Slug1
Mar 12th 2009, 07:51 PM
This is my first time on this site. I didn't know where else to go. I am trying to get rid of all the negative things in my life,but I just can't do it. I have been trying to quit smoking (cigarettes and pot),being so sexual,bad language, and horrible thoughts. I pray everynight and when I do I pray to make all of this go away and for help so I can become a better person. I try so hard,but the temptations always get a hold of me. I want to learn how to overcome these things. I just don't know how to go about it. Please help me. I feel like I'm about to break down. :(
I suffered from all this except the smoking and I can add to this list. I asked God to take it all and He did... one at a time.
Once I realized how He planned to do it, one at a time... I allowed Him to be in control. If I had remained in control and try to give them all to Him at one time, would have never worked as my strength was not enough for such a task. So, I was strong enough to be obedient to God as He helped me with one at a time.
In time, they are all given to God and taken away by Him.
What do you do to resist temptation when it pops in your head?
i_say_redemption21
Mar 12th 2009, 08:43 PM
I suffered from all this except the smoking and I can add to this list. I asked God to take it all and He did... one at a time.
Once I realized how He planned to do it, one at a time... I allowed Him to be in control. If I had remained in control and try to give them all to Him at one time, would have never worked as my strength was not enough for such a task. So, I was strong enough to be obedient to God as He helped me with one at a time.
In time, they are all given to God and taken away by Him.
What do you do to resist temptation when it pops in your head?
When temptation pops into my head I tell myself,"No.I can't do this. This needs to stop." Next thing you know, whatever I told myself not to do, I do it. I sit,pray and ask God to help me and once I get a little bit better, temptation comes back knocking on my door and it starts all over again. I don't know how to keep temptation away once it's gone.
th1bill
Mar 12th 2009, 11:52 PM
When temptation pops into my head I tell myself,"No.I can't do this. This needs to stop." Next thing you know, whatever I told myself not to do, I do it. I sit,pray and ask God to help me and once I get a little bit better, temptation comes back knocking on my door and it starts all over again. I don't know how to keep temptation away once it's gone.
... I am now 18 years into repentance and, still, I am tempted. I have gotten more and more like Jesus though, each time it is easier to deny myself and to glorify God. Keep pushing, your on the threshold of victory.
baxpack7
Mar 13th 2009, 11:43 PM
This is my first time on this site. I didn't know where else to go. I am trying to get rid of all the negative things in my life,but I just can't do it. I have been trying to quit smoking (cigarettes and pot),being so sexual,bad language, and horrible thoughts. I pray everynight and when I do I pray to make all of this go away and for help so I can become a better person. I try so hard,but the temptations always get a hold of me. I want to learn how to overcome these things. I just don't know how to go about it. Please help me. I feel like I'm about to break down. :(
If I may add to what Bro. Slug has given you.....
I think that if you can find friends that are NOT into those things that are setting you back, and fellowship with them, then you can get the help that you need.
Are you currently attending church? That is the best place to get good fellowship and support for your afflictions.
I feel your pain with the pot and cigarettes. Check out my signature and read my testimony. Like Slug's, it will hopefully inspire you to stay in the word, pray, and completely surrender your life to Christ. Let God be the One to lean on.
Prayin' for ya:pray:
God bless!
i_say_redemption21
Mar 21st 2009, 03:49 AM
If I may add to what Bro. Slug has given you.....
I think that if you can find friends that are NOT into those things that are setting you back, and fellowship with them, then you can get the help that you need.
Are you currently attending church? That is the best place to get good fellowship and support for your afflictions.
I feel your pain with the pot and cigarettes. Check out my signature and read my testimony. Like Slug's, it will hopefully inspire you to stay in the word, pray, and completely surrender your life to Christ. Let God be the One to lean on.
Prayin' for ya:pray:
God bless!
I did read your testimony and It really touched me. I am going to be quitting smoking cigarettes very soon,pot and drinking I'm cutting out completely now and I feel great. Tomorrow night my friends invited me to a party with a lot of alcohol and pot, but I said no. That was the first real time I've said no to something like that. I feel so fantastic!
My friend at school was going through the same things I am going through right now, and now he is going to church about three times a week and going to bible study. I am going to take part in bible study as well and begin going to church again. I feel so amazing now all thanks to loving and accepting God in my life again. I just feel so guilty at times that I've blocked him out of my life for so long...He is an amazing God and due to all the things I've said and done he should not have forgiven me, but he has and I am thankful.
Sorry, I'm just going on and on tonight. I just needed to get somethings off of my chest. Well, I'm going to bed soon. I'm going to another college to visit in the morning. So goodnight to you all. God Bless and peace be with you,always.
baxpack7
Mar 21st 2009, 01:36 PM
I did read your testimony and It really touched me. I am going to be quitting smoking cigarettes very soon,pot and drinking I'm cutting out completely now and I feel great. Tomorrow night my friends invited me to a party with a lot of alcohol and pot, but I said no. That was the first real time I've said no to something like that. I feel so fantastic!
