s wonderful free gift of salvation inside us, and we live that out through our faith.
Also, the phrase, “with fear and trembling,” doesn’t mean we are to fear lest we come up short of God’s requirements for salvation. It means that the process of living out our faith is sometimes scary or nerve-wracking, because our faith will never be perfect side of heaven.
Therefore, let’s discover 7 steps for “working out our faith”—in other words, growing in our ability to live out our faith as God gives us victory over our Dirty Little Secrets.
7 Practical Steps for Victory Over Your Dirty Little Secrets
1. Don't just ignore your Dirty Little Secrets.
Life-altering Dirty Little Secrets that you’ve held for years or decades don’t just disappear. In fact, they tend to get worse and cause ever-increasing damage:
Each person is tempted when they are dragged away by their own evil desire and enticed. Then, after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, gives birth to death. (James 1:14-15)
2. Confess or talk with God.
When I’m thinking about sinning, or in the very act of sinning, or have just sinned, I don’t want to talk with God. I want to avoid Him. I think that I have to feel sorry first, or I have to make amends first, or I have to do some kind of penance like praying for a certain period of time, before He will want to listen to me.
But that’s not true!
I just need to come to Him, as the old Billy Graham song says, “Just As I Am”:
If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness. (1 John 1:9)
If your Dirty Little Secret is not a sin, but a failure or a hurt that someone has done to you, come to God, who is your Rock. These verses are great for that:
I waited patiently for the Lord;
he turned to me and heard my cry.
He lifted me out of the slimy pit,
out of the mud and mire;
he set my feet on a rock
and gave me a firm place to stand.
He put a new song in my mouth,
a hymn of praise to our God.
Many will see and fear the Lord
and put their trust in him.
Blessed is the one
who trusts in the Lord,
who does not look to the proud,
to those who turn aside to false gods.[b]
Many, Lord my God,
are the wonders you have done,
the things you planned for us.
None can compare with you;
were I to speak and tell of your deeds,
they would be too many to declare.
3. Confess to or talk with a trusted loved one.
The enemy of our soul loves nothing better than to isolate us in our sins, failures, and hurts.
Tell a trusted loved one about your Dirty Little Secrets. You’ll see the love and grace of God reflected in their face, and your relationship will go to a new level. You might even give them the courage to tell you their own Dirty Little Secrets, and they’ll be healed too!
Confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective. (James 5:16)
Bear one another's burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ. (Galatians 6:1)
4. Forgive people who sinned against you or hurt you.
Remember, the Lord forgave you, so you must forgive others. (Colossians 3:13)
Yeah, this is a tough one.
Forgiving doesn’t mean forgetting, excusing, or trusting. The Bible says that God forgets our sins, but it never tells us to forget when people hurt hurt us; God has the ability to forget, but we do not. When we forgive, we are not saying what the other person did was right; we choose to forgive so that we are set free from resentment and pain. And forgiving doesn’t always include trusting, because the person might hurt us again.
5. Get Christian counseling or other professional help.
If you have implemented the steps above, and you still cannot seem to break free of your Dirty Little Secrets, please consider Christian counseling. It certainly helped me to overcome my long-standing sin of lying.
6. Resist the enemy, and put on the full armor of God.
We are indeed in spiritual warfare. We should not focus overly much on Satan, because our God has already conquered him. But he still does try to influence us, and we need our spiritual armor for the battle:
Resist the devil and he will flee from you. (James 4:7)
Finally, be strong in the Lord and in his mighty power. Put on the full armor of God, so that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes. For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. Therefore put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand. Stand firm then, with the belt of truth buckled around your waist, with the breastplate of righteousness in place, and with your feet fitted with the readiness that comes from the gospel of peace. In addition to all this, take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one. Take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God. And pray in the Spirit on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests. With this in mind, be alert and always keep on praying for all the Lord’s people.
7. Look for and celebrate God’s sovereignty.
Look for the good God has done in spite of—or even because of—your Dirty Little Secret. God never causes us to sin, fail, or hurt. But He always brings good out of everything, for His glory, your good, and His purposes.
For example, if I had not failed as a medical researcher, I would not currently be coaching and writing to help people find and fulfill their Christian calling. Also, God continually uses my testimonies about my own Dirty Little Secrets to bring God glory and to bring other people to Him.
In all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose. (Romans 8:28)
Why God Wants You to Have Victory Over Your Dirty Little Secrets
God loves you and wants His best for you.
"I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future." (Jeremiah 29:11)
God wants a closer relationship with you.
I have grown most in my relationship with God when I have been in my deepest valleys. The same will probably be true of you.
Be courageous in your pursuit of wholeness and holiness!
God wants you to become fully who He created you to be.
God did not create you to be crushed by sin, failure, or pain. He created you to rise above it!
You are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s special possession, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light. (1 Peter 2:9)
God wants you to be able to do what He’s created you to do.
When we are free from the bonds of our Dirty Little Secrets, we live maximally for God.
It is in Christ that we find out who we are and what we are created for. (Ephesians 1:11)
God wants to glorify Himself through you.
And, oh, you want that too!
Let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven. (Matthew 5:16)
Actions Steps
- What long-lasting, life-altering Dirty Little Secrets still plaque you? Are they sins you can’t conquer, failures you can't recover from, or hurts you can’t let go of?
- How does the section above, “Why Does God Allow Us to Be Hurt So Deeply,” encourage you?
- Which of the “7 Steps for Victory Over Your Dirty Little Secrets” have you already taken? Which do you need to take again? Which do you need to do for the first time?
- How does the section above, “Why God Wants You to Have Victory Over Your Dirty Little Secrets?”, encourage you?
- What are your next steps for overcoming your Dirty Little Secrets, through God’s power and your faith?
Share
- Let's encourage one another! Please post your comments, encouragement, questions, suggestions for future blogs, etc., under "Leave a Reply" below.
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- Thank you!
To read the rest of the blogs in this "Dirty Little Secrets" series, click the links below:
Part 1
Part 2
(Part 3 is above.)
Conclusion
RJ, the scripture passages in this blog are particularly meaningful–I copied them to keep them handy for daily encouragement.
Fran
Awesome! I’m glad they are helpful. Thanks!