Ending the Reign of Guilt, Shame and Regret

Night Prayer Before Sleep

You have an enemy…and he’s dead set on destroying all you hold dear and keeping you from experiencing abundant life in Christ. What’s more, his approach to disrupting your life and discrediting your faith isn’t general or generic, not a one-size-fits-all. It’s specific. Personalized. Targeted.

So this audiobook is your chance to strike back. With prayer. With a weapon that really works. Each chapter will guide you in crafting prayer strategies that hit the enemy where it hurts, letting him know you’re on to him and that you won’t back down. Because with every new strategy you build, you’re turning the fiercest battles of life into precise strikes against him and his handiwork, each one infused with the power of God’s spirit.

New York Times best-selling author Priscilla Shirer, widely known for her international speaking, teaching, and writing ministries, brings her new role from the 2015 film War Room into the real lives of today’s women, addressing the topics that affect them most: renewing their passion, refocusing their identity, negotiating family strife, dealing with relentless regrets, navigating impossible schedules, succeeding against temptation, weathering their worst fears, uprooting bitterness, and more. Each chapter exposes the enemy’s cruel, crafty intentions in all kinds of these areas then equips and encourages you to write out your own personalized prayer strategies on tear-out sheets you can post and pray over yourself and your loved ones on a regular basis. Fervent is a hands-on, knees-down, don’t-give-up action guide to practical, purposeful praying.

