In the six years that I’ve been walking with God I’ve learned many lessons, gone through personal growth, and received plenty of grace for the times I forget who I am in Christ. Over this past year, if there’s one thing that I can point out as the most important thing He’s taught me - is that I’m an idiot about 100% of the time and the He loves me anyway.
It’s funny how the Christian walk goes. At first thought you’d think that the longer a person has known Christ, the more he/she would feel like a saint. But in reality, in my own experience, the more that I’ve grown to know God, His Word, and myself, the more I realize how crappy I am as a person. In the first couple of years after becoming a Christian, my arrogance and pride made it super easy to trick myself into thinking God had made me into a perfect person already. I elevated myself over others, acted like I knew everything, and wasn’t real with how horrible I actually was.
But the more I got to know the Bible, the more my knowledge of sin increased and, little by little, I realized how much of an actual loser I am on my own.
With all of this self-realization happening over the last couple years, I had a real hard time struggling with guilt and doubt. I came to the point where I found it really easy to believe that God would forgive and love others, but never actually believed He would forgive me for my sins after committing to follow Him. I would find myself sitting in my own self-pity, wondering if I’d ever “get back” to the good old Phil I was when I first decided to follow Jesus. That was until I God caught my attention through a guy named Paul in Romans 7.
God taught me that even though I am a believer, I will still struggle with sin since I still live in the flesh. Super encouraging, huh? Well, where the amazing part comes in is in the truth that immediately follows this passage: no matter how badly I mess up, I can’t do anything that takes away what Jesus did for me (Romans 8:1).
God’s made it abundantly clear to me that it is because of His doing that I have the privilege of knowing Him through His Son (John 6:37). Since it is because of Him that I can be a child of God, it is because of Him that I continue to be one even in my shortcomings. I suck at being a decent person on my own, but God still calls me His own no matter how I’m feeling. So moving forward I now know that it is important to remember who I am and what I know. I am no longer the Phil I once was (Galatians 2:20), but am new. And even when I feel stuck in a rut, God hasn’t given up on me (Philippians 1:6). Grace over sin.
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