I backslid pretty bad after being saved for a long period of time... years. Did some pretty gross sins. After realizing that life is short after an event with my heart that gave me a scare, I've been cleaning the garbage out of my life. I want to live the rest of my life as a faithful Christian but I fear I've disqualified myself from the faith or in better words become a castaway. I fear I've been given over to a reprobate mind.
I've finally had some lasting victory over pornography/masturbation. Asked God to never ever let me do those sins again. Still get tempted but I try to remind myself to flee from sexual immorality and I have been successful. My other sins I was able to ditch very quickly.
I try to place my faith in Christ and his sacrifice and then Hebrews 10:26-31 pops up in my mind. No more sacrifice for my sins remain? I try to love people but then Hebrews 6 come to mind and then I wonder if my repentance is fake and if I am Esau. 2 Peter 19-21 pops up in my mind. 2 Timothy 2(I think) comes to mind where I've been disqualified. Goes on forever. So many verses condemning me. Even Ezekiel has a verse that condemns me.
Honestly this is such a harsh punishment even though I know I deserve it. I miss God and his Holy Spirit. I miss bearing fruit. I miss having assurance that if I died tonight, I'd be going to heaven. I keep thinking about eternity in torment by demons and my parents being in heaven completely forgotten me for all of eternity. Being unable to pray to God seperated from Him forever.
Edit: After reviewing this, I see it is longer than it felt when I finished writing it. But please read over what I've shown you from the Scriptures here as I believe you will be blessed by it.
We have incredible encouragements in the Word of God, one exceptional example that demonstrates aptly the depth of God's grace and kindness
and severity. I want you to endure through this desperate problem and receive this encouragement, but it must be received how it was intended: with a sober mind and the fear of God, considering not only His kindness but His severity. For "There will be tribulation and distress for every human being who does evil, the Jew first and also the Greek (Romans 2:9)."
Consider the example of David, who is recorded in 2 Samuel 11:2-27 as having committed adultery with Bathsheba and conspiring to murder the man who was the woman's husband, Uriah, so that his sin could be concealed since Bathsheba became pregnant. To compound the depravity of this sin, before having the man killed, David twice met with this servant of his, whose wife he had just laid with, under the pretense of wanting updates on the present war.
The first time they met, David, after conversing pretentiously with the man, told Uriah to go down to his house and wash his feet hoping that Uriah would lay with his wife and conceal the alternative cause of her pregnancy. The next morning, David discovered that Uriah instead slept at the entrance of the King's house with his Lord's other servants. When David discovers this, he is displeased and extracts from Uriah the reason being that Uriah refused the pleasure of enjoying time with his wife and his home while all his fellow soldiers and servants were denied this pleasure. This was manifestly a noble man. So David met with him again, inviting Uriah to eat and drink with him, this time intoxicating him in hopes that his compromised senses would circumvent his noble self-denial on this occasion. Uriah still did not go to his house and slept again on a couch around his fellow servants. This displeased David and he ordered that the man be sent into the most vulnerable position in his next battle so that he would be killed. Subsequent to succeeding in this plan, David takes Bathsheba to be his wife and attempts to live casually as though he is innocent in this affair, until confronted by the prophet Nathan.
Before I briefly conclude with the severe consequences of this sin (which for soberity's sake and to compliment your understanding of God's grace
properly I recommend you keep reading), I want to have an intermittence to explain the significance of what you just read. David commits adultery with a woman he discovered was married prior to laying with her, attempts to conceal his sin by manipulating her husband, discovers his servant who he betrayed is a noble man who will not lay with
his own wife in consideration of his fellow servants and instead of being convicted, David, frustrated in his plots, decides that murdering this man is the only alternative. After succeeding, he takes this woman to be his wife and only repents when confronted some time later. Add to this how long David must have been enduring in this sin, the time it would take to pursue the woman, lay with her, meet with her husband and plot; the time elapsed before Uriah went into battle and died, the time it took for David to receive the report, to take Bathsheba and then finally the time during the delay in Nathan the prophet confronting him.
Here's the part that can be most perplexing: David was saved while doing this! Although this time was prior to the first coming of Christ, the just were always saved by faith in their looking onwards to the Messiah, trusting in God's mercies (Habakkuk 2:4, Romans 1:17), and prior to committing this sin, God declared David to be a man after His own heart (1 Samuel 13:14, Acts 13:22). David, writing in a Psalm concerning the brokenness he experiences in his sin, said "Cast me not away from your presence, and
take not your Holy Spirit from me.
Restore to me the joy of your salvation (Psalms 51:12)..." David had the Holy Spirit and he sought restoration of the
joy of his salvation, which implies he was already saved and indwelt by God.
So here's the conclusion of the point on God's grace in kindness: even a saved person can fall into terrible wickedness, and even for a season endure in it and harden there heart, as David did. So do not be quick to think that your sins have separated you from God or that you in any way have
necessarily demonstrated you were never saved.
However, and this is a part you MUST understand to have the whole picture of the nature of God's grace or you will send yourself to hell presuming on the promises of God as a license for immorality (which the book of Jude deals fiercely with), when God confronted David on his sin and the terrible consequences of it, he repented. What were the consequences? Because David stole another man's wife, God had sworn an enemy king would now come and not only take David's wife, but all his wives, and not only do to them what David did with Bathsheba, but that it would be done in broad daylight as opposed to secretly as David had done. Worse than this, God assured him that violence would never leave his house, and four sons that we know of in the Biblical record were killed (Bathsheba's first son, 2 Samuel 12:18; Amnon, 13:28-29; Absalom, 16:14-15 and Adonijah, 1 Kings 2:25). The account of Nathan's confrontation of David is in 2 Samuel 12.
So what David had done was paid back to him many times over. Not only did he
not get to keep what he had gained in sin, but he lost what he had prior and lived in great anguish for a time long enough to ensure he received many more times of pain than pleasure from his wickedness. He was acquainted with the impartial justice of God. Yet, after this punishment was decreed, David accepted it's brutality and repented, not insincerely, knowing God was going to cause his sin to not have been worth its time. This is the proper response of the saved person, because the Scripture promises us that those who are saved will be disciplined, and that only a spiritual bastard who is not the child of God will proceed without present discipline in this life until Hell (Hebrews 12:4-8). As Paul says to the Corinthians:
"For godly grief produces a repentance that leads to salvation without regret, whereas worldly grief produces death. For see what earnestness this godly grief has produced in you, but also what eagerness to clear yourselves, what indignation, what fear, what longing, what zeal, what punishment!" (2 Corinthians 7:10-11)
If you have sinned, you will experience godly grief and it will be allowed to have it's intended effect until God's will is accomplished with it. I want you to also take note of Paul's words "what punishment!". The context of this is the desire of the Corinthians themselves; they wanted to be punished and longed for the satisfaction of God's justice against themselves! If you are saved, God will bring punishment in your life fitting for the sin, and when He does you must endure it and
will endure it if you are truly repentant.
"And whoever falls on this stone will be broken; but on whomever it falls, it will grind him to powder." (Matthew 21:44)
So fall on Christ and be broken.
