covered

When I live in the tension of being a flawed human, I am always relieved to remember His abounding grace. I am relieved to remember I am not the sum of my mistakes, but rather a culmination of the new works He is doing in me.

I know my own capacity for sin and selfishness.

I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good. As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me. For I know that good itself does not dwell in me, that is, in my sinful nature…For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; but I see another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within me.

~Romans 7:15-23

I can torment myself with the ways I fall short. I can fall into a pit of despair over the ways I fail Him, others, and myself. I can sink deeper and deeper into the lamentation of my own humanity.

But there is another way- He offers something new.

See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland.

~Isaiah 43:19

Somehow, someway, He restores all things to Himself. Somehow His relentless grace covers all that we are and all that we do, so that we become less and less like the deadness inside of us and more like Life. His power is so far-reaching that even the things we have done that the enemy hoped to destroy us with can actually transform us into who we were created to be. When I’m in the trenches of guilt and condemnation, I can remember this: that it’s not the end.

Our consciences are effective tools that God has given us to help avoid making decisions that He knows will bring harm to ourselves or others. He implanted us with his Spirit to guide us in the ways that are righteous and holy, and we can walk in these ways the more we listen to His voice. We will stumble and fall, but that is no longer the point. It’s not a journey about us anymore- it’s not our story. Our own strengths and weaknesses are not determinate of our success on this path; they are opportunities for God to come close and be our strength, to remind us that He is building something bigger and using our failures to display His majesty. When we acknowledge that we are weak in our flesh, He can finally show up and prove Himself strong. And others will see that and realize it is not us, but Him. Our shortcomings allow us and others to give Him all the glory.

I am convicted by my follies, but the pain of my mistakes allows His grace to come in. I receive it and go forward in renewed hope in the One who will never fail me.

Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already arrived at my goal, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me. Brothers and sisters, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.

~Philippians 3:12-14