Learning to Come to the End of Yourself
Posted by Pastor Pat on August 16, 2010
Do you ever find yourself succumbing to fleshly lusts? Have you ever wondered why you find it so easy to do evil when the good is equally present? No matter how hard you try to talk yourself out of it, failure seems so inevitable; your frustration level is climbing; stress becomes a part of your every day life. The gap between what you know to be true and how you experience life is glaring and the schism is heart breaking.
I am confident that all who read this can identify with Paul’s dilemma as lamented in Romans 7:19. Those who do not identify fall into one of two categories: those who are spiritually dead as an unbeliever, and those who are spiritually deceived as a believer.
Honesty and transparency are difficult, for they leave us vulnerable. The alternative, however, is mask wearing, and I have always found mask wearing to be uncomfortable as well as stifling and “plastic.”
So, let us be honest – both you and I struggle. While we do not struggle with the truth claims of faith, we do struggle with our progression forward. We want to see Him and have Him use us in an unprecedented way. We want to see Him with the eye of faith. We want to believe that which awaits us can swallow up the trials of this temporal world. We want to believe that somehow in the midst of all this “craziness” God is in control. And yet . . . we struggle. We struggle at work; we struggle with our kids; we struggle with our spouse; and we struggle financially, emotionally, physically, and, at times, spiritually. We just flat out struggle. Life is hard; nothing appears to be easy. We want the supernatural and miraculous. We want God to snap His fingers and fix all of our problems. Yet despite all of these desires, it is still incredibly difficult to do right when wrong is so easy.