My friend at school was going through the same things I am going through right now, and now he is going to church about three times a week and going to bible study. I am going to take part in bible study as well and begin going to church again. I feel so amazing now all thanks to loving and accepting God in my life again. I just feel so guilty at times that I've blocked him out of my life for so long...He is an amazing God and due to all the things I've said and done he should not have forgiven me, but he has and I am thankful.
Sorry, I'm just going on and on tonight. I just needed to get somethings off of my chest. Well, I'm going to bed soon. I'm going to another college to visit in the morning. So goodnight to you all. God Bless and peace be with you,always.
Hey, that's what we are here for -to listen and contribute wherever the Lord leads us. I am very happy to here about your refusal to attend that party and your strengthening in the Holy Spirit:ppContinue to seek fellowship with like-minded people who truly care for you for who you are, not what you bring to the party.:hug: I'll continue to keep you in my prayers. May God continue to bless you my friend.:pray:
Scruffy Kid
Mar 21st 2009, 03:21 PM
Dear i_say_redemption21,
Welcome to Bibleforums! :hug:
It's great to have you here!!! :pp :pp :pp
People here have given you some good advice -- and in saying no to the party friends invited you to, you've been taking some wise steps.
Let me try to set some context here.
Four great truths
God loves you very much! That's the first point.What is it to love another? One good definition, which the (now-deceased) Christian philosopher Peiper came to after long thought and study is that: To love another is to say "How good that you exist!" When we love another, we both care for them, do good for them, and also delight in their existence. That's how God is, toward us. Actually we couldn't exist at all except that God brings us into existence, and sustains us in existence, in His love! So God's creation of us, and sustenance of our life, is the sign of His abundant life for us.
But of course, this is a second point, we are radically messed-up. More is involved here than just particular vices, errors, sins, and wrongs we do. Somehow the whole of our being has gotten corrupted. Why? How? In turning away from God, humanity has radically wrecked ourselves. The account in Genesis 3 emphasizes that, at the root of our ruined condition, lies selfishness, self-will, trying to put ourselves in God's place, wanting quick satisfactions, pride, disobedience or rebellion, lack of contentment in all the things we have been given, and the like. (Even boredom!) While the Genesis 3 account does, certainly, tell us about the origins of human disorder in the past, which the whole human family is heir to, it is also telling us about ourselves, our own lives. True, our parents, our grandparents, our society, our friends, the media, and our remote ancestors (such as the first human beings, as Genesis emphasizes) got going down a wrong road, and that certainly is a part of our problem. But each of us, even when given a relatively clean slate, stupidly and rebelliously chooses to go in really destructive, futile, wrong, and rebellious directions.
Because of our own rebelliousness and selfishness and -- above all -- lack of love and appreciation for God and His goodness, each of us (as well as our entire society and all humankind) tends to keep heading down destructive paths.
The third point is that , God's great love for us doesn't end when we mess up. Instead, God in His mercy sent Christ to be with us, to die for our sins, to set us free from sin, and to bring us back to God.
Jesus loves you, dear friend! God our father loves you dearly! The Holy Spirit gently loves you, and, with the Father and the Son, is at work in your life to help you become more the person God created you to be: a child of God whose life has integrity, purpose, wholeness, peace, and is a beacon which helps others, also, in practical ways, and helps them to turn to God and the goodness which comes from Him alone!
Jesus told us of God's love, saying "Which of you, if you have a child who asks for bread will give your kid a stone? Or who, if your kid asks for an egg would give the kid a snake instead? If you, messed-up as you are, know how to give your kids good gifts, how much more will your heavenly Father" (SKP: Luke 11) give to those who ask Him good things -- and especially, He will certainly give us His spirit, to come alongside us and help us! ["SKP" stand for "Scruffy Kid Paraphrase" -- meaning that it's my own translation, slightly paraphrastic at some points. :lol: ]
God doesn't stop loving you, dear friend, because you're kind of messed up. (As Slug is messed up, and I am messed-up, and the others on your thread, trying to come alongside and help are messed up ourselves.) Instead "This is love: not that we had loved God, but that He loves us, and has given us His Son (Jesus) to be the gift that takes away (hilasmon) our sins" and takes away their destructiveness and the rejection and penalties that those sins merit. (SKP) "We love" -- not only originally, but also after messing up a good bit -- "because He first loved us." (SKP: I John 4) We come to God, come to Jesus, as sinners -- we come poor and needy, we come like refugees stumbling into a safe place. Jesus is our refuge, our healer.
Of course we are ashamed of what we have done. It would be a terrible thing if we were not. Of course we know we are guilty for what we have done, and feel bad about it. We'd be continuing in rebellion if we didn't feel that way: we'd be hardened rebels -- a very dangerous thing for us indeed!
