No restart required

Having been justified by faith, we have peace with God. (Romans 5:1)

As a kid I played a game called "Aggravation." To win, you had to be the first to get your four mables from start to finish. But if an opponent's marble landed on a space occupied by one of yours, you had to go back to the beginning and start all over....

Some Christians...believe that they advance in their Christian life until they sin, then they have to start all over. Yet if that were true, we could never be secure in our relationship to Christ, for we all sin every day.

When we sin, we don't need to go back and start all over again--just repent and keep on going.