The evil that is in me

Do I really have faith? Is my love for God real? have I really understood the reality of the gospel of grace, the gospel of Christ?

When I look at myself, I see an unbelieving individual. A man full of flaws, without love, filled with evil desires and a worshiper of numerous idols. When I see myself in the mirror, I see a reflection of the world - faithless, dirty, godless. I do not desire any of these, but they just don't go away easily.

I am evil.

When I sin, I am evil. When I do good, I am evil. How could I ever be able to save myself from all of the corruption that is in my flesh, from all of the darkness that devour my soul, from the hardness of my heart? Everything about me is darkness and death. I will never be numbered among the righteous by myself. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death? Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord! (Romans 7:24,25).

Remembering the Savior of the world, I am encouraged. How impossible this Christian life can be apart from His divine work in me! Today I see the desperateness of my condition, and how much I need pure grace and mercy from the Living God who is enthroned in heaven forever.

I am never strong, unlike some people think. I am weak and needy of help. I may be a leader, and sometimes speak words of wisdom. I may look like I am okay but deep inside I am not. I have struggles, the same ones that you experience - struggles with sin (those sins that keep on coming back and seem hard to defeat), struggles with doubt, struggles with theological questions, and all the struggles concerning faith. I am tempted to fall back, to give up, to shrink back, so backslide, or whatever you call it, for so many times. 

But in all of these defeat and weaknesses, I just can't let go of my grip on the glorious work of Jesus Christ, who being God, made Himself a man so that He may experience death for me, take away all my sins, and be resurrected by the God of the universe. This truth is just so awesome that every failure, every shortcoming does not seem important anymore. There are fiery lies of the enemy that always pull me down. There are the struggles that discourage me to go on. Condemnation comes close in every failure. But this Christ always and always changes the situation. He is a full package. Everything that I need I find in Him. 

"Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved." Romans 10:13

I plead to God everyday to save me from myself, to keep my eyes open, and my heart able to understand His Truth, always willing to hear and believe and turn to Him and that the deceiving sins and the shouting world may not prevail in hardening my heart and make me lose my stability. I may be weak, but His Spirit is strong in me. My flesh may fail, but my God, He never will!

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I pray that in your own battles, you will always strive to gaze upon the glory of Christ, our God, on the cross, and that you will remember everyday that it is all done for your sake. Be strong, brother. You are not alone in this war. We will fight, clothed with the power from on High and we will come home victoriously in His Name!

Renewing our minds

We are told to renew our mind. It is an instruction from God. It is important because we are bombarded with, molded by, and exposed to different kinds of lies ever since we were born. Lies became truth to us. Our whole mind was under the influence of lies. Our perception of what love is, what life is, who God is, or what's good or not, and every thing else was grounded to a certain degree of lies. And our minds were darkened until the gospel of Christ was preached to us and the Holy Spirit enabled us to believe. We learned the truth for the first time. And every lie in our minds should be exposed to the Word of God so that it may be aligned to His truth, sparing us to live our lives blindedly and uninformed. 

But it is a process. It takes effort and initiative. And there are things that we need to be doing and making a habit to allow God to renew our minds. Here are some:

• Reading the Bible - It is the Word of God. The whole world always speculates about something they do not know or understand, just like how they speculated who God is, which birthed to false religions. But the Bible records the very words that came from the mouth of God. He revealed to us everything that we have to know so that we may not need to speculate or grope in the dark, unsure of what the truth is. 
• Praying -  We are not just thinking of God, we are actually talking to Him. Communicating with God is a very great thing to spend time, than use it for some other things. It is also making us attentive of God's presence, that He is alive at this moment and He hears us.
• Fellowshipping -  It is the way believers share their lives to one another. Like prayer, it helps us see the reality of God not only in our life but also in the lives of other believers. And it helps us influence each other in a very good and godly way.
• Listening to sermons, preaching - It is like we allow a leader to help us understand and apply God's truth in our lives.
• Filtering media -  We know that when we watch a movie or listen to songs or read a book, it means we are allowing them to influence our minds or even reprogram it.For example, after we watching horror movies, we noticed that we became easily scared of things we were not scared of before. So we should always ask ourselves if we are going to allow this movie, or series, songs, books to influence our mind and pollute it. Read godly books instead, more of Christian songs and movies that, you know, not as worldly as almost all the movies of this generation. 
• Renouncing sins - Definitely. We are already forgiven in Christ but  if we befriend our enemies (sins in these context), they will lure us away from following Him. If we continue sinning, it will come to a point that doing it doesn't seem wrong anymore. 

There are many other things, but I think these are some of the basics. Our mind is so important. I don't know if I read it in the Proverbs but It says that our thoughts direct the course of life. Let us desire to fill our minds with Godly thoughts and with the knowledge of His truth, not compromising any single area of our lives to worldliness and deceit. I think it is enough reason to exert effort in allowing God to renew our minds.