I don't think it's an accident that you're watching this right now. You love God, you actually do, yet you keep falling into the same sin anyway. You've confessed it more times than you can count, promised it was the last time, and you meant it.
Then you found yourself right back there, and somewhere along the way you started to believe that God must be done with you by now. I'm David DeGarmo Hernandez, and I want to be honest with you in this video. I'm going to comfort you because you need it more than you know.
But I'm also going to be straight with you about what this sin is actually doing to you. And then, I'm going to give you a real way out, not try harder. A real way out.
But before I give you that, you have to understand what shame is actually hiding from you. Because until you see it, nothing else I say is going to bring freedom. So, let's get started.
So, you might be picturing the heavenly Father looking down at you right now with disappointment. Maybe in your mind you see him shaking his head or turning his back on you. You see him as angry with you, frustrated with you, looking for a reason to punish you.
But biblically speaking, if you're born-again believer, that is not the description of your heavenly Father. God is not finished with you, nor is he surprised by your struggle. It doesn't catch him off guard when you make your mistakes.
In fact, here's what Paul writes in Romans chapter 8 verse 1. So, there is now no condemnation to those who belong to Christ. You belong to Jesus.
Plain and simple, God does not condemn his children because we've already been accepted, not based on our own performance as Christians, but based on what Jesus did for us on the cross. Now, I remember that I had this real religious mindset, is I struggled with for years. And when I say religious mindset, I mean that I had a very works-based thinking.
And when I say works-based, I mean that I thought that it all depended on me. My relationship with God depended on me. My salvation depended on me.
God's acceptance of me depended on me. And so when I would make my mistakes, I would think, "Okay, now God has disconnected himself from me. " And then when I was a good Christian, it was, "Okay, now God has accepted me again.
" But God doesn't work this way. Nor does your salvation work this way. There's no condemnation for those who are in Christ.
Now, of course, sin has consequences. I'll be talking about that in a moment. It's important that you hear that.
But you have to start here first, recognizing why you're accepted. Often that weight that you feel, that that extreme sense of darkness that you feel around you, often that is the enemy trying to fill you with shame so that he can keep you from approaching God. Because when we're filled with shame, the last thing we want to do is look up.
But conviction, that is the Holy Spirit speaking to you, tells you to look up. Look up to your heavenly Father. Look up to the standard he's given to you.
Look up to what the Bible teaches is the lifestyle of the believer. And so we have to begin here that there's no condemnation. God is not angry with you.
Yes, we understand that God is angry with the wicked every day, but as a born-again believer, you're not counted among the wicked. You're counted among the righteous because of your faith in Christ. The next truth I really want you to embrace is the truth that you don't need to clean yourself up before you approach your heavenly Father.
Now, this is backwards thinking. Because as born-again believers, it's not that we need to clean ourselves up so that we can approach God. It's that God has already cleansed us and therefore we're accepted by him.
Look at what Paul writes here in Romans chapter 5 verse 8. But God showed his great love for us by sending Christ to die for us while we were still sinners. Now, this is important that you embrace this foundational truth because if you have this backwards thinking when it comes to sin and redemption and your connection with God, then you're going to always be fighting against this core lie.
But I'm here right now to expose that lie of the devil. That actually is a form of self-righteousness. You see, we imagine that by inflicting upon ourselves emotional and mental pain that we are in part helping God to pay for our sins.
It feels right. It feels good. We we feel like we're accomplishing something.
That's why so many like the preaching that makes them feel condemned. They like the preaching that beats them up over their mistakes. They like the preaching that makes them feel righteous for experiencing emotional and mental pain.
We think that God is pleased with pain for pain's sake. However, the scripture teaches it's just the opposite of this. In Romans chapter 2 verse 4, we read this.
Don't you see how wonderfully kind, tolerant, and patient God is with you? Does this mean nothing to you? Can't you see that his kindness is intended to turn you from your sin?
I'm not saying we shouldn't live righteously. Absolutely, we should. What I am saying is that this idea that we have to get it all correct before we approach God or before we're accepted by him, that's a religious lie of the enemy.
That's another gospel, and that's part of the reason why you are still trapped in this cycle of sin because you have not overcome the shame cycle. So, you have to combat demonic shame before you can experience the power of the Holy Spirit's conviction. Now, here's why sin affects you so deeply.
There is this expectation of fulfillment that's created when the devil is tempting you or when you are being tempted by your own desires. There's this idea that this is going to make me feel better. This is going to fulfill.
This will satisfy that deep longing within my soul. And there are broken aspects of our nature that reach out for healing or reach out for fulfillment or reach out for purpose or reach out for this feeling of strength and competence or of importance. And so, as your flesh reaches out for these things expecting to be fulfilled, what ends up happening then is you find that you're empty, filled with shame, filled with guilt, and that despair takes you further downward.
