Daily Article 2-2A

Letting Go of Your Past

It may not surprise you to hear that we have had a high number of people over the years write us asking about how they can let go of the sexual sins of their past. We all have regrets over things we have done and when it comes to sex, it has a lot of potential to wreck havoc in married sexuality. What often happens is we become deceived when we are single into believing lies about sex and then the enemy turns it all on its head and comes at us from the other side to guilt us into living in bondage. In both cases we aren’t living out of the identity that God has spoken over us.

So if you have regrets about your sexual past, where do you start? As always, I encourage you to start by connecting to God. To begin with, if you have not repented and broken the soul tie to your previous sex partners that is your first step. This would include premarital sex that you had with your husband prior to marriage. Draw close to the Lord and stay in that place with Him. The Lord does not require a perfect heart, but a contrite one. Bring your regret and repentance to Him and then ask Him to restore you to a right relationship with Him. Ask Him to break off of you every attachment that you have in your soul to people whom you were intimate with. Certainly intercourse would apply here, but so would oral and manual sex. Remember that our Savior Jesus died for those sins and then was raised to life so that your inheritance in the kingdom of God could be restored to you. So leave those things at the cross and let Him raise you to stand in the identity that He has established you in. Claim your forgiveness with determination and boldness.

Once you have received forgiveness from the Lord, it’s time to move onto something that can be much harder for some of us. Forgiving yourself. This is the aspect where a lot of women find the greatest point of struggle. A “good Christian woman” can learn to receive the forgiveness of God, but forgiving themselves can feel inappropriate. That somehow they are not serious about their repentance if they don’t hang onto a little bit of what they did, even if it’s subconscious. Many women carry their regret into marriage and have a hard time learning to embrace their sexuality in a godly way when they have misused it in the past. It can take years, but once a woman forgives herself the process is much easier.

I would encourage you to ask the Lord to wash your mind of the sin as well. There is no reason to hang onto the memories of your mistakes. They will not benefit you now and they are a distraction to the intimacy you can have with your husband. Invite the Lord to cleanse your mind and release His thoughts over you and to replace those memories.

There is nothing we can do to change the mistakes of our past, but we sure can give it way more authority than it ought to have. We can let it have more control over us than it needs to and can remain bonded to our sin even while the Lord has forgiven us. So often the truth evades us that while we continue living in a cage, the doors have been opened. All we need to do is walk out and embrace our freedom.

Reproduced from http://christiannymphos.org/2010/02/04/letting-go-of-your-past/