Shaped by Grace - Lose the Lies & Gain God's TruthSample

Encouragement When You Fall

Lose the lie: “I’m defeated!”

I understand the struggle all too well. Year after year, I collected my failures (in many areas) in my heart so that I felt so defeated I wanted to throw up my hands and say, “What’s the use?” I’ve fallen and restarted so many times my knees are still bloodied! So … how can we keep going when we are discouraged?

I love the verbiage in The Message for 2 Corinthians 5:17:

Now we look inside, and what we see is that anyone united with the Messiah gets a fresh start, is created new. The old life is gone; a new life burgeons! Look at it! All this comes from the God who settled the relationship between us and him, and then called us to settle our relationships with each other. God put the world square with himself through the Messiah, giving the world a fresh start by offering forgiveness of sins.

The New Living Translation (NLT) says it this way:

This means that anyone who belongs to Christ has become a new person. The old life is gone; a new life has begun.

Now, we can’t physically be created again, but God can redeem anything. This truth encourages us to be free of our old self. When God is personally present, by His living Spirit, the old “you” defeatist thinking must go, too! Yesterday’s version is obsolete! Be free of it! Hold on to nothing of your past self, and try again.

As you put aside your old ways and take on godly habits, you will experience the grace transformation process. Negative habits of defeatism, pessimism, and cynicism need to be replaced with optimism, positivity, and most of all ... hope. Christ is the difference maker!

Gain God’s Truth: Look at change as another opportunity to experience God’s transforming grace. Remember, God hasn’t forgotten His original design for you. And your downfalls don’t deter Him from pursuing you. All the lies, the scraped knees, the bumps, and bruised egos diminish in the light of His beauty and grace. Jesus is our worth, and because He paid the highest price for us, He will stop at nothing to pursue us when we fail or fall away. Jesus thought you were worth dying for. His death and resurrection re-makes us to have more hope than we can wrap our hearts around. God chooses you to live the life you’ve been given, so start again, and rely on total dependence on Christ and God's grace.