S8 Ep. 6 / The Good News for Sinners: Gospel Waltz (Love)
We wrap up our discussion of the Gospel Waltz with “Love.” Our Father’s forgiveness and the knowledge of His character should drive us to action and to heart change. Even as we continue to fail or struggle with sin in our weakness, He continues to forgive and pick us up again.
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For those of you who enjoy behind the scenes videos, here is an unedited video of Episode 6 of Season 8:
For the full unedited transcript from this episode click here.
Throughout this season, we’ve examined how God views sin and the sinner. While God is not soft on sin, He is exceedingly gentle and compassionate to the sinner and knows our humanity and our frailty. We finish our discussion of the Gospel Waltz and the Sacred Struggle with the third step of the waltz: Love. We may also refer to this step as “obedience” or “action.”
When we seek to fight sin, we need to seek a change in our hearts – the root. We do this by targeting the three main actions of the heart. First, we target our cognition (beliefs) by weighing our beliefs with God’s Word. When we meditate on our beliefs, we can recognize where our beliefs about ourselves and our world do not align with our Father’s. For some of us, our relationships or our situations are influencing us to believe we aren’t loved or worthy, leading to destructive and sinful behavior to cope. Yet God understands this weakness, and He encourages the body of Christ to comfort and help the weak. As we understand more of His Word, we can reshape our thoughts and our feelings to align with the promises of God.
Next, when we recognize our affections (desires) are pointed away from God, we can position ourselves to allow the Holy Spirit to change our hearts. We do this by beholding God and recognizing how He offers our hearts a more true, right, and beautiful version of our desires. Though we cannot produce God-honoring desires on our own, we can meditate on our Father and set aside time to know Him better. The more we understand His heart, the more willing we are to come to Him with our sins and our weakness.
Finally, we change our actions by making choices in our hearts that reflect God’s will. Even when our hearts don’t yearn to follow God, we can choose to act in a way that honors Him and honors others. To fight sin, we need to actively plan against it and set up safe guards and accountability within our community. Even when change is slow or we regress, our community reminds us to not grow weary in doing good.
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