1 John 1:7-10
Here are 4 signs a sin in your past is now blocking God’s blessings from coming into your present.
1. If Your Attempt to Hide a Part of Your Past Is Causing You to Hide Your Whole Self from Others, This Is a Sign You Are Blocking God’s Blessings in Your Present
Sin always needs to be dealt with, and there are variety of ways to deal with it. The best way is the biblical way, which means we must ask God to forgive us and then accept Jesus’s sacrifice to atone for our sins. When we don’t receive forgiveness, the most common way to deal with the guilt of sin is to simply hide it and push it away.
This has many negative consequences though. One of those consequences is that when you try to hide a sinful part of your past from God and others, you will actually start hiding parts of yourself from the people in your life. What we do is a reflection of what we believe. If we believe there are parts of us that we need to hide, we will start living in ways that cause us to hide ourselves from others.
When people can’t connect with you because you are guarding yourself and not allowing them to get close to you because you fear they will judge you and not like what they see in you, you will end up living an isolated life. You will crave connecting with others but you will stay disconnected because you are afraid of revealing yourself because of past sins.
As 1 John 1:7 states, “But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin.” When you are hiding your sin from God, this will cause you to miss out on fellowship with God’s people.
So one consequence of hiding sin is that this will stunt the relationship blessings God wants to give to his people who are living in the light together.
2. If You Are Now Stuck at the Maturity Level You Were at When That Sin Took Place, This Could Be a Sign You Are Blocking God’s Blessing in Your Life
When something traumatic happens, even if that trauma was self-inflicted through a sinful choice, it is common to get stuck in your current level of maturity. This is one of the reasons you see some grown men still watching cartoons or obsessing over toys. This is why you see some grown women wearing clothes like their teenage daughter. I’m not saying everyone who does these things is doing something wrong; I’m just saying that many times when something traumatic happened in your past, a part of you often gets stuck in the past too if you do not deal with it properly.
I believe one of the reasons this happens is because we want to avoid pain, but when we avoid pain we often do so by no longer moving forward because if we moved forward we would need to pass by the source of our pain. If something happened in the past, to move forward you will need to arrive back to that place where the pain took place so you can deal with it and stop it from blocking the road forward.
1 John 1:8 states, “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.” You can’t mature if you are deceiving yourself. To grow, you must have the truth in you. So if you are running from your past sin and this is now stunting your maturity, this is often a sign you are blocking God’s blessings in your life because God will not bless you with gifts until you are mature enough to use them properly.
3. If the Shame from This Past Sin Is Causing You to Cope By Sinning in New Ways Now, This Is a Sign You Are Blocking God’s Blessings in Your Life
As I mentioned in point 1, sin always needs to be dealt with. If we don’t deal with our sins biblically, one way we try to cope with the pain we are causing ourselves is by sinning more. It’s kind of like using an addictive drug. Your life is getting ruined because of this addiction, but the way you are coping with a ruined life is by using more drugs. This same deadly pattern occurs with sin.
Sin causes us pain, but oftentimes to cope with this pain we just sin more. So if you had premarital sex, you will often have more premarital sex because you are running from God now and the further you get from him the more you are seeking to relieve the pain you feel for your rebellion. If you did something dishonest, you will often need to lie even more to keep your first lie from being exposed. Or if you hurt someone and you feel badly now but you don’t want to admit your wrongs, you will often hurt more people along the way because you will become more stuck in your ways and less willing to acknowledge when you make a mistake.
If you don’t want to block God’s blessings in your life, you have to avoid becoming like the people described in 2 Timothy 2:13, “. . . while evil people and impostors will go on from bad to worse, deceiving and being deceived.”
4. If You Have Not Confessed, Repented, and Depended on the Grace of Jesus Christ, Then You Are Missing Out on God’s Main Blessing He Desires for You
The ultimate gift God gives us is a relationship with himself through the gospel of Jesus Christ. But we can’t experience this gift unless we confess our sins, repent by turning away from sin, and then depend on the grace of God to give us the righteousness of Jesus as an underserved gift.
1 John 1:9, “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” God’s love is unconditional, but is forgiveness is conditional in a way. I don’t mean that there is a level of sin God cannot forgive. I just mean that the one condition to being forgiven is that you confess it to God. Notice the “If” at the beginning of 1 John 1:9.
So if you have confessed and turned back to God, it’s time to move on and enjoy God’s lavish grace. As Romans 5:20-21 states, “. . . where sin increased, grace abounded all the more, so that, as sin reigned in death, grace also might reign through righteousness leading to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.”