And the further downward you go, the stronger that emptiness begins to feel. So, you get stuck in a sin cycle. That expectation of fulfillment, the disappointment of it not fulfilling, and then that shame that pushes you further into this idea or further into this sin consciousness, this this false identity that you've created around yourself, and you now live out of that false identity.
So, the enemy, when he's tempting you, will say that this sin is no big deal. You have to hear this because listen to how he works. When the enemy is tempting you, he'll say it's no big deal.
No one will know. It's not going to affect you that badly. And then the moment you give into that temptation, he suddenly wants to make that sin the biggest thing in the world.
The the the most consequential action you've ever chosen. So, before you give into temptation, no big deal. After you give into the temptation, he says this is earth-shattering.
It's going to destroy the rest of your life. You have to keep the flesh's influence small. You have to keep that sin nature weak.
Otherwise, it just grows and consumes more. And where a sin might seem small at the beginning, the moment you give into it, now you've allowed some influence in your life. And so, this influence continues to grow until you feel like you're being consumed by something so strong you cannot shake it.
And this is very important because this is another reason why people keep coming back around. You have to recognize it has to go in all measures. Meaning not even a small influence.
Because sometimes we tell ourselves, "Okay, I'm done with that. " But in the back of our minds we think, "For now. " And so, we don't necessarily want to be free from sin, we just want to be free from the consequences of sin.
We don't want to be free from the sin itself, we just want to be free from that dark, shameful feeling that we get when we give into sin. That's not true repentance. That's not true alignment with God's thinking.
You have to come to the place where you say, "God, this is going to leave my life now, and not only will I not tolerate it in no measure, but I will not even entertain the idea of allowing myself to go back there because again, subconsciously sometimes we give ourselves a little relief, or so we think, where we reward ourselves for good behavior later on. This is not true repentance, and you need to deal with this thing now. You You to be honest about it, and you need to determine in your mind this is going now in all forms and in all measures for all time.
Okay, so at this point now you're saying I want to be done with this. I know that I need to be done with this. I just don't know how to get there.
You're going to have to realize that you're not going to overcome this by just trying harder. You've already done that. You've made the promises, you've sought out the accountability, you've told yourself you're not going to do it.
You You've exercised your willpower, your strength, you put all your intention on this, you've done everything you know how to do, and yet here we are. That's not a statement of condemnation, it's one of reality. James 4:7 says this, "Humble yourselves before God.
Resist the devil and he will flee from you. " You cannot resist temptation. You cannot resist the devil until you're first submitted to God.
You see, we've become so sin-conscious as a church culture. And again, one of the reasons for that is because it can feel so right to be conscious of sin. But remember that the Holy Spirit doesn't just convict us of sins.
He doesn't just say sin is bad, and it is. He also says righteousness is good. Righteousness is the standard.
He doesn't just tell you what not to do. He gives you a standard to which you can aspire. Imagine you attend a wedding ceremony and the groom gives a speech.
He gives his vows, and in those vows he simply states to his bride, "I promise to not cheat on you. " Now, imagine how romantic that would be. Not at all.
And if that was the totality of his vows, if that's all he said, you would think there was some emptiness there. Marriage is more, so much more, than just not cheating. In the same way, living in the spirit, living righteously, is so much more than just not sinning.
You see, you can make your checklist. Don't do this, don't do this, don't do this. You can lay out your strategy.
Have this friend on speed dial, make sure to put the phone away at this time. I mean, you can have all of that and that's all good. You should have that.
But ultimately, if there's not a standard to which you're aspiring, if you're just sin conscious and not righteousness conscious, you're not going to fulfill the desires of the spirit. Here's what Galatians chapter 5 verse 16 says. Watch this now.
So, I say, "Let the Holy Spirit guide your lives. Then, you won't be doing what your sinful nature craves. " The key to not living in the flesh isn't just not living in the flesh.
The key to not living in the flesh is living in the spirit. It's submission to God. It's surrender to the voice of the Holy Spirit.
Okay, so here's the strategy for actually overcoming this temptation once and for all, that thing you've been battling with for years. Let's deal with it. 1 Corinthians 6:18, "Run from sexual sin.
" No other sin so clearly affects the body as this one does. For sexual immorality is a sin against your own body. You have to flee.
The moment you begin to debate with the devil, you've already lost. In the back of your mind, on a subconscious level, that sin nature is trying to get what it wants. It is addicted to sinful pleasure.
And you are battling with that nature. You are battling with that aspect of human reasoning. And so, that addict, that sin addict is going to lie to you in order to get what it wants.
Let's say you're struggling with pornography. The sin addict will say, "Just leave your phone by your bed when you go to sleep at night. Don't worry about it.
You're not going to look at anything bad. There's nothing wrong with scrolling through social media. " And when you're dealing with that kind of temptation, you know that's not a good idea.
