Do you ever get angry, frustrated, and impatient with yourself and the way you are? I have long standing, default responses in my heart that I truly despise and grieve over. How about you. Whether you are in your twenties or sixties like me, you probably have some long-standing heart responses you don’t like. These are like reflexes. They are default responses. They are natural habits birthed out of sin. You don’t choose them or plan them. They spring up unintentionally from your heart, usually in response to the people and situations around you.
Your response may be anger, anxiety, envy, resentment, self-pity, disgust, frustration, pride, discouragement, lust, irritability, impatience, hard-heartedness, rudeness, unkindness, withdrawnness.
When any one of these attitudes springs up unbidden, you hate it.
Paul describes your experience this way in Romans 7
15 For I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. 16 Now if I do what I do not want, I agree with the law, that it is good. 17 So now it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me. 18 For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh. For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out. 19 For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing. 20 Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me. 21 So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. 22 For I delight in the law of God, in my inner being, 23 but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. 24 Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? 25 Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! (Romans 7:15-21)
There are battles I have fought it for years with the word and the spirit and prayer trusting in the blood of Christ and the power of the Holy Spirit to cover it and conquer it. Yet, still it returns. You weep over it, resolve to change and be different, pray asking God to take it away, and ask your closest friends to pray for you. Sometimes there is a short season of reprieve and suddenly, there it is again stamping you. Telling you: This is who you are. You will never change. You say no. In Christ, this is not who I am. His stamp is on my life. True.
But on a personal, experiential note, you would be thrilled to be completely victorious and be done with this! you want to be new, really new, through and through! Not in such a limited way.
Is there a remedy? Is there a key?
Yes! There are a thousand remedies and keys!
.
That is because “every Scripture is profitable for training in righteousness” so that we might be “complete, equipped for every good work” (2 Timothy 3:16-17). Every verse in the bible is exceedingly profitable. Thousands of them.
What does this mean? Do not be discouraged. Do not despair. Do not doubt that you cannot change. Do not lose hope. Never give up.
Why?
Because you don’t know what word of God will suddenly (or gradually) be used by the Holy Spirit to give the long-awaited and long desired victory. God has his reasons for why he allows us to fight so long. Only He knows what they are (Deuteronomy 29:29). But he never intends us to give up on Scripture to be His primary means of changing and transforming us.
Don’t give up the fight. God’s designs are to bring a surprising verse into your heart in a surprising moment in a surprising situation and do a surprising work of transformation. I am thrilled that there is an immeasurable moment when the Word of God can suddenly change you.
For example, you may be reading one morning and see for the hundredth time Psalm 90:12, “So teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom.” It happened to me after my near death and my Father's death the past two weeks. Suddenly, in a way that never happened before you feel how utterly short and fragile and uncertain and precious your life is. You feel, as never before, the connection between a wise way of life and the shortness of life, and in that surprising awareness of death,that deeply felt awareness, you recall what James says about wisdom. You have never made this connection before in your whole life. You recall that James says, “the wisdom from above is gentle and full of mercy” (James 3;17). Then you sense what God is doing. All your life, you have struggled with being critical rather than merciful. Your reflexes are not merciful, and now, God is touching you at a place you have never been touched before. He’s making a connection in your heart that you have never made before. The connection between your coming death and your unkindness. Suddenly, you are awakened to a new possibility, a new way of responding.
What is God is doing now? He is awakening in you a new possibility of life. He is opening you to a kind of mercy and gentleness and forebearance and peace and kindness that could actually begin to feel natural to you. The shadow of your own death is softening you. The numbering of your days is shaping in you a humble, gentle, heavenly wisdom. Your heart is actually softening.It s a miraculous work of the Word and the Spirit conforming you into the very image of Jesus Christ.
This long-standing struggle with the reflexes of hard-heartedness, and unmercifulness, is suddenly (or gradually) different. My closeness to death and my Father's death is doing a strange and sweetening and wonderful work.
Will it last? Perhaps. If not, there are 999 more verses waiting to do their surprising work. You do not know what victories await. Read on. Pray on. Believe all things. Hope all things. And know that victory and change is coming. “Every Scripture” is profitable. God is not done with you.
“O Lᴏʀᴅ, make me know my end and what is the measure of my days; let me know how fleeting I am!” (Psalm 39:4).
2 comments:
Well done!
Be led, not driven. Be killed, crucified in Christ.
The victory is learning to stay dead! Yet alive in "a life",
That is not mine, yet that I am now "one" in!
He resurrects those who live in Remembrance of their death in His death, their burial in His Burial and now their life in His life!
Revelation of this passage comes only in Despair and Desparation: of how unable we are to live in any life of flesh! (Self serving... Vs. others serving in His Name!)
For if we have been united together in the likeness of His death, certainly we also shall be in the likeness of His resurrection, knowing this, that our old man was crucified with Him, that the body of sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves of sin.
(Only radical revelation of "knowing this" by the Holy Spirit will set one free, to live free from sin's slavery!
Yet I dare say we need continual trials, to constantly bring us to more desperation of self will (aka: our lust dreams....)
For he who has died has been freed from sin.
Now if we died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with Him, knowing that Christ, having been raised from the dead, dies no more. Death no longer has dominion over Him. For the death that He died, He died to sin once for all; but the life that He lives, He lives to God.
(Any living life "carefully" aka "thinking of how I can be blessed to my flesh" keeps me from "believing that I will live with Him", and thus depression and despairs will again be NEEDED to wake us up again! To Let go and let God!)
Likewise you also, reckon yourselves to be dead indeed to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
For sin shall not have dominion over you, for you are not under law but under grace.
(Living in Christ is not a performance of us, but a Letting of One's life now in us, be us-New Creations in Him,, totally radical, totally Supernatural! All of His Grace, which only comes when you receive, accept, and consider it pure Joy to be Humbled by life's trials, knowing they have been ordained by God for our good!)
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