I am

I am the son of a preacher. I am a liar. I am a self indulgent, wicked, lazy, inconsiderate, lustful sinner. Sometimes I feel like the only difference between then and now is that I have a greater understanding of just how wicked I am...and even that is given by the grace of God.

I have stolen.

I have had sex before marriage.

I have hated.

I have cheated.

I have looked down on others.

I have hidden God under the bed while I read books that were more interesting than the bible.

I have neglected prayer, because I didn't feel like it.

In my head, I love God. But in my heart, and by my acts I hate Him. I still, to this day, seek more often to satisfy my will over his will. I am the worst of sinners. I am often an enemy to God. But he continues to redeem me. He continues to save me. He continues to accept me, to wash me clean and bless me in ways I will never, and could never deserve.

I love my father, but I have hated him. I have thrown his advice away and plunged headlong into sin more times than I can count.

I love my mother, but I have forgotten her love, walking into my own self indulgence...living for myself...haunted by her parting encouragement... "remember who you are."

I love my brothers and my sister, but I have neglected them, hated them, cheated them, been cruel to them, forgotten them.

I hate myself. And still, still, even now...at this very moment...at the few high points...and even more powerfully in the darkest of the common lows...God loves me. I am so thankful that God is not fair. God spits in the face of legalistic justice, for it is a poor imitation of the black and white by which he loves and corrects us. If God were fair I would be dead, lost in the enemy of God that I was born as.

So often I look down on those around me and that loveless arrogance leaves a rot, a taint, a disgusting, vile, terrible bitterness that grows and begins to eat away at me. I hate that me.

But God frees us from these chains of self loathing with the cleansing power of his forgiveness and the succeeding redemption that is gifted to us even as the filth, the blood, the rot falls away.

I still sin, but it is not who I am. I am forgiven and am an enemy to God no longer (despite the urges inside that beg to differ). Guilt, shame and self loathing are mine no longer. They are not mine to keep. For by the power of Christ's sacrifice I am a new man, more than a new man, I am a new creature, a new creation, one that I have never before been. Baptism is merely water upon my face if it is not but a symbolic display to others of what lies beneath that water, beneath that face...

I am a passionate man, given to great bouts of emotion, and it leaves me struggling to remain constant. It is frustrating, how even my desire to remain constant for the glory of Christ, is so inconsistent.

I am truly nothing by myself. Apart from Christ I am completely and totally depraved. I have the free will to choose him, but if he does not first come to me, I never will. He has chosen me, he has accepted me, has lifted me up to proclaim his name by word and by deed and by thought.

And it blows my mind that God loves me that much, that he would do for me what he has done...

...despite the fact that the only thing that I could ever give him, the only thing that I ever truly owned totally and completely as mine, is my sin. God is most glorified in me, when I am most satisfied in Him, regardless of the circumstances.

The consequences of my actions still haunt me, as I know they will until at least some of them fade with the passing of time. I will have to look my wife in the eyes and tell her that I did not wait for her. For those of you that know me, you know that I have a very strong desire to be married and to have a family. Pray for me, that I might begin to act like I desire such things. In many way, I am but a child, lost in the desires of my will. I need to grow up, to stand up, to wake up...I need to be the man I am meant to be.

I was created for a purpose, to glorify God. May my life reflect that purpose.

I am an heir.