However, the path to healing, the path to change, consists not just in seeing the stupidity (and emptiness) of how we've been living and messing-up, but even more in seeing the warm embrace of God's love. Yup, we're fools. Yup, we've really screwed up. Yup, our understanding is wounded somewhat as a result, and for the present we're stuck struggling (for a while without decisive victory) with some bad habits that scare us and are a bit nasty. But in the midst of that there's something far bigger. The huge thing -- the real center of our hope and our life and our comfort -- is that God (knowing all about us, including the slimy stuff) doesn't just tolerate us or pardon us: He loves us intensely. He sees you, dear i_say_redemption21, with all your faults, and absolutely loves you, dotes on you, like a proud parent dotes on a child, an only child. God embraces you with great joy! -- and especially as you are coming back from a degraded life to trying to walk with Him again! (See Luke 15, John 4)
All this is included in Christ's coming to be with us, and dying for our sins.
Fourth, it helps to understand that God will have the final victory -- the final victory in your life (if you let Him) --
transforming you into a person redeemed and with God's own heart! I John 3 tells us this wonderful truth:See what love the Father has showed us that we should be called children of God -- and so we are!! ... Beloved, we are now God's children, but we haven't even seen what we shall be! But we know this: When He (Christ) appears, we shall be made like Him, because we shall see Him as He really is. First off, God loves us here and now as His children. Messed-up as we are, and still struggling with some nasty stuff in our live, God still loves us, unreservedly! And then, we have the great promise: Finally, if we persevere, God will have the victory, we will have the victory, for God will make us the kind of people we long to be, and that He intends for each of us to be: people in whom Christ's love and integrity are solid and completed, people from whom Christ's love and goodness shine. "We will be like Him" because as we fix our gaze more and more on Him, God will transform us, and at the end transform us completely into the kind of good-hearted, God-centered people we long to be, and that God in His great goodness intends for us to be! We will be because we see Jesus really and fully understanding and seeing Who He is, and our love for Him will then work final transformation it us, too. "When He appears we will be like Him, because we shall see Him as He is!"
But furthermore, this very process starts right now, as we set our sights on Him, and also labor to live in His ways. Everyone who has this hope in Him starts to become pure, because of Christ's purity (SKP: I John 3:3)
So what about right now, for you, friend?!
It's really great that you've started to make some good decisions: struggling to live in a good way, and to avoid situations where you are tempted into sinful and destructive ways of acting!
What you need to do -- as th1bill, Slug, and others have noted -- is to be patient and persevere.
Part of what gets us in trouble in the first place is that we are grabby, and want satisfaction right now, and want to live our own way rather than God's way. In short we're selfish and self-indulgent and self-centered!
Maybe if God took away all our vices and sinful tendencies in a flash (that is, all the ones that we're so aware of) it wouldn't help us very much. What we need even more than getting free of smoking, or pot, or booze, or sex is a determination to go God's way even when we find it tough and discouraging, and a heart that seeks God, and God's help, and runs to God when we're in trouble, either with temptation, or with having messed-up.
If God just took away our current bad habits -- as if by magic -- all at once, maybe we'd just find other ways to be proud, and rebellious, and self-centered, and (worst) to orient our hearts mainly to things other than God. God, I guess, lets me struggle, and experience my own continual failures in various areas, to help me learn of the greatness of His constant love for me despite my failures, and to help me learn to be patient, and to keep on trying to live His ways, even when I don't feel like it or even when I get discouraged. He wants me to see, I think, that I'm not any better than anyone else; and He wants me to see that He loves me, very tenderly and with delight, not because I'm a perfect guy but because He cherishes me, even with all my mistakes and bad tendencies.
My first need is to walk with God, to know and love Christ, who loves me so much and died for me. One thing I have desired of the Lord,
.....and that is what I will seek
That I may live close in the house of the Lord
.....all the days of my life
To behold the fair beauty of the Lord,
.....and to be seeking Him and His ways in His Holy place! (SKP: Psalm 27:4) Of course, that means that I'm trying hard to give up harmful things, not to sin, and to be obedient to Him. That is very important! But the center is knowing God's faithfulness to me a sinner, and placing Him at the center of my heart!
I do that, I learn to do that, little by little, because of the greatness of His great kindness and love for me, a scruffy sinner who keeps going astray. Because of God's faithfulness, I start to learn how to trust Him and how to be faithful myself!
We're all rooting for you, i_say_redemption21! We're cheering for you. More important yet, God is rooting for you!
Be wise then! Don't get discouraged, but be thankful for God's faithfulness. But it is very important to get yourself with Christian friends, and out of situations where you will be led astray. (Christian friends'll have plenty of faults, too, just as we all do. But friends who are following a dissolute path, even though they are perhaps very nice people -- God loves 'em greatly, just as He does me and you -- will tend to encourage you into activities and patterns of thought that will wreak more devastation in your life.) You can do yourself a lot more harm by continuing in destructive paths.
Try to find a college where you'll have solid support in your Christian walk -- and if possible a good Christian college.
Friends here -- including the pastoral staff, and often other members -- will give you support and advice if you want it.
Blessings on you, as you seek to follow Christ!!
In friendship, :hug:
Scruffy Kid
