Category: Reflections

For years, I believed something that quietly kept me discouraged.

Every time I found myself struggling with the same sin again, I took it as evidence that nothing had really changed. I’d think, “If God were truly changing me, why am I still fighting this?”

I wasn’t asking because I wanted permission to sin. I was asking because I hated that the fight hadn’t ended.

It took me longer than I’d like to admit to realize I’d been measuring spiritual growth by the wrong standard. I assumed maturity meant the struggle lessened and eventually disappeared. Looking back, I don’t think that’s what God was showing me at all.

The struggle itself matters.

For a long time I thought the struggle meant I wasn’t changing. Now I wonder if the struggle was one of the clearest signs that God was changing me.

The Spirit creates a kind of struggle that didn’t exist before. Especially with the sins no one else sees. The ones you could carry quietly without anyone around you ever knowing. Before Christ, it’s easy to justify them, excuse them, or simply live with them. But when the Spirit began working in me, something changed. Before I would sin without any thought to it. Now, there is tension. There is resistance. Something inside me pushes back.

That tension is not meaningless.

It’s evidence.

Scripture speaks about conviction, and that word matters. Conviction is not the same thing as condemnation.

Condemnation says, “This is who you are. Stay here.”
Conviction says, “This doesn’t belong to who you are anymore.”

One traps you. The other calls you forward.

For years I misunderstood that feeling. I thought every fresh struggle was proof that I’d failed God again. Looking back, I can see that many of those moments were actually invitations to return to Him instead of running from Him.

It’s easy to hear someone say guilt and shame are gifts and misunderstand what they mean. Most of us know what it feels like to be crushed beneath them.

But think about touching a hot stove. Pain isn’t there to punish you. It’s there to tell you, “Move your hand.” Without that warning, you’d do real damage and never realize it.

In the same way, conviction isn’t meant to leave us staring at our failure. It’s meant to turn us away from it.

If we stop at guilt, we stay stuck. We replay our failures, define ourselves by them, and become more aware of the distance than of God’s invitation.

But if we treat conviction like a signal instead of a sentence, everything begins to change.

I began noticing something I hadn’t expected. The struggle didn’t disappear, but I couldn’t enjoy my sin the way I once had. I found myself recognizing patterns sooner, praying sooner, repenting sooner. The battle was still there, but it no longer held quite the same grip.

Looking back, I’m grateful the struggle didn’t disappear overnight. If it had, I might have trusted my own willpower instead of learning to depend on Christ.

Over time, obedience grows. Not perfectly. Not all at once. But steadily. The same temptations lose some of their pull. The same failures no longer define us because we keep turning back toward the One who is changing us.

The absence of struggle isn’t always a sign of freedom. Sometimes it’s a sign we’ve stopped fighting.

The presence of struggle is not proof that nothing is changing. It may be one of the clearest signs that something is.

Not that you’ve arrived, but that you’re no longer asleep.

So if you’re fighting something you wish wasn’t there, don’t rush to write it off as failure.

Pay attention to the struggle. Respond to it. Let it draw you back toward Christ.

Because the goal isn’t simply to feel bad about sin.

The goal is to leave it behind.

And if that’s beginning to happen, even in small ways, then something in you is very much alive.

God is omnipotent. That simply means God has all power. Nothing is beyond Him. He doesn’t need tools, time, or effort the way we do. Creation itself came into existence because He spoke. Scripture tells us plainly that “with God all things are possible” (Matthew 19:26).

Because of that truth, a natural question arises. If God can do anything… why doesn’t He? Why doesn’t He simply fix everything? Why doesn’t He come down and play Oprah with the world?

“You get healed. You get a million dollars. You get happiness.”

It sounds almost humorous when we say it that way, but underneath the joke is a very real question. If God is loving and powerful, why isn’t His intervention more obvious? The answer begins with understanding what God actually wants from us.

If God revealed Himself constantly in undeniable, unmistakable ways—if miracles happened every hour and divine voices echoed from the sky—belief would be unavoidable. But unavoidable belief is not faith. Scripture describes it this way:

“Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”
(Hebrews 11:1)

Faith involves trust. It involves believing before we see the outcome. Jesus spoke directly about this after His resurrection when Thomas demanded physical proof. After allowing Thomas to touch His wounds, Jesus said: “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed” (John 20:29). Faith, in other words, matters deeply to God. Not because God needs validation, but because faith reveals something about the heart.

