ingliz wrote:Are you saying Christians can do all that evil stuff and still be good because they repent? Good even if they are repeat offenders as long as they repent, and repent, and repent. That Christians are good per se, no matter how evil they are?
Christians must be contrite in repentance, and repentance means honestly attempting to change themselves. So, the person who strives to give up a habituated sin must make honest strides to that end.
A common issue these days is 'self-abuse' (a euphemism for another sin that starts with 'm' and ends in 'ation'). Self-abuse is easily habituated through becoming addicted to internet smut, and it can also be triggered by even images that are perfectly fine to be displayed in sexual imagery in TV, advertising, the WAP music video, etc. It can be very difficult to overcome habituated self-abuse.
But we are expected to make progress. So, for instance, if your issue began in 2018, we may expect that you completely cut out internet smut from your life with few relapses by 2019, and with almost zero relapses by 2020; perahsp some amount of self-abuse persists, triggered by everyday events or triggering images, and so maybe you would be expected to cease a lot of social media activity, and make self-abuse seldom in 2020...
So, in the case of a habituated sin, the effort to
overcome it is protracted.... But let us remember that self-abuse is a very, very easy sin to overcome compared to
even more basic sins like anger.People experience anger or frustration at their neighbors so often that the process of excising anger from one's heart seems like a near impossible task that will take decades.
The process of
overcoming evil things is lifelong, and repentance is lifelong.
So, Christians will
sadly end up doing evil things that fall short of the grace of God their entire lives.What
hopefully distinguishes the Christian is some sort of progress towards achieving these goals. If this is not the case, then it is a sad situation, and we are thus sort of just
laughing at the foibles of others & of man in general if we make the observation that it is so impossible for regular people to ever become Christlike.