Monday, June 26, 2017

Still So Far to Go

So the trouble is not with the law, for it is spiritual and good. The trouble is with me, for I am all too human, a slave to sin.

—Romans 7:14

When I began to lose my hair in my 30s, I started finding imaginative ways to postpone the inevitable. One day my friend, who is also bald, took off his hat. “Check this out,” he said, showing me his new hairpiece. “The guy who made it is really good.”

A few weeks later, my hairpiece arrived. It was nice as far as hairpieces go. But when I put it on, I felt pretty stupid. I just couldn’t bring myself to start wearing it.

Author Peggy Noonan described a hairpiece as “a lie on your head.” That’s pretty accurate. I don’t think any of us wants a lie on our heads or in any other area of our lives. We want to be honest. We don’t want to be hypocrites.

People are quick to throw around the term hypocrite when they see any inconsistency in a Christian’s life. But let’s understand what a hypocrite is. A hypocrite is someone who tries to appear to be something they are not at all, not someone who believes something and fails to live up to it.

Believing something and then falling short of it doesn’t make us hypocrites; it makes us human. We are imperfect people trying to serve a perfect God, and every believer falls short.

Even the great apostle Paul made this candid admission in Romans 7, “I don’t really understand myself, for I want to do what is right, but I don’t do it. Instead, I do what I hate. . . . So I am not the one doing wrong; it is sin living in me that does it” (verses 15, 17).

The further we go in the Christian life, we realize the further we must go. And the more I grow spiritually, the more I discover I must grow spiritually.