Mind The Gap.

Romans 7:19- For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing

Modern Translation- Why the $%!@ do I keep on doing this…#@$%?

“There has always been a gap between the ideals people espouse and the way they live, between knowledge and behavior, intellect and character. The difference today is not that the discrepancy exists but that our modern expectations do not cater to it. Ancients understood that it was only in admitting the gap between what you profess and how you perform that growth and maturity could take place.” –Rebecca Manley Pippert

Are you ever surprised by your sin? I often times find myself completely jaw-dropped at my capacity to live completely counter to what I know in my heart to be the truth. Do you know why we are surprised? Pride. I hate to make it that simple, but it is. And the fact that you are fighting right now to make it something more than that, to find some more complicated explanation, proves that very point.

Ecclesiastes 7:29 –“This only have I found: God made mankind upright, but men have gone in search of many schemes."

Psalm 10: 4-“In his pride the wicked does not seek him; in all his thoughts there is no room for God”

Our scheming hearts are relentless factories of deception, constantly pumping out false confidence in a “self,” that if we were to see through the pure lens of the gospel, would cause us without question or reservation to cast all of our hope fully on God’s grace. We simply can’t believe that we are really that fallen, that broken, that desperate, that needy, that helpless, that powerless, that depraved. But that’s exactly what we are apart from Christ.

That is what Pippert is referring to in the above quote when she states, “The difference today is not that the discrepancy exists but that our modern expectations do not cater to it.” The modern mind is fixated on the idea that although we may need some help (grace) from time to time, ultimately with a little more fine tuning we can actually get our lives and sin under control. We are immersed in a self-help society that believes with the right plan, and some good old-fashioned hard work, we can fix this. Were wrong. And the ever-undulating state of our visceral lives is often all the proof we need.

This begs the question, so what do we do? We repent and rest (in Christ himself), as opposed to self-flagellate and double the effort. And we do so often.

Isaiah 30:15 "In repentance and rest is your salvation, in quietness and trust is your strength, but you would have none of it.”

We can’t truly repent if we can’t acknowledge our real need and its scope. We can rest unless we know the truth.

Psalm 16:9-11 “Therefore my heart is glad and my tongue rejoices; my body also will rest secure, because you will not abandon me to the grave, nor will you let your Holy One see decay. You have made known to me the path of life; you will fill me with joy in your presence, with eternal pleasures at your right hand.”

It is in our need of Christ, in our posture of humility, in our honesty of our utter inability to within ourselves to live out what He has led us to believe, that we find the starting line, the often “daily” repeated first steps into a deeper journey of seeing our lives in the physical world, begin to reflect what we have more fully grasped in the spiritual.

Romans 7:24-25 What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God—through Jesus Christ our Lord!