"My son, do not forget my teaching,
but keep my commands in your heart..."
~Proverbs 3:1
Some of the memories of my Christian walk seem tainted by moments of self-loathing after I had slipped into a time of self-centered personal gratification. I think we all have times when we are disapointed and Satan somehow magnifies the gulf that exists between Our Lord and ourselves.
Trying to understand God--really attempting to empathize with Him has been a powerful experience for me. I have seen my hunger for the Word increase, my attraction to sin decrease and my victory over addictive behavior wane.
As a man, the hardest thing about desiring God's heart is the disturbing nakedness that results as the relationship grows. Everything in my flesh tells me that I'm good enough, that the rest of the world should just accept me for who I am... but deep in my heart, I long to be that man that the Lord looks upon as one worthy of showcasing. As communion with the Lord grows deeper, vulnerabilities and gaps in my faith life seem ever larger. In the end, I am comforted by the knowledge that I am not the first:
This experience of our attention being directed to our concentration of personal sin is true in everyone’s life, from the greatest of saints to the worst of sinners. When a person first begins climbing the ladder of experience, he might say, "I don’t know where I’ve gone wrong," but the Spirit of God will point out some definite and specific thing to him. The effect of Isaiah’s vision of the holiness of the Lord was the directing of his attention to the fact that he was "a man of unclean lips." "He touched my mouth with it, and said: ’Behold, this has touched your lips; your iniquity is taken away, and your sin purged’ " ( Isaiah 6:7 ). The cleansing fire had to be applied where the sin had been concentrated.
~Oswald Chambers
Amen.
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