adamic

For When You Want to Do Right but Do What's Wrong

So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. -Paul, Romans 7:21, Holy Bible

This verse from my daily reading of the Bible springs out at me as manifestly, visibly true in my own life.

Paul goes on to explain:

For I delight in the law of God, in my inner being, 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. -Romans 7:22, 23

I have the same struggle. When I want to do what is right, it is the wrong thing, the distracting thing, the aimless and fruitless thing that is easier. It very often pulls me away.

This annoys me, saddens me, and frustrates me. I resonate with Paul’s next statement:

Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? -Romans 7:24

But then his closing statement gives me hope:

Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, I myself serve the law of God with my mind, but with my flesh I serve the law of sin. -Romans 7:25

Admittedly, it’s a somewhat mixed hope. The hope is in knowing that in Jesus Christ I am both completely forgiven for this tendency and being cleansed of it. Yet the difficulty of my two competing desires will remain, just as it did for Paul.

Because of Jesus Christ, I should do what is right without despairing when I do wrong.

A.W. Tozer, Prophet

Writing in 1961, Tozer pegged what remains a problem in the Western churches:

This loss of the concept of [God's] majesty has come just when the forces of religion are making dramatic gains and the churches are more prosperous than at any time within the past several hundred years. But the alarming thing is that our gains are mostly external and our losses wholly internal; and since it is the quality of our religion that is affected by internal conditions, it may be that our supposed gains are but losses spread over a wider field. -A.W. Tozer, The Knowledge of the Holy, vii.

Whatever size your church, the question is, is the measure of health a deeper and broader sense of God's holiness among the congregation, or just more folks in the chairs?

Or, if you're a small church advocate, the question might be, is the measure of health a deeper and broader sense of God's holiness among the congregation, or just having a small number of folks in the chairs?

Choose Ye This Day

If I wrote a dictionary, this picture would be under "self-defeating:"

Tumblr_ky23toecfq1qa3qedo1_500

So would this blog post I read the other day:

There are basically two kinds of people on the earth:

Those who say,

“There will be peace on earth
when everyone understands that my ideology is true.”

And others who say,

“There will be peace on earth
when everyone lives in mutual acceptance
of one another’s ideological differences.”

And for all this talk of peace,
these two sides can’t even respect each other.

What's self-defeating about the blog post is that the second statement is really just a subset of the first. The second statement is an ideology demanding allegiance from everyone.

What's self-defeating about the graffiti is that it's selling you something: an idea.

Here's the problem: you can't get out of the system. Anti-advertisement graffiti is still advertisement. Tolerance is intolerant. Similarly, atheism is a faith.

The answer to the question of meaning and truth can't be relative. It can't be whatever's good for you. It can't be subjective.

Truth must be objective, and at the end of the day everyone simply must choose. Not to choose is to choose.

Jesus Christ, who is God, is better than every other choice.
Posterous theme by Cory Watilo
  
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