-- Proverbs 16:2
If you think long enough, and hard enough, you can justify just about anything you do. To yourself. Most of the time it doesn't take that much thought at all.
Left to ourselves, it's a pretty easy sell -- this idea that at the end of the day we're pretty good people.
Our fleshly nature desires affirmation and approval -- the idea that our decisions are right and those that don't agree just don't understand the situation the way we do.
One of the biggest wake-up calls after I got married a little less than five years ago was learning how frequently I'm wrong.
It seems, once you're closely-quartered with someone on whom your decisions have a profound and direct impact, and whose decisions profoundly and directly impact you, you start to get an idea of where you, your most reasonable logic and your moral imperative stand in the grand scheme of things.
It's at that point that you either have to submit your differences to the Lord and seek His direction, or choose to continue on in your "rightness" and see how well that works out. (Remember, in taking those vows, you promise to lay your life down for that person. If it is ever going to work, you've really got to do it and it really does mean dying to yourself -- but that's another entry for another day, one about finding a greater whole than you ever could have imagined on your own. I digress.).
Call it a blessed humbling.
That's why God saw fit to give us His law. It was, a) to show us the rules of living rightly as defined by the only one ever found to be righteous and, b) to show us how incapable we are of upholding it.
Until we're shown the wide-ranging breadth of the demands of His law, we can't even begin to fathom the depth of the mercy and grace we've been given in bridging the gap between man and God.
In Isaiah 55:8-9, it says "'For My thoughts are not your thoughts, Nor are your ways My ways,' says the LORD. 'For as the heavens are higher than the earth, So are My ways higher than your ways, and My thoughts than your thoughts."
It is a freeing thought, knowing that for all of the things I can't grasp about God, it doesn't much matter, because He -- in every sense of the phrase -- is so much bigger than I can imagine. His power is bigger, His wisdom is bigger, His holiness is bigger, His righteousness is bigger, and His love is bigger.
So who am I to determine the purity of my own ways?
That's the miraculous thing about this love relationship God has given us with Jesus Christ. My ways are purified once I've been reconciled to Him through the repentance of my sin.
It is God who searches hearts and discerns motives. But it is also God that makes His heart and His will known to man.
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"Understand, you senseless among the people; And you fools, when will you be wise? He who planted the ear, shall He not hear? He who formed the eye, shall He not see? He who instructs nations, shall He not correct, He who teaches man knowledge? The LORD know the thoughts of man, That they are futile. Blessed is the man whom You instruct, O Lord, And teach out of Your law, That You may give him rest from the days of adversity, Until a pit is dug for the wicked." -- Psalm 94:8-13
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