Over and over again...

When will this EVER end? Why do I do the things I do? Why do things start to get better in my life and then why do I fall into the same awful traps again and again? It's like I don't want to be free from all that, but I do!
I can pray, ask for God to intervene in my life, to help me, and He always does, he is always faithful... but then I mess up again and after awhile I'm just tiered of always confessing the same sins, asking sorry again and again- my repentance is always genuine, and I'm fine for awhile- but a few years down the road, or a few months, or a few weeks, I blow it all again.
I'm always sincere.

Guilt really gets to me and I just want to be free. Free. I long to be free, I long for the day I'll believe...
I can be thinking I'm doing fine and then realize I just chewed someone out again, or had a bad attitude, or judged someone, or gossiped... Or, worse, that I have been ignoring God, havn't talked to him in days, and don't even *care* what He thinks. And yet I do.
It's incredibly frustrating.
What makes it worst is I know the answers- I've read my Bible and listened to enough sermons and lived enough to know better and to know the way out. I can give good advice, even give it to myself. But following it is another matter...
It's like in my driving. Every now and then I'll make a mistake, and Rémi will stop me and ask me what happened, and I'll tell him : "this is what I should have done, this is what I did, and this is why. This is how I could have avoided the mistake". And then he'll be like "so why didn't you do it?" and I never know why. I think things are the same with my faith.
Faith and driving have so many parallels.
The answer is very simple: "Read your Bible and pray every day" - "Trust in the Lord with all of your heart" - "Love him with all your heart"
Why does it have to be so simple? Sometimes I'm much better at doing the hard stuff. And it's much more embarrassing to mess up when it should be simple.
How can I still mess up when Christ lives in me? When I am filled with his Spirit? When I love him? When I'm trying to follow him?

It's so tempting to set myself rules to keep myself on the right tracks- but then I want to break them for they are "only" rules I made up. It's so tempting to say "I'm back for good this time, Lord, I won't dissappoint you". I'm so afraid to fail that I dare not even try anymore.
Or I end up legalistic. And my faith becomes a set of rules. And I become judgemental.
What does this sound like? been there, done that... I've said that so many times before. I've expressed those frustrations countless times in my journals.

When I was a kid, I loved reading the Old Testament. I enjoyed the stories (even though I didn't understand them- it could be fairly humorous to post "The Old Testament, read by a kid") but mostly I wanted to read the Bible like any book and I always got stuck in the Prophets so I kept starting back in Genesis. I made it to the New Testament sometime in my early teens!
My thoughts, after awhile, were "I see a pattern here: Isreal trusts God, God delivers Isreal, they are happy, but stop relying on him, sin against him, ignore him and get idols, and then God punishes them and then they repent and it goes on and on and on like that."
When I was a kid I thought "that's pretty stupid"- and it is. But I'm pretty stupid as well. I'm turning around in my desert when I should be in the promised land!!
I think their main problem was that they wanted to go to the Promised Land, but they also liked some aspects of Egypt. They couldn't get in until they had "divorced" Egypt. I won't get anywhere so long as I still have any regards or regrets of my life on my own.