There
is the admonition today to "be yourself", to "believe in
yourself", to "trust yourself".
All this sounds like wise counsel and of course it is upbeat in its
approach to personality. But it is sheer folly to put any real confidence in ourselves without taking into account the destructive working of Sin at every level of our personality. Our
dreams hint at the vast unconscious mind we possess. It is a tangle of lusts, bitter frustrations
and crippling fears. Anger and hatred
boil below the surface of our consciousness as does despair and loneliness
along with hopes and loves and passions.
Our Lord is the great realist and he refuses to ignore the true condition of our humanity. For out of the heart come
evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony,
slander. (Matthew 15:19-20 NIV) Many wave this all off as negative thinking but God knows how deeply Sin has worked
its way in us and how corrupted the inner parts of our being are. We don't need an infusion of positive thinking so we can blindly look past our true brokenness; we need a Savior to cleanse the deep parts of us that control our moodsand impulses. John the Apostle puts perfectly what we must
do. Walk in the light and as the Holy Spirit reveals a matter of doing or stopping, immediately act upon that
impulse of God. As we
remain in the light the Lord gives us, the blood of Christ will cleanse and
purify the damage caused by Sin, even in the unconscious parts of us.
We will discover that while we walk in the light, the darkness in our
dreams will begin to clear also so that we will see, as if on a big screen, the
great work of our Lord in the inner parts of our soul!
But
if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one
another, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from all sin. 1 John 1:7 NIV
No comments:
Post a Comment