Day 2 - Contradictions

The world's religion is to build up the inner man while God's religion is to throw the first Adam inside us down into the dust, to allow space in our lives for the glory of Christ.

What a mystery I must be!

"So I find this law at work-When I want to do good, evil is right there with me." Romans 7:21

If we take the trouble to look, We are so often a mystery to ourselves. Warm one moment - cold the next! Feeling humble at one moment -congratulating ourselves the following one!

Look at us! Loving the world, full of it, steeped up to our ears in it today - crying, groaning, and sighing for a manifestation of the love of God tomorrow!

Brought down to nothing, covered with shame and confusion, on our knees before we leave our room-filled with pride and self importance before we have got down stairs!

Despising the world, and willing to give it all up for one taste of the love of Jesus when in some solitary place -trying to grasp it with both hands when out there in business!

What mysteries we are! Touched by love - and stung with hatred! Possessing little bits of wisdom - and a great deal of folly! Pressing forward - and lagging behind! Full of sloth - and yet taking the kingdom with violence!

And in this way the Spirit, through a process that we can feel but cannot adequately describe -leads us into the mystery of our two natures perpetually struggling and striving against each other in the same bosom. This is how the creator ensures that every one of us is no more different from another than we are from ourselves!

But one mystery of the kingdom is this - that our carnal mind is not changed in any way, but keeps on in a state of perpetual war with grace. The lower we sink in self abasement under a sense of our own vileness, the higher we rise up in the knowledge of Christ, and the blacker we are in our own view - the more lovely Jesus appears.

Did we not realise all this was going on?

"Are you still so dull?" Jesus asked them. Matthew 15:16