Tonight I Wrestle.

Habitually, I disregard peoples opinions of me.  I am who I am, and I do not live to please.  But above all that I am, I am Christ's.  I bear the name of my Savior and so I realize that I should care about perceptions. That I must care.  Nothing wounds the church like inconsistency in her people.

In turn, I find myself hating how people regard me.  Not because I want them to see a godly life, but because I want them to see God.  I pray they never notice me.  I do not want praise, I do not want recognition.  It disgusts me.  I do not want anyone to see me.   I want people to see my God. I want people to know my God.  I pray I am only a reflector of my Father.  It is not about me, it never has been.  It is always about him, it always has been.

I am left hating sin. I hate when I sin. Mother Teresa said, "the only true sorrow is sin."  She is right, and so nothing burdens me like my own sin.  I refuse to accept it; I cannot escape it.  My hope rests in the fact that I do not have to. That my Lord has done it for me.  He has attained my victory over Satan, sin and death.  A beautiful triumph.  Do I repay his grace and sacrifice with more sin?  I plead with my God, "Never."  Yet, I plead more for forgiveness in the wake of my actions.  The more I pray for obedience, the more I see my sin.  I cry along with Paul, "wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?"     
 
So, tonight I wrestle. Tonight I struggle and work.  Tonight I pray. And every night, and every moment of everyday until my time here is done.  God remove every last remnant of sin from this offender.  May my will and actions be bound by grace, and may my failures be covered in it. God be glorified in spite of me.   

“I am content to live and die as the mean repeater of scriptural teaching, as a person who invented nothing, as one who never thought invention to be any part of his calling, but who concluded that he was to take the message from the lips of God to the best of his ability and simply to be a mouth for God to the people, mourning that anything of his own should come between, but never thinking that he was somehow to refine that message, to adapt it to the brilliance of this wonderful century, and then to hand it out as being so much his own that he might take some share of the glory of it.” – C. H. Spurgeon