Thursday, March 08, 2007

I'm My Worse Enemy, but Christ is My Friend

I am so grateful that God is so faithful to us and that His desire for us is to become more like Him; holy and righteous. Despite our selves, He will reveal our sinfulness to us by allowing us to truly just fall on our own strength so that we can just see how very weak we are and just how powerful and BIG He is. I know for me, sometimes God really causes me to fall deep in the miry pit so that I can see my weakness and sin, and so that I would cry out to Him, depend on Him, and trust Him.

Last week a friend was over my house (for Mom's' Coffee Break) and she said the most surprising thing to me. She told me that she thought that I was the godliest woman she knows and that sometimes she envies me. She added though that though she thinks I am the godliest woman she knows she also knows I am not perfect. Anyhow, I was just really surprised by her comment because when I look at myself, I often see this horrible and wretched person that just always wants to rebel against God and I feel like I'm always struggling against myself. There's a non-Christian song by a singer named Pink and one of her song says:

Every day I fight a war against the mirror
I can't stand the person staring back at me

I'm a hazard to myself - Don't let me get me
I'm my own worse enemy
It's bad when you annoy yourself - So irritating
Don't want to be my friend no more
I want to be somebody else


This is probably one of my favorite non-Christian songs because the lyrics really express the war that I fight against my flesh. I mean that is how God is so faithful in that He allows me to see just how ugly my soul is without Him. However, sometimes I often get stuck with that picture and I often don't go past that to the joy and peace of seeing the beauty of Christ in me. Therefore, I thank God that others see Christ in me, but I do pray that though I fight this war, that I may also and truly recognize that the war has already been won by Christ, through Christ, and for Christ!

"Putting to death the deeds of the body by the Spirit – the daily practice of killing sin in your life – is the result of being justified and the evidence that you are justified by faith alone apart from works of the law. If you are making war on your sin, and walking by the Spirit, then you know that you have been united with Christ by faith alone. And if you have been united to Christ, then his blood and righteousness provide the unshakable ground of your justification.

On the other hand, if you are living according to the flesh – if you are not making war on the flesh, and not making a practice out of killing sin in your life, then there is no compelling reason for thinking that you are united to Christ by faith or that you are therefore justified. In other words, putting to death the deeds of the body is not the way we get justified, it's one of the ways God shows that we are justified. And so Paul commands us to do it – be killing sin – because if we don't – if we don't make war on the flesh and put to death the deeds of the body by the Spirit – if growth in grace and holiness mean nothing to us – then we show that we are probably false in our profession of faith, and that our church membership is a sham and our baptism is a fraud, and we are probably not Christians after all and never were.
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The faith that makes peace with God makes war on our sin. If you are not at odds with sin, you are not at home with Jesus, not because being at odds with sin makes you at home with Jesus, but because being at home with Jesus makes you at odds with sin."


Excerpt from How to Kill Sin, Part 1 by John Piper

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