And so you say, "That's reasonable. I can have my phone there and I don't think anything will go wrong. " That's the sin addict trying to get what it wants.
Or maybe it tells you, "You can go to her house. Nobody's there. But uh just just don't do anything.
Set some boundaries and and you should be good. " But you know deep down that there's a part of you that's trying to get what it wants. There's a part of you that's trying to reason away boundaries because ultimately it doesn't want the boundaries because it wants what it wants.
You have to be honest with yourself. You have to stop thinking that you can debate when you put yourself in a place of temptation. Stop giving yourself opportunity to fulfill sinful desires.
Run from that temptation. Don't go anywhere near it. And you've already won a portion of the battle.
The next thing you're going to do after running is you're going to reduce sin's influence. In Psalm chapter 119:11, we read, "I have hidden your word in my heart that I might not sin against you. " Here we see that you have to reduce the influence of that sinful craving.
Well, you do that with the word of God. You have to be in the scriptures daily. Don't tell me you're serious about overcoming sin if you're not serious about daily devotion to God's word.
So reduce sin's influence through the word and also through prayer. Now you may say, "I've done that. I've tried that.
" But I want you to really look at the consistency of your prayer life. Look at the consistency of your devotion to the word of God. The scripture clearly tells us that if we put God's word in our heart, we won't sin against him.
So, if you are battling heavily, you need to do some heavy scripture reading. Not 15 minutes of Bible reading or 15 minutes of prayer. You're going to war here.
You're trying to reduce the influence of the sin nature. You're trying to minimize what you've spent years maximizing. You're trying to weaken what you've spent years strengthening.
And so, you must attack this at its root, and you must begin to weaken that influence. It may take a few days, a few weeks, a few months, but you've got to get in there into the scriptures and reduce the influence of the sin nature. The other thing you're going to do is you're going to replace this now.
You're going to replace that sinful craving. Only the presence and power of the Holy Spirit can satisfy the deepest longing of the human soul. And so, when you begin to instead reach for something sinful, and now you begin to reach for the presence of the Spirit.
That's the game changer. To what in that moment of temptation, you have to hear this. In that moment of temptation, you can actually throw up your hands and say, "Help me, Holy Spirit.
" Now, here's why we don't do that. This is where it's so subtle. The enemy is so deceptive and the flesh is so deceptive.
Because in those split seconds where we're being tempted, the only reason we don't reach out for the help of the Holy Spirit is because we've kind of already decided in our minds that we want to give in to the sin nature. Because you know the moment you reach out for his help, he's going to get you out of there. He's going to bring a way out of that temptation.
So, whom the son sets free is free indeed. Not just forgiveness, but freedom. Not just a change in your behavior, but an utter transformation of your very nature.
Father, in the name of Jesus, I lift that one to you now who [music] is crying out for freedom from sinful lust. They're crying out for strength in times [music] of temptation. And first of all, I rebuke every lie of the enemy in the mighty name of Jesus.
>> [music] >> I come against shame. I come against religious thinking. I come against works-based mentalities.
And I pray, Lord, that by your spirit and truth, you would break those [music] mentalities. Help them to embrace the truth that you accept them because of [music] the work of the cross. Help them to embrace the truth that they can come to you and you will cleanse them.
And Father, I pray that you would convict them. Make them aware of the consequences of sin. Make them aware of the heaviness, the waitingness of giving in to sinful temptation.
And I pray that by your spirit, you would help them, Lord, to minimize the influence of the flesh and to reach out for the things [music] of the spirit. Father, give them grace and strength. Break every bondage in the mighty name of Jesus, >> [music] >> and let today be the day of freedom.
If you believe that, >> [music] >> I want you to type in the comment section right now, amen. Again, I'm David Diga Hernandez. I'm an evangelist.
I travel the world preaching the gospel. [music] The ministry that God has entrusted to me reaches people all around the world through media like this video that you just saw, through events where thousands [music] attend and are touched by the power of the Holy Spirit, and through church planting where we build communities where people can come [music] and experience the presence and power of the Holy Spirit together. Go to davidhernandezministries.
com/partner >> [music] >> to sign up for a monthly automatic gift. You can also give a single gift by going to davidhernandezministries. com/donate.
[music] Give generously. Give led by the Spirit, but do give today. I need your help, my dear brothers and sisters, [music] to help this mission to continue to preach the gospel.
Okay, I want to leave you with one more [music] thought. You are not too far gone, and that was never the truth. You don't have to do this by yourself [music] for the rest of your life.
The cycle can be broken. The stronghold can come down. [music] The Holy Spirit can set you free.
If you want to learn how to break the spiritual strongholds that keep pulling you back into the same cycles, watch my next video how you can break demonic strongholds [music] permanently.
