The parts of me that God couldn’t save.

There’s this thing that occurs when you come into the Faith and its unavoidable. You can call yourself a believer and not do it but you can’t really be a believer and not do it.

Its built into the system. The system is a joke without it. Its not even an option, its a must! What is it? It’s CHANGE.

If you’re going to be ten toes deep in this faith, you’re going to have to change. In the faith, you are taking on a new nature-a new identity.

Why? Well, to put it bluntly and cut through the fluff, something is wrong with you. If you’re going to be a true follower of Christ, you’re going to have to concede to that.

The inner world.

This is where you can separate those who claim to be Christians from those who really follow him with their hearts. The ideals of sanctification, holiness, circumspection, and perfection are not just something to romanticize about, they become your duty to strive for.

The reason why you begin to strive for these things is because the aim is to be closer to God, to be filled with the Spirit in order to be used by God, and to simply please God. There’s supposed to be supernatural benefits to this and not even limited to that.

This was my motivation and you know your heart is ideally in the right place because you don’t pursue these things to be seen or acknowledged by people but to be acceptable in God’s sight.

Doesn’t that sound virtuous? Doesn’t it sound like there may be something to all this when you see people devoting their lives to this pursuit. When you see authentic believers who really take their faith serious, I understand how compelling it can seem to a seeker.

But there is a reality that smacks and will smack the believer and skeptic alike.

Don’t get it confused.

In my case, when I started to take my faith seriously, it was all about obedience. Being serious about obedience isn’t the same as being legalistic. I know that some believers’ minds go there but obedience is a demonstration of your love towards God according to the Bible.

In your pursuit of holiness you will look for where your life is at in the pages of the bible. You’ll start viewing your life through a biblical lens. You’ll start looking for people in the bible to model your behavior after.

If you end up believing like I did, you start to live by the Torah. But there’s this illusion that gets created and seems to grab the worshiper.

When you’re really focused on trying to obey the bible and feel like you have a handle on what that life is about, over time you can come to believe that you’re getting closer to God. You’re putting what is written into practice and start to think that God is perfecting you.

You’ll go on this admirable yet, futile quest to live sinlessly. Every religion has its disciplines and spiritual disciplines are no respecter of believe system.

But that’s the illusion: thinking that getting better at practicing your faith is actually changing the real you. The parts of you that can’t seem to stop sinning, you believe that God will change that over time or you end up being perfected at the resurrection.

You can use your beliefs to motivate you to stop drinking and smoking and other things. I’ve used it to stop doing things. Some things stuck and other things didn’t.

Its the things that I couldn’t stop doing that was the problem–because I couldn’t stop being human.

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