Job 36:16-19

Prosperity knits a man to the World. He feels that he is ‘finding his place in it’, while really it is finding its place in him.
-C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

Man oh man. What has become of my life? Overall, my life is fabulous. Twenty-four hours a day, every day, I feel so full of happiness and sunshine and hope and faith and life that my heart could very well burst with it. The blessings poured out by my Father are so overwhelming in quantity and in quality that I cannot begin to comprehend how it’s even possible that my life turned out this way. Even as I write this, my heart feels like it’s just bursting with the Christlife in me.

But things happen. “In this world [we] will have trouble” and all that jazz. Things happen to make me feel frustrated, lonely, sad, confused, persecuted, and so on. They don’t shake my foundation or anything – they don’t even really scratch the surface. But they make me remember the fallen nature of this world; they remind me that there is work to be done and eternity to reach. I like to believe that I’ve gotten to be pretty good about handing these things over to God, seeking His counsel and support in all my difficulties, but no two responses are ever quite the same. And last night I began to wonder why something in particular wasn’t getting tidily resolved. I asked God to help me understand why things have been happening the way they are, and He pointed me to Elihu’s speech in the Book of Job.

“He is wooing you from the jaws of distress
to a spacious place free from restriction,
to the comfort of your table laden with choice food.
But now you are laden with the judgment due the wicked;
judgment and justice have taken hold of you.
Be careful that no one entices you by riches;
do not let a large bribe turn you aside.
Would your wealth or even all your mighty efforts
sustain you so you would not be in distress?
+Job 36:16-19

Now let’s get Biblical. Quick summary of the traditional lessons on Job: Job’s a righteous, prosperous guy. God takes away his prosperity and makes him suffer. Job’s friends say that he must have done something sinful because God rewards the righteous and punishes the wicked. Job insists on his own righteousness and demands an explanation from God. In the end, God provides Job with no explanation but affirms Job’s righteousness and rewards him for being faithful despite tribulation.

Alright. Here’s my take. I am a firm believer that we are created beings and have neither right nor need nor ability to understand why God does everything that He does. Even so, based both on the repeated assertions of Scripture and my own daily experience, I am a firm believer that God does generally reward the righteous and punish the wicked. Since coming to Christ, I have been absolutely dazzled by the blessings poured out on me. In light of that fact, God drew my attention to one particular passage from the Book of Job this morning.

After Job and all his friends are finished going back and forth, and right before God Himself steps on scene, Elihu (son of Barakel the Buzite) speaks. He puts forth the possibility that God may sometimes preempt the sins of the righteous, rather than just inflicting punishment after the fact. I can’t speak for Job, but I know that I needed God’s preemption in my life these past few days. It’s great that I rejoice in God’s blessings and that I’ve grown to trust Him so readily with everything, but I’ve let my guard down towards the enemy. By God’s recent intervention, I’ve been directly rescued from temptation, my attention’s been drawn to my weaknesses, and my courage to protect my virtues has been strengthened. If that’s not preemption, I don’t know what is. I ought to remember that God does everything for one reason or another and is always looking to my best interest.

Romans 8:28-30

If a woman conceals her affection with the same skill from the object of it, she may lose the opportunity of fixing him; and it will then be but poor consolation to believe the world equally in the dark.
-Jane Austen, Pride & Prejudice

Sometimes I’m hurting, and it feels like God’s holding me in His arms, and I know He knows exactly what I’m thinking about all the things that I want and He empathizes perfectly with every ounce of loneliness and fear and grief that I feel. But no words are exchanged because there’s nothing to be said. He knows that I am hurting, and I know that He loves me. There doesn’t seem to be much more to say. Because God knows I’m wondering why: I’m wondering why there’s so much grief at all, and I’m asking if the glory of the redemption is really worth the agony of the fall. But I know that God is faithful and that, if He says it’s worth it, then it is.

Even so, there is little more challenging than reaching an impasse with the Lord. I mean, what do you do with something like that? There’s nothing you can say and there’s nothing you can do. But I guess that, one way or another, you do end up dealing with it somehow. I’ve realized that I’m not dealing with it properly. Even though I know that there’s nothing I can do, I try to do something about it anyways. Unconsciously I say to myself, “Well if I can’t change the circumstances, then I’ll have to change me.” And then I try to force changes in my heart. I try to prove to myself that I can carry on with this pain in my heart, I try to prove to myself that the burden isn’t as heavy as it sometimes feels, and I try to prove to myself that it makes more sense not to care as much as I do.

