The part of what perfects our relationship (our love of God) is the struggle. I have struggled with sin my entire life. I suspect I always will. I personally believe that anyone who says they have it all figured out is lying. I have been a believer for more than 55 years. I don't know the secret to a sin free life. Mainly because there isn't one. You know why we struggle? Because a perfect walk can never be done in the flesh. Jesus gave us an impossible command.
Matthew 5:48 Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.
It is without a doubt the hardest verse to live by in all of Scripture. I cannot do it. But I try. And I believe God honors the struggle. The struggle proves that the relationship is real. The struggle is how we know we are in Christ. I know it's a real relationship. Non-believers don't have this struggle. Believers do. I know it sounds crazy. But the struggle is my assurance of salvation. How do I know I am saved? I struggle every day. I get knocked down all the time. The relationship exists because I want to get back up and try again. Keep walking everybody.
May God bless,
Taz
The earlier part of your post was great stuff. But this bit above made me cringe - and feel sad at what you seem to have come to believe.
I disciple men and have done for three decades or so now. In my experience as a discipler, one of the biggest places of difficulty Christian men have is how they conceive of what it is to be a child of God and how holiness is achieved. Like you, many of them have come to think that holiness is mostly an aspirational thing, an unachievable goal this side of eternity. I don't know if this is true of you, but many of them think of holiness as an all-or-nothing proposition: Either they are perfectly holy or they are not holy at all. By this particular conception of holiness, they relieve themselves of the need to be holy. Since "no one's perfect" - borne out by repeated moral/spiritual failure in their daily living and the testimony of many other believers to the same failure - they conclude that holiness is largely impossible, practically. God knows the impossibility of true holiness for sin-cursed creatures, they tell themselves; it follows, then, that He never intended for His children to
actually be people in whom sin was the rare exception rather than the rule.
Believing actual, ever-increasing holiness is unattainable, Christians resort to "trying" to be holy, instead, ennobling their moral/spiritual failure by making it a mark of genuine spiritual life. They emphasize the virtue of having tried but diminish the fact that their trying is actually moral/spiritual failure.
Part of the problem in all this is that Christians have the habit of putting their experience on par with God's truth - or even above it. If a Christian man has sincerely tried, over and over, to live the holy life to which God calls him as His child and he has been unable to do so, his experience, which, for him, commonly defines what is real and true, becomes a qualifier of what God has said to him in the Bible: God's truth is only actually true insofar as it coincides, or agrees with, the man's concrete experience. Many, if not most, Christians operate this way with God's word - though not always consciously.
But this sort of approach to God's Truth is not the approach of faith. God's truth repeatedly and sharply diverges from my experience (and my feelings). For example, the apostle Paul wrote, "What shall we say, then, shall we continue in sin that grace may abound? God forbid! How shall we who are
dead to sin continue any longer in it?" (
Romans 6:1-3). He goes to explain that a life of persistent sin is totally contrary to the spiritual reality of being a "new creature in Christ" (
Romans 6:4-12). But when, as a teenager, I first contemplated what Paul had written in
Romans 6, I found myself saying, "But I sin every day! I'm not dead to sin! I'm full of sin! Paul's got it wrong." My experience in no way bore out what Paul said was true of me as a born-again child of God.
But how does the Christian come to actually live in the truth of their being "dead to sin and alive unto God"? By
faith; by "reckoning it so" (
Romans 6:11). Every, single man - myself included - who begins to live in the truth of
Romans 6:1-12, Galatians 2:20, Galatians 5:25, Colossians 2:12-13, Colossians 3:3, etc., must do so
contrary both to their experience and what they feel. They have to "walk by faith, not by sight" (
2 Corinthians 5:7) in the matter of their being dead to sin. Until they do, and persist in doing so despite their opposing experience and feelings, they will
never experience the truth of their freedom from their "old man" and the sin he produces in their living. It is this "reckoning it so," however, that is one of the two "keys" to a sin-free life, a holy life, that Paul points out in
Romans 6 (the other is submission to God -
verses 13-18).
So few Christian men, though, live in the Truth of
Romans 6, or even know that it explains two of the most basic and essential "keys" to walking with God! And so, they try to make noble a life of sin, a life of failure; they make trying (and failing) a virtue. But God has a better way!; a way that brings the child of God into consistent victory over the World, the Flesh and the devil; a way that is full of joyful, holy fellowship with God.
Hebrews 12:14
14 Strive...for holiness without which no one will see the Lord.
1 Peter 3:10-12
10 For “Whoever desires to love life and see good days, let him keep his tongue from evil and his lips from speaking deceit;
11 let him turn away from evil and do good; let him seek peace and pursue it.
12 For the eyes of the Lord are on the righteous, and his ears are open to their prayer. But the face of the Lord is against those who do evil.”
Romans 6:15-18
15 What then? Are we to sin because we are not under law but under grace? By no means!
16 Do you not know that if you present yourselves to anyone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness?
17 But thanks be to God, that you who were once slaves of sin have become obedient from the heart to the standard of teaching to which you were committed,
18 and, having been set free from sin, have become slaves of righteousness.
\m/ - Ignacio
