Today I drove past a woman who was waiting at the bus stop. She was obese and smoking a cigarette, and my thought was, why are we so bent on our own destruction? Surely she knew that smoking - as well as the extra weight - can kill her. Surely she realizes that she should probably eat healthier and exercise more. It's easy to know things, even easy to desire to do things, but getting the right things done is the hard part.
As the Indigo Girls sang, "No one can convince me we aren't gluttons for our doom." It applies to every aspect of life - physical, emotional, spiritual. We have bad habits, hang-ups, attitudes, etc that we know are harmful to us and yet we persist. We all have issues. We all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, to take it up a notch. To paraphrase the apostle Paul, the good that I want to do, I do not do....but the very thing I do not want to do is exactly what I do! Who can help us out of this predicament? By grace, through faith alone (not by what we do so no one can take credit for it), God has saved us through Jesus' life and death and resurrection.
Jesus makes us right with God in the big picture. In the day to day smaller picture we still get our heads befuddled because we still wrestle with our own sin nature. But we can live in the sure hope that He has set us free, He is setting us free, and ultimately He will set us free. Thanks be to God! Amen!