Your past ending, the reign of guilt, shame and regret.
If I were your enemy, I’d constantly remind you of your past mistakes and poor choices.
I’d want to keep you burdened by shame and guilt in hopes that you’ll feel incapacitated by your many failings and see no point in even trying again.
I’d work to convince you that you’ve had your chance and blown it, that your God may be able to forgive some people for some things, but not you, not for this.
It’s awful and it’s personal, a personal unwelcome, unwarranted attack, using your forgiven past to poke holes in your future.
But that’s exactly what the enemy does.
He absolutely loves living in the past, in your past, in my past and why not?
Some of his best opportunities to sabotage our potential comes from there.
He carefully archives footage from our history so that he can pull from those files and remind us what our days of defeat, sin and failure look like you’ve seen them.
Same as I have a million times.
If your life is anything like mine, I’d imagine he’s turned every room in your house into a screening room at one time or another popping one of his old favorites into the player for his amusement, for our humiliating, shame and embarrassment.
It’s a painful thing to watch even in reruns, especially in reruns because every time he queues it up again, it’s with the fresh intent of mocking and maligning us making us feel as unforgiven and unforgivable as possible.
And then even pointing the finger at all the other people who are more to blame more at fault than we should ever consider ourselves to be.
If he can’t make us feel judged, he’ll try turning us into judges.
So it’s quite a show he puts on and quite depressing mostly because as he loves reminding us, we’re the ones who’ve given him so much material to work with under more constructive circumstances.
We might actually be able to learn from it.
See another option we could have taken to avoid what ultimately happened in order to not be so rash or gullible.
Next time we might be able to teach from it, help steer others who might one day face the same set of choices, our Children, for example, toward an alternate ending, that’s likely to result in something more favorable for them.
But in the hands of the enemy, it’s always a horror film run from it, hide from it, keep living and reliving it over and over again with no resolution.
Just a persistent dread and heartache, never out of range from his cackling, accusing reappearance always at risk for having it jump up and scare us just when we thought we and God had finally settled it for good.
And that’s how instead of living with assurance, we become bombarded with shame.
Instead of celebrating God’s grace, we feel undercut by continual guilt over the same old things.
Instead of experiencing the ongoing residual blessings of being regenerate by his spirit, all things new.
We’re caught in the spin cycle of ceaseless regrets.
But prayer fervent, strategic prayer can change things, even unchangeable things, even things as unchangeable as real life scenes from your past.
What you did, what you didn’t do, why you did it, why you didn’t, no prayer doesn’t wipe them all away, doesn’t pretend they never happened.
And no, it doesn’t remove every natural logical consequence from playing itself out.
But just as God says to the ocean waves in job 38 11.
Thus far you shall come and no farther.
He’s given us prayer to raise us up above the sea level of Satan’s assaults from our past.
My past, for example, includes some unfortunate travels on us.
Highway 59 North, a major thoroughfare that runs through the heart of Houston, Texas.
I did my undergraduate work in that city and like a lot of college kids, I occasionally went down the wrong road when I should have stayed on the high road, which for me, all too personally includes one particular exit off 59 North that sort of symbolizes some of the most regrettable choices I’ve made in my life.
That road led to nowhere healthy, nowhere beneficial. Nowhere I should have been in the first place.
Perhaps you can relate, choose from your own roads.
Many years later, long after college events took me back to Houston for a summer speaking engagement.
My host for the weekend picked me up at the airport.
I climbed alone into the back seat and they proceeded to drive me to the hotel where I’d be staying a route that diverted us for several miles onto the old familiar 59 north being the kind hospitable women that they were.
They continued to chat merrily as we sped past the various reflective signs on the highway.
I’m not sure they even noticed how gradually quiet I was becoming in the back.
But the mile marker numbers we were passing weren’t just numbers to me.
They were counting up to that one specific exit number that Satan was counting down in my mind with each condemning second, flashbacks flooded tears were forming.
I was fighting an old foe inside and the spiritual battle was threatening to come spilling out all over.
And then there it was the exit ramp. The one I’d taken far too many times.
I couldn’t breathe. My heart beat fast.
My palms moistened with sweat and then almost like a short woosh of wind. The sign was gone.
We were past it and at that precise moment.
I sense the voice of God speaking so clearly to me saying, Priscilla, wipe your tears away.
That road is behind you. Now, I have other roads in store for you in the future roads.
I’ve been preparing for you just as you’ve passed this exit of shame.
So you now are beyond the pain that accompanied it. I make all things new, all things new.
I turned clear around, looking out the rear windshield and watching the exit sign fade into the distance.
Suddenly the lilt of my new friend’s voice has bubbled back to the surface of my conscious hearing and a fresh rejuvenating smile strengthened my trembling lower lip.
I looked ahead and for the first time in my life, I saw what Houston looked like beyond that exit on 59 north, a stretch of road I’d never traveled before and I saw a sign of God’s grace that I’d never ever experienced.
The past was in the past. It didn’t have permission to touch me anymore.
And just like on the freeway, I would soon be traveling to new places of freedom and fullness I’d never seen before.
It was done. I was free. The enemy’s bad girl. Accusations against us.
Come with a statue of limitations. He can rant and threaten and how dare you all he wants.
But here’s why you can plug your ears.
Ignore his accusations and sing God’s praise while you walk away with real. Pardon in your heart first.
God doesn’t live in the past because God, your God exists outside of time to Him the past that so haunts and hamstrings you the past that so ruffles and frustrates you is not in the past at all in prayer.