And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose. For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers and sisters. And those he predestined, he also called; those he called, he also justified; those he justified, he also glorified.
+Romans 8:28-30

But it’s not right. I’m not as desensitized to this stuff as I’d like to think I am. I’m not as content “toughing it out” as I thought I could be. The right thing to do when I don’t know the right thing to do is not to grit my teeth and endure it however I can; the right thing to do when I don’t know what to do is to give it up to God. Forever my God is faithful, forever my God is strong. What good will it be to me in the end to have just made it through? What good will it be to me in the end to have been the toughest or the strongest or the most durable woman of Christ? What ultimate good is durability when it is founded on a lie? I by no means intend to deny the incalculable importance of a woman’s strength and dignity, because those things have merit beyond measure, but they do little to heal a broken heart. My heart is broken, and rightly so. What father sees his daughter facing the unbearable burdens of the world alone and just watches her do it? What father does not yearn to scoop up her burdens for her, to make right what has broken his little girl’s heart? How much more is that my perfect Father’s desire? He is not passive, not distant or detached from me – He is doting and loving and desperate to love me well and to heal all the wounds on my heart. I am not going to turn from God in my moments of darkness. Rather, I will turn my face towards Him and entrust my weakness to my Father. His desire is to love us well, and He has the strength to do so. Nothing is going to stop God from delivering us from evil. He will deliver us from pain and from loneliness and from sorrow because He is our holy and mighty God. There is nothing to fear, nothing to take on. God is on the scene.

Proverbs 5:6

But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.
-Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

I am so full of indifference that I feel as if I might be smothered by it without even batting an eye. There used to be days when I cried out, “I feel nothing!” and meant that I felt only despair. The past several days, I have said to myself with increasing frequency, “I feel nothing,” and wondered at the contentment with which I could say it. Nothing in me stirs at the loss of my passions, and I realize that I have learned to silence all the things that once made me feel deeply. The moment anything starts to rise within me, it feels as though my will acts of its own accord and moves quickly to muffle the emotion. I have caught myself stopping short guilt, grief, longing, dreaming, rejoicing–the list could go on for a while–and felt like an unwitting bystander as the barely new feelings were whisked away from me. Only my reason whispers its protests, and in fact does so in something even more subtle than a whisper: there is no urgency, no insistence, nothing – just an observation: “This seems a bit off, doesn’t it?” And the more attention I pay to this nearly inaudible observation, the more resounding it becomes, and I feel as though I am shaking off the fogginess after an unintended nap.

It is a bit off. I can see that now. The taste of Satisfaction that should have been a tremendous victory for the Lord became a stronghold for my enemy. God gave me Satisfaction, a sense of contentment and fulfillment totally unprecedented in my life, and the moment I received it, my mind was fixed on the world of Giving that was available to me. But I failed in prudence. I did not consider the enemy, I did not believe in the dangers of my own selfishness, and so I just assumed that whatever happened next with the gift God had given to me would be both natural and righteous. But I was directionless, and so I wandered aimlessly in my contentment, and I did not try to be master of myself.

She gives no thought to the way of life;
her paths wander aimlessly, but she does not know it.
+Proverbs 5:6

What do you want? – That’s the question I’ve been asking myself all my life. I imagine that it’s one of the two most important questions I ever ask myself, the other being the one that generally follows: Well then, what exactly are you going to do about it? So as often happens, I have found myself at a point where my desires and my will are pivotal. I want to feel again. I want to feel rotten about my sin, I want to feel desperate for God, I want to ache down to my very core as I pray for my family’s walk with Christ. I want to rejoice with those who rejoice, mourn with those who mourn, feel outrage at injustice and feel actionable pity at the sight of the broken. I want to blush at compliments, I want to sob as I sing praise, I want to wonder if I’ll ever find someone who could love my wild heart. There must be something righteous in feeling dangerously and deeply, in taking very real and tangible risks in pursuit of God. It is written on my soul to do so, and I know that now. God, forgive me for both my conscious and unconscious sin, and please lead me resolutely into your illuminating Presence.

Proverbs 14:30

‘And now!’ said the Tragedian with a hackneyed gesture of despair. ‘Now, you need me no more?
‘But of course not!’ said the Lady; and her smile made me wonder how both the phantoms could refrain from crying out with joy.
‘What needs could I have? I am full now, not empty. I am in Love Himself, not lonely. Strong, not weak. You shall be the same. Come and see. We shall have no need for each other now: we can begin to love truly.’
-C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce

I typed this out what feels like weeks ago but never posted it, so I’m posting it now.

It is not very often that we experience entirely new feelings. Once you reach a certain age, everything starts to remind you of everything else; every new wave of emotion carries you back to some moment or another from your past. But absolute novelty does happen from time to time, and I strongly suspect that this is a glimpse of Christ’s power in us. It is a first flickering of what it means to become part of the New Creation: these are the moments when I experience something that was always beyond my ability to imagine but of which my first thought is always, ‘Of course. Of course it was going to be this way–how could it ever have been anything else?’

The other day, I tasted Satisfaction, or what is no doubt merely a shadow of it. I looked all around me and just saw what there was to see. I looked at the big picture and was completely untouched by loneliness, hunger, lust, greed, vanity, boredom, or anything else that cries out for self-fulfillment in one form or another. And for the first time in literally my entire life, I was able to imagine a state of being in which the question of my fulfillment would cease to be a question at all.

