“Condemnation is his native tongue.”

A thought by Mark Batterson, (2015-10-06) from his book, If: Trading Your If Only Regrets for God's What If Possibilities (Kindle Location 562). Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. (Click on the title to go to Amazon.com to buy the book.)

And we have felt that, haven’t we?

Mark says, “Satan is a complex personality, but one of his monikers is ‘the accuser of our brethren.’ Condemnation is his native tongue. He tries to remind us of everything we’ve done wrong over and over again like a broken record. Why? So that all of our emotional energy is spent on past guilt. That way we have no emotional energy left over to dream God-sized dreams or pursue God-ordained passions.”

Did you catch that? We spend so much emotional energy on past guilt “so we have no emotional energy left over to dream God-sized dreams or pursue God-ordained passions.”

He goes on, “The irony of his accusations is this: he leaves our unconfessed sins alone. Why wake a sleeping dog? He’d rather you don’t deal with unconfessed sin at all. So he doesn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole. His accusations pinpoint confessed sin, sins that have already been forgiven and forgotten. That’s why they are false accusations— those sins have already been acquitted.”

Look at this, “Condemnation is feeling guilty over confessed sin. Conviction is feeling guilty over unconfessed sin. Conviction is healthy and holy, and it comes from the Holy Spirit. It’s the way we get right with God and get on with our lives. If you don’t listen to His convicting voice, you won’t hear His comforting voice, His wise voice, or His GPS voice either. Hearing the voice of God is a package deal. If you don’t listen to everything the Holy Spirit has to say, it’s difficult to hear anything He has to say. So you’ve got to tune in to the convicting voice of the Holy Spirit, but you also need to tune out the condemning voice of the enemy.”

Does that help you in what you are going through right now?

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