You are alone with a God who sees you only as you are and have always been since that beautiful moment when you placed faith in Him, holy righteous and blameless past, present and future.
He forgives your guilt, removes your shame and declares his work an established all the time.
Fact, prayer does a complete end, run around Satan’s pitiful accusations, ushering us into an eternal realm with God where the past doesn’t even compute.
And second, we only live by grace anyway, all that stuff, Satan tries hanging over our head.
Those forgiven failings of ours are no longer reasons for shame but are now monuments to the totally amazing grace of God.
I mean, just look at what he is able to forgive even this.
Even that yes devil even that isn’t God incredible that he could forgive even that the glory our God receives and will eternally receive from having saved our souls.
Doesn’t come from all the good things we do for Him.
His glory comes from creating people of purity and spiritual passion who once did things like that like we’ve done like you’ve done like I’ve done so talk it up devil because as high as you choose to ratchet it up.
You’re only showing off the breadth length, height and depth of the love of Christ. Jesus extended toward me.
Satan can be the accuser of the brother and all he wants like it says in revelation 12 10, but he can’t change what the cross has done to throw all his accusations out of court.
Every last one of them on an undeniably divine technicality.
Again, one of the qualities that makes the gospel so real and so great is that it doesn’t eliminate our past, but just so thoroughly deals with it.
God forgives it. He changes it.
He transforms all that mess into this huge mountain of grace that only takes us higher and closer to him.
So now, instead of being a reason for endless shame, guilt and regret, our past is a reason for endless worship and free flowing testimony and for continual grateful heartfelt prayer, call to prayer.
I realize when I bring up the subject of the past, I have no real idea what populates that period of time for you.
I hope you’ve seen as I’ve talked about the height and depth of God’s love and grace.
A phrase that comes from Ephesians chapter three verse 16 through 19 that I’m not minimizing what’s back there in your past, the extent of what you’ve done or what’s been done to you.
But the devil wants you to think that your past is worse than everybody else’s or he wants to suggest to you that given your religious background and what you profess to be in public, your past sins, though, perhaps not the shocking scandalous type still disqualify you from parading around all Christian.
Like, look, here’s the truth. There’s not one of us, not one who can stare back into our past and wish 100 times we’ve done 100 things differently.
And the reason it’s only 100 today is probably just because our memory isn’t what it used to be.
Not to mention, despite our best efforts, we keep feeding our enemy new clips of failure to choose from and compile.
And as soon as they fade into the past, he fires up the projector and invites himself over for popcorn to make sure we’ve seen how bad it is and how bad we are.
Yes, we’re all on a journey here. We’re not perfect. We all struggle.
We can tell from the fatigue we feel and the stiffness of our spiritual joints that we haven’t always taken good care of ourselves.
But prayer wakes us up with mercies from God that are according to lamentation.
3 23 new, every morning prayer is how we start to stretch and feel limb again, feel loose and ready to take on the world.
And when we start applying prayer to particular muscle groups, like our confidence in Christ and his victory over our past our whole body and our whole being start to percolate with fresh energy with the blood pumping results of applied faith.
So as you begin crafting a strategy for crushing Satan’s backdoor assault on your daily freedom and joy.
Think back again to that helpful guide we’ve been using. It’s the acronym for pray P stands for praise.
Thank him for completely forgiving. You cleansing, you changing you. R is for repentance.
See the foolishness of anything that perpetuates old sin patterns and by his spirit walk away.
A is for asking, ask for freedom, for release, for the ability to deflect lies and embrace truth.
Why is for yes, because you by his resurrection power can now walk in a new way of life.
Second Corinthians 5 17 says, therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature, the old things passed away, behold, new things have come.
Ephesians 21 through five says, once you were dead because of your disobedience and your many sins, you used to live in sin just like the rest of the world, obeying the devil, the commander of the powers in the unseen world.
He is the spirit at work in the hearts of those who refuse to obey God.
All of us used to live that way following the passionate desire and inclinations of our sinful nature.
By our very nature, we were subject to God’s anger just like everyone else, but God is so rich in mercy and he loved us so much that even though we were dead because of our sins.
He gave us life when he raised Christ from the dead.
It is only by God’s grace that you have been saved. Isaiah 43 16 and 18 through 19.
Thus says, the Lord do not call to mind the former things or ponder things of the past.
Behold, I will do something new now it will spring forth. Will you not be aware of it?
I will even make a roadway in the wilderness, rivers in the desert.
Psalm 30 verse four through five, sing praises to the Lord, you his Godly ones and give thanks to his holy name.
For his anger is but for a moment, his favor is for a lifetime. Weeping may last for the night.
But a shout of joy comes in the morning, Isaiah 40 29 through 31.
He gives strength to the weary and to him who lacks might. He increase his power.
Though youths grow weary and tired and vigorous, young men stumble badly.
Yet those who wait for the Lord will gain new strength.
They will mount up with wings like eagles, they will run and not get tired, they will walk and not become weary.
Second Corinthians chapter 12 verse nine, he has said to me, my grace is sufficient for you.
My power is perfected in weakness most gladly.
Therefore, I will rather boast about my weaknesses so that the power of Christ may dwell in me.
Hebrews 13 8, Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever the past for all its attempts at confining and condemning us, possesses limits that our enemy doesn’t want us to know about.
Well, now we do. And so here we go, we’re moving on and he can just sit back there in the dark and watch all those home movies of his, all by himself because our real life in Christ is just a lot more exciting.
So here’s to freedom. Yours and mine in Jesus name. Amen.