We don’t pray to satisfy God.  We pray to commune with God.  He is our Father.  We love Him.  We want to be in His presence; amen?  We don’t forsake all of the different lasciviousness things that are in the world to satisfy God.  We abstain because we are now the righteousness of God and, though our flesh begs to do those same things, we hate those things that we used to love; amen?  Our spirit resists the flesh, the flesh warring against the Spirit, the Spirit against the flesh, so that we cannot do the things that we would.

But, beloved, we see in Romans 6 that sin is no longer in that war, the dominant force.  It rises up.  It has a voice, but it has no power.  It has a voice; it will constantly condemn you.  It will rise up and constantly seduce you, but it has no power over you, praise God!  Now, that has built up your ability to resist sin and to overpower sin.  It’s built up by being what?  By being doers of the Word, exercising those things that by reason, the Scripture says, of use gives us the ability to discern the environment, the temptations, the lies, so that we can now begin to habitually do the things that are good.  Yes, we’re going to make mistakes.  Yes, we’re going to sin.  Yes, we’re going to have times of refreshment and revival.  But we never gauge ourselves by how well we’re doing or how badly we’re doing.  We gauge ourselves by the finished work of Jesus Christ that declares we are right with God.  "I don’t care what just happened there.  I got mad, kicked the dog."  Now the dog’s not happy.  Those that we sinned against are not happy.  So therefore, we must go and reconcile with them; amen?  Because see, all of this is contingent upon living in a heart of repentance.  You need to learn to say, “I’m sorry.  I was wrong.”