Christian faith is not merely intellectual agreement with a set of ideas. It’s not just saying, “Yes, God exists.” Biblical faith is relational. When someone places their faith in Christ, they’re trusting Him with their life, their forgiveness, their identity, and their future. And that kind of trust doesn’t grow in a vacuum—it grows from love.

Think about it in human terms. The people we trust most deeply are the ones we love most deeply. Trust and love reinforce one another. In that sense, faith becomes a reflection of love. When we believe in God—when we choose to trust Him even when life is confusing, painful, or uncertain—we’re expressing love toward Him. The depth of our faith reveals the depth of our love.

So does that mean God simply sits back and watches the world unfold? Not at all. Jesus said, “My Father is working until now, and I am working” (John 5:17). God is not absent. He hasn’t abandoned the world. But much of His work now happens in a way that many people overlook—He works through His people.

Throughout Scripture, God repeatedly accomplishes His work through ordinary people who are willing to trust Him. He worked through Moses to lead Israel out of Egypt. He worked through Esther to save her people. He worked through the apostles to spread the gospel across the world. That pattern has never really changed. When someone feeds the hungry, comforts the grieving, speaks truth in love, forgives someone who wronged them—that is God working through the faithful.

Paul described believers this way:

“For we are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.”
(Ephesians 2:10)

Notice the order. God prepares the work. We walk in it. The power belongs to God. The obedience belongs to us.

Here’s something many believers eventually discover—living by faith often leads us into situations we would never choose on our own. Left entirely to ourselves, most of us prefer comfort. We prefer safety. We prefer quiet lives where we don’t draw attention to ourselves. Yet faith has a way of pushing us past those boundaries. Someone might feel called to encourage a stranger who is struggling. Someone might speak openly about their faith even though it makes them nervous. Someone might step forward to serve or lead in ways that stretch them far beyond their comfort zone.

From the outside it may look like courage. From the inside it often feels like obedience mixed with trembling. And that trembling obedience is exactly where God often works most clearly. Paul described it this way:

“We have this treasure in jars of clay, to show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us”
(2 Corinthians 4:7)

We are the jars of clay—ordinary, fragile, imperfect. The treasure is the work of God happening through us.

I know that from the inside. I’m a writer now—you’re reading the proof of that—but there was a long stretch of time when I had no interest in writing about faith at all. I wasn’t running from God exactly, but I wasn’t moving toward anything either. God had to work around a fair amount of my own resistance to get me here. The path wasn’t straight and it wasn’t comfortable, and I wouldn’t have chosen most of it. But looking back, I can see it clearly: He was preparing the work long before I was willing to walk in it.

That’s how it tends to go. When a person truly understands God’s love—not as a concept but as something they’ve actually received—something shifts. The cross is the clearest demonstration of that love:

“While we were still sinners, Christ died for us”
(Romans 5:8)

God didn’t wait for humanity to deserve His grace. He offered it first. When a person receives that love and responds with love of their own, faith begins to grow. Obedience becomes less about obligation and more about relationship.

Living that way changes how a person approaches everything. Acts of kindness become expressions of obedience. Forgiveness becomes an act of trust. Serving others becomes a way of reflecting Christ. Jesus put it simply:

“Let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven” (Matthew 5:16)

The goal isn’t to impress people. The goal is to point people toward God. And often the most powerful witness isn’t a sermon or a debate. It’s a life that quietly reflects the character of Christ.

God doesn’t need human help to accomplish His purposes. But He chooses to involve us anyway. When believers step forward in faith, even trembling faith, they become part of something far larger than themselves. A kind word at the right moment. An act of mercy shown to someone who expected none. These things may seem small. But they travel.

I stood in front of a room full of college students not long ago and talked about all of this. I was terrified. I didn’t want to be there. But I was there, because I had faith. Somewhere along the way, God had been working on me long enough that I finally stopped arguing with it.

Faith may begin as belief without seeing. But over time, you start to see it everywhere. God has been working all along. And often, He works through the hearts of those willing to trust Him, even when their hands are shaking.