Recently at work, we’ve been talking a lot about building the infrastructure for our business intelligence and analytics platform. The work is complicated, but once it’s broken down into a process flow, everything seems much more clear and easy to handle. That links me to start thinking about my own personal process flow of how I came to the decision to become a disciple of God.

When God didn’t answer my prayer to let me win the visa lottery, anger started to come into my heart. In front of everyone, I would act like everything was fine and told people that I trusted God with His plan. Even though my mind constantly repeated that, my heart didn’t believe it because my heart was full of anger. My heart was also full of doubt because I didn’t understand why God wouldn’t give me what I asked for. When anger took a hold of my heart, temptation started to come into my mind. At that time during my moment of weakness under anger and doubt, I was not on guard of my faith, so I let the temptation of the flesh to come into my mind. After this temptation grew, it completed its mission when I sinned against the Lord. This is how sneaky Satan works. He constantly watches us and patiently waits for the moment our faith is unguarded and weakened. Then once we let our guard down, even if it’s only for a moment, Satan grabs the opportunity and put the temptation in our mind to lead us toward sin. That’s why we have to constantly guard our faith because sin starts with the thought, then grows with the deed to set everything in motion, and finally completes its work in action. “When tempted, no one should say, ‘God is tempting me.’ For God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does he tempt anyone; but each person is tempted when they are dragged away by their own evil desire and enticed. Then, after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, gives birth to death” (James 1: 13-15). This is the process of flow that Scripture explains to us. But God doesn’t stop there; He also warns us to be careful with the anger in our heart to not give in to sin. “In your anger do not sin. Do not let the sun go down while you are still angry, and do not give the devil a foothold” (Ephesians 4: 26-27).

After Satan leads us to sin, if we yield to him and commit that sin, he then will turn it around and accuse us of the sin he whispers in our ears to commit to. The whole process of blaming and accusation starts here. Then in our mind, we will finally realize the reality of what we have done; we will have to face the consequences of the decision we made to sin. That reality check will lead to fear, shame, guilt, regret, pain, and despair in our heart. If we don’t have Christ in our lives, the story ends here. And we forever will live in the fear, shame, guilt, regret, pain, and despair that we put ourselves into.

But for those of us that have Jesus in our lives, things start to change here and take another turn. God’s unconditional love through the forgiveness of sin will wash away all of the ugliness of our sin in our heart. Because of the blood of Christ, we are now holy and blameless in God’s eyes. We no longer have to live in our own fear, shame, guilt, regret, pain, and despair. Instead we know with complete confidence that we are forgiven by God, and no one, not even Satan, can ever hold us accountable or accuse us of that sin anymore because the Most High God has the final say, and He chooses to forgive us of our sin. At that time, this confidence in our identity in Christ takes root in our mind to give us boldness, courage, and completion to live out our faith. We don’t look back at who we were or the sin we committed to condemn ourselves. We think about the person we once were to be thankful for the person we are today in Christ. “Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ. For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love he predestined us for adoption to sonship through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will – to the praise of his glorious grace, which he has freely given us in the One he loves. In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, in accordance with the riches of God’s grace that he lavished on us. With all wisdom and understanding, he made known to us the mystery of his will according to his good pleasure, which he purposed in Christ, to be put into effect when the times reach their fulfillment – to bring unity to all things in heaven and on earth under Christ” (Ephesians 1: 3-10). The moment we fully realize our identity in Christ with all our mind and truly believe it with all our heart, we will have the desire to make a conscious decision to live this out and walk with Him everyday. At that point, we no longer live in fear because this perfect love of Christ drives away all our fear. We will want to be the hands and feet of Jesus, to become his disciple: servant of God. When I reached this point of my life, on October 22, 2016, I made a decision to intentionally serve God and walk with Him each and every single day – “God I accept the responsibility to be your disciple. I choose to love you, honor you, praise you, and walk with you everyday. To act justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with you for the rest of my life and for all eternity.”

Now looking back, I realize God’s tier of grace and mercy on me. First He is merciful enough to forgive me for my sin. Then He is gracious enough to love me anyway after what I have done. But it doesn’t stop there; He takes grace and mercy to the next level. What I cannot explain is how and why He still trusts me and uses me to serve Him and the people that He loves. I don’t deserve His forgiveness or His love. And I definitely don’t deserve His trust even more. I don’t even deserve to be called His servant. Yet not only He uses me as His servant, He calls me His child and loves me unconditionally. This kind of love, this kind of trust, I will never understand. But I’m so glad He give me this love and this trust because without it, I can’t go on with my life with boldness and confidence in Christ. I hope that means I will never sin again, but I know that’s not the case. I will continue to sin, to make mistakes, to mess up my life, but I refuse to live in sin like I was. And I have confidence that when I do sin, Christ will still be there, as He has always done and will forever continue to do, to forgive me and love me back to where God wants me to be. But that doesn’t mean I get a free pass to sin. I should never take His forgiveness for granted. Rather I use it as an assurance of His love for me to live out my life boldly and courageously in Christ. “What shall we say then? Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase? By no means! We are those who have died to sin; how can we live in it any longer? Or don’t you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life. For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly also be united with him in a resurrection like his. For we know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body ruled by sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be salves to sin – because anyone who has died has been set free from sin” (Romans 6: 1-7).