Victory Begins With Honesty

“Iniquities prevail against me: as for our transgressions, thou shalt purge them away.” (Ps 65:3 AV)

It is comforting to know I am not the only one who feels he has failed to live as the LORD would have him.  And failure is the norm.  Paul related the same feelings in Romans chapter seven.  It is part of our human experience to fail.  The comfort for those who know Christ is we are not satisfied with failure.  As much as it is frustrating and discouraging, we have several comforts.  We know we are saved by a forgiving and gracious God.  Even though we fail, He is always ready to forgive.  We also know our failure will not be a permanent condition.  We will be glorified and given a new body wherein sin is impossible.  We know that we have been given a new nature.  This new man, as Paul calls it, is the part of us that desires to live for the glory of God in contradistinction to the old man that only wants to please self.  That old man is the one who allows sin to reign in our mortal bodies.  It is the new man who feels guilt and shame.  It is the new man that wants an end to this battle in complete and total victory.  Until then we have no other choice but to admit to the truth above.  Inequities prevail against us.  The hope comes in the second half of the verse.  God shall purge them away!

Willingness to admit the obvious is the first step in overcoming the issue.  There are things in which aging adults must come to terms.  As we age, our health fails.  Some are from the curse of Adam.  It wouldn’t matter if we made all the right choices in life, the second law of thermodynamics would have still been our master.  However, as we go from one test to the next and our doctor relates our condition as tactfully as he or she can, it becomes painfully obvious some of that from which we suffer is a direct result of choices which we have made.  Take my cholesterol for instance.  My doctor has diagnosed me with higher cholesterol than is healthy for me to have.  He has explained I inherited a trait that under produces the good cholesterol recommended by the experts, so my slightly higher bad cholesterol is made much worse by the absence of good cholesterol.  The problem is, there is no way to increase good cholesterol.  Therefore, I have to make lifestyle changes and take medication to balance it all out.  I have severe vitamin D deficiency.  In part, because I prefer to be indoors.  My weight has increased to an unhealthy level.  So on and so on.  The bottom line is unless I am brutally honest with myself, these numbers are only getting worse.  The first step in improvement is to stop deluding self by thinking we are not as bad off as we are.  David laid it all out.  He said that sin controlled him.  Not just a small problem.  But a problem that defined who he was and what he did.

Sin is a formidable enemy.  It has to be seen as such, or, it will completely ruin our walk with God.  We also have to be brutally honest with how powerful it can be.  David is honest with himself.  He is honest with others as he professes his condition.  He is mostly honest with the LORD because it is the LORD who is the only one who can free him.  We lack discipline.  We lack motivation.  We lack conviction.  These are ministries of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.  However, we are getting nowhere unless we have a self-intervention.  We need to get down to the real us.  We need to look ourselves squarely in the mirror and admit what we see.  Not what we hope to see.  Not what we try to show to others.  The real us.  The one who cannot say ‘no’.  The old man who has control of our minds and actions.  Unless we can look really deep and realize just how much of a fix we are in, there is no purging.  There is no correction.  There is no victory.  It all starts with “…truth in the inward parts…” (Ps 51:6)