Look at divorce for example. God may have had a plan for you and your spouse to do something for Him together. But because of imperfections--actually sin--it doesn't work and you get a divorce. Now God goes to plan B. Or let's say He has a path for you to walk for a while as a single person and because you are anxious to get married you run out and find someone to marry. God may have had a different plan and wanted you to do some things first, now the situation you are in is not His 'ideal' plan. Does that mean He gives up on you and His plans for you are forever ruined? No, of course not. God always has plan B, (or C, D, E, etc…)

Thank God He does! If there was no plan B after Adam and Eve sinned in the Garden we would all be in trouble. But what we do is we make some wrong choices, make a mess of things and then want God to instantly clean it up and get us out. We've gotten way off the 'ideal' path and then want to instantly be back on it as if nothing ever went wrong. You've got to start from where you are, not from where you wish you were. And that's O.K. God knows where you are. He knows what you've messed up. He knows the bad choices you've made. (And the ones you’ll make in the future too!) And He's still holding out His hand and inviting you to get back up and move on.

But we've got to accept where we are, admit it, confess our sin if we need to and then get back up and keep going. If we don't want to accept where we are we will never be able to move on. This is why He says in 1 John 1:9-10:

It does no good to say we haven't done it if we've done it. It's through our confession and admission of the sin we've committed that we're able to be free of it. We don't get to where we want to go by denying where we are. That's not what faith is. Faith is not denying where you are and the reality of your situation.

Faith starts out with a confession of the sin, or an admission of the problem. It starts out with an admission that; 'Yes I have this huge debt, or this sickness or this problem'. Faith will even admit to how you got yourself into that mess and what you might have done to bring yourself to that place. And then from there your confession becomes one of God's promises of cleansing and deliverance. It becomes a confession of His mercy and grace and your love and submission to Him. If we deny the problem, we deny God credit for a miracle. If we deny that a problem exists then when our miracle or deliverance comes how can we credit Him with the solution if the problem never existed in the first place?

If this were an ideal world with all of us being perfect people then we wouldn't have to talk about these things. But the truth is that we make mistakes and those mistakes sometimes lead us into consequences that we don't like. We need to know what to do when that happens. When we make the admissions we need to make, then we can expect that the Lord will put us back on the path of victory and we will once again be headed in the direction He wants us to go.