How can I stop failing in my walk with God?

Probing Proverbs: 4:1-2 My children, listen when your father corrects you. Pay attention and learn good judgment, for I am giving you good guidance. Don’t turn away from my instructions.

So much of Proverbs is dedicated to encouraging us to listen to counsel and follow it! Many times we joke about how to get children to do something…just tell them they can’t and then they will

want to! Sadly there is a lot of truth in that, not just for children. We humans have a fallen nature that insists on having its way. This nature can lead us to destruction. Consider this true story:

Henry Nelson, of Wilmington, Delaware, was a veteran of World War II. He had served as an instructor in the Army Chemical Warfare Department. Yet he ignored a warning by the superintendent of the Riverside Housing Development that the apartment he lived in was being fumigated with hydrogen-cyanide gas, tore down the barricade at the door and went in after two blankets. The neighbors saw him remove the sign and barricade and go in, and they called the Development office. But when employees arrived it was too late. Nelson lay sprawled on the living room floor with the two blankets in his arms. Despite both written and verbal warnings, and despite his training in the Army, he had gone to his death^[1]

I know that I have that same stubborn nature in me and if I am not vigilant it will control me. There are many things we can do to allow God’s Spirit to control us. However, at times we will fail…the fallen nature we live in will fight our spirit until the Day we go to the Lord, so what do we do then. This passage speaks directly to that. God has invited all of us to join His family, when we do He takes that very seriously. He desires to share all that He is with us…and when we begin to behave in a way that would be dangerous or detrimental to our well being, if we refuse to listen, He will, as a good Father does, become firm and correct us! When we blow off sin as a “little” thing that is failing! Falling into sin is never ok, however, the fall is not living in failure, it’s what you do after the fall!

How important it is for us to learn from our Lord’s corrections. Why? Several logical reasons come to thought immediately. 
1. Because He is our Father and His correction is founded in love, it is met for our good, not to satisfy some evil or ego in Him. God is perfect and would do no wrong. He knows what the end will be to our sin and is endeavoring to convict us into turning away from it. You might say, “But if He is God, He could make us stop!” True, yet that is not how He desires in most cases to lead His family. The “Jonahs” are very few in the Scriptures; for the most part, God yields to our choices, never relinquishing His Sovereignty, instead choosing to allow His children to grow through success or failure while also allowing them to reap what they have sown.

2. Either way we will feel the pain of correction because God’s love will lead Him to attempt to teach us the danger and deadliness of sin, so why waste what correction might reap? The lesson you learn will keep you from making the same mistake, the same way again, if you choose to follow. In fact, if you keep that truth before you, it makes the pain easier to endure. 

3. As we learn from our failures His correction will teach us good judgment, which in turn will bring principles of godly living to us, so instead of trying to juggle many specific issues, on whether each one is a sin or not, we will walk in wisdom and we will be “in tune” with the Spirit of God in such a way, that whenever we begin to veer off the path, we will sense it immediately. The key is not to turn away from His teaching. What does turning away look like?

Rejection is the most obvious, however, the deadliest and what I consider the subtlest,  is emotional sorrow without any willful action to repent. Because we “feel” bad we think we are listening, but the proof of listening is in obeying! Keep your heart open.

The so what? When you are convicted by the Holy Spirit concerning a sin, what are the things you do to address that? Do you take an inventory of your life at the end of each day, not to be over critical, instead to keep yourself sensitive to sin? Do you understand the balance we need to have in accepting God’s grace in full and receiving His chastening when we travel in sin? What does the statement in Romans 8 “Therefore there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus”  mean to you?

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^[1] Tan, P. L. (1996). Encyclopedia of 7700 Illustrations: Signs of the Times (p. 1361). Garland, TX: Bible Communications, Inc.