Overcoming Despair About Personal Change
If our only hope of personal change was to let time and nature do their work, we might lose hope that ourselves and others would ever be brought to faith or holiness. Yet one of the deepest works of personal transformation to ever occur was that which happened within Saul on the road to Damascus, and this was accomplished in an instant by the Spirit. [Acts 9, 22] One moment Saul viewed Jesus as his enemy. Then a light appeared from heaven and a voice spoke, “Saul, why are you persecuting me?” As the bitter Pharisee beheld the fearful glory of the Son, a more mysterious light suddenly appeared within his heart—faith, the gift of God. Now in a moment he believed Jesus was his greatest benefactor, for having died to reconcile him, an enemy of God, to the Father at the cross. The greatest change imaginable happened in the twinkling of an eye, when a spiritually dead man was resurrected by God through new birth into spiritual life.
Personal weakness is the lens by which we see God’s strength magnified to greatness.
In Christ, each passing night entombs another day’s sense of failure, to be followed in the morning by a resurrected confidence that we are graciously forgiven.
Comments on Lamentations 3:22-23
We are rubble in the hands of one greater than Michelangelo. We feel ourselves to be hard as rock and yet He molds us like clay.
The essence of godliness is not to have moral strength, but to sense one’s natural moral weakness and depend instead on God to overcome and incline the heart to holiness.
We are as strong in Christ as we are weak in ourselves.
