| [My thanks to Steve Brown of the 'KeyLife' radio program for the new perspective of this very familiar passage in Romans!]
That I should be ‘found out’ to be such a sinner in such a manner is both deeply humiliating and profoundly embarrassing. I have again proven to myself and to my wife that the above title has absolutely no connection to reality as far as my Christian conduct is concerned. Though I have been a ‘believer’ for almost 50 years, I indeed have not gotten better and better everyday in every way! I am still thoroughly flawed and in deep need of the Deliverer. And so, it is more than interesting that I should have addressed this very issue just this past week in a lesson that I had presented to the Pleasant Hill Church. There is a particular phrase in a song that was sung in my home church from the early days of my youth and beyond, that seems to illustrate the fallacy of this kind of thinking that many believers (including myself) have tended to embrace: "I’m pressing on the upward way, New heights I’m gaining every day. . . ." Let me say, It just isn’t so!--It’s just not true. I indeed am "growing up into [my] salvation" (I Peter 2:2), I am learning new truths each day (often, like today, the hard way), and I am coming to a better understanding of my Lord and His tremendous and tender mercy and grace. But when it comes right down to it, I am still a sinner in need of redemption by the blood of Jesus Christ. And you know what?--If I live to be 100, this will still be the greatest reality--and need of my life. What truly amazes me, is that the great Apostle Paul, as the great Apostle Paul, openly confessed this truth centuries and centuries ago! Listen to him;
Do you catch the gravity of this statement? This is not just a statement from a ‘po-dunct’ sinner, by the name of Lynn A. Williams here (though it is ‘spot on’ and nails my profound dilemma!). This is from the pen of the great Apostle Paul!--The seasoned teacher of the Gospel--The great defender of the faith--The ‘great one’ who withstood Peter, one of the Jerusalem church leaders, to the face! He was no ‘newbie’ or novice of the faith! This was Paul!!
Consider what Paul, the seasoned veteran of the faith, the primary author of the New Testament, God’s chosen vessel to carry the Gospel to the Gentiles, had to say about himself:
Look at it square in the eyes! : At the end of the day, every single one of us (myself included), must be compelled to openly confess, even after working ourselves into a frenzy to try so very hard to do good--to try to be loyal to Jesus Christ: "I have Failed--I have failed again--and again--and AGAIN!! Have you ever experienced and shared in this same deep dark desperate despair of the Apostle Paul? Guess what? There’s tremendously good news--The best news! Again hear_Paul:
And so, I am like Paul in the sense that the focus of life can never be upon what I have done or what I am doing or what I want to do, because it will never happen the way I want it to anyway. No--the focus is, and must always be upon what God is doing in Christ Jesus in, for and through my very less than perfect life.
Like Paul, my only claim to fame can never be anything but; "Nothing to the cross I bring, Simply to the cross I cling!" Paul spoke/wrote a tremendous and heartening truth: "He [Jesus] said to me, 'My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness' . . . . [And so] when I am weak, then I am strong!" Yes, Amen, So be it!!
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