A heart at peace gives life to the body,
but envy rots the bones.
+Proverbs 14:30

I used to cringe when people would talk about the “perfect happiness” supposedly found in heaven; I couldn’t imagine a way to live without any need or any pain without somehow losing my humanity and becoming a machine. But I didn’t mind the shadow of Satisfaction that I felt the other day, because there was so much more to it than I expected. It came with the understanding that it might one day be possible for me to be truly selfless, not just because I loved the Lord and other people more than myself, but because there’d be no point in Selfishness: there would no longer be anything left for me to want for my own sake because I would be truly and finally complete. And tasting that shadow of Satisfaction freed me for some time to realize that boredom would not accompany it because, in reaching such a state, a whole new world of Giving would be opened to me. Giving would not be one narrow, simple feature of my existence like it has been in the past, but rather something so complex and vast that I could explore for ages at least without ever running out of steam. I think that what I felt the other day was a precursor to what every experienced Christian has always told me about the inexplicable joy to be had in achieving selflessness and giving unconditionally. Heaven, redeemed humanity, and New Creation are going to be truly amazing things. This is going to sound corny, but I feel like my heart is just trembling with hope at the thoughts I’ve been having about all of it.

Proverbs 16:1-3

Your patient will, of course, have picked up the notion that he must submit with patience to the Enemy’s will. What the Enemy means by this is primarily that he should accept with patience the tribulation which has actually been dealt out to him—the present anxiety and suspense. It is about this that he is to say ‘Thy will be done’, and for the daily task of bearing this that the daily bread will be provided. It is your business to see that the patient never thinks of the present fear as his appointed cross, but only of the things he is afraid of. Let him regard them as his crosses: let him forget that, since they are incompatible, they cannot all happen to him, and let him try to practise fortitude and patience to them all in advance. For real resignation, at the same moment, to a dozen different and hypothetical fates, is almost impossible, and the Enemy does not greatly assist those who are trying to attain it: resignation to present and actual suffering, even where that suffering consists of fear, is easier and is usually helped by this direct action
-C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

I think a lot of my problems result from overlooking the present. It’s weird to realize that’s an issue because, you know, it’s right in front of my face. The future’s ahead of me, and the past’s behind me, but the present’s right here and now. But I do – I overlook the present all the time. I’m always trying to figure out how to resolve issues from my past or how to prepare for any number of uncertain possibilities in the future, but I rarely think to stop and assess my present situation and what I should be doing in the present moment.

I think part of why that happens is because the past’s issues and the future’s possibilities very often impact what’s appropriate to do in the present. But take my current romantic situation, for example. Yeah, yeah, I know it’s all I think about – but this realization should change that! Anyways, I’ve been thinking myself half to death about how to resolve the issues of my relational history and how to prepare for any number of relational futures, but I wasn’t getting anywhere until I just stopped and took stock of the present. What’s my present situation? I’m single, I’ve made mistakes, I’ve never been married, and I have no immediate prospects for marriage. Guess what? If that’s all Scripture needs to know before telling me how to live righteously, then that’s probably because that’s all I need to know.

To human beings belong the plans of the heart,
but from the LORD comes the proper answer of the tongue.
People may think all their ways are pure,
but motives are weighed by the LORD.
Commit to the LORD whatever you do,
and he will establish your plans.
+Proverbs 16:1-3

My point is that dealing with the past and preparing for the future are all well and good, but I can’t let an influx of those thoughts completely cloud my ability to see the present. I mean, really, the present is what it’s all about. If you want to be confident, stop worrying what people think of you and just be yourself. If you want to be generous, stop worry about how much you can spare and just start giving. If I really want to know the right thing to do right this second, then maybe I ought to stop worrying about what I’ve done in the past and what I’ll do in the future and just start doing the right thing right now.

Song of Songs 8:4

[God]‘s demand on humans takes the form of a dilemma; either complete abstinence or unmitigated monogamy.
-C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

Like a lot of people, I started dating before I really knew what I was supposed to be doing. I made a lot of mistakes physically, and even more emotionally. Since coming to Christ, I’ve learned a lot about what’s right and wrong and why in relationships. I guess I’m frustrated, though, because even though I understand how differently I ought to deal with my future, I still don’t know how to deal with my past. Think about it this way: If you came to Christ after you were already married, we know that the right thing to do would not be to get a divorce – it’d be to reevaluate your approach to the relationship without giving up on it.

The Bible talks a lot about marriage, and it even talks about being single, but I haven’t really come across anything that specifically addresses dating. Maybe that’s because nobody really “dated” back then, or maybe because you only ever pursued someone if your intentions were for marriage and marriage was when your “relationship” really began anyways, or maybe because there are so many different types of dating relationships that one could hardly describe a righteous approach to each individual one. But if I’m being honest, which I think it’s high time that I were, then I think it’s because Christianity makes relational rules quite clear: You’re either married or you’re not.

Daughters of Jerusalem, I charge you: Do not arouse or awaken love until it so desires.
+Song of Songs 8:4

I feel like I need to write that statement on a note card and put it on my mirror or something. “You’re either married or you’re not.” I mean, that’s pretty much all that needs to be said, isn’t it? I treated a past relationship like a marriage, and it wasn’t one, so all I did was sin emotionally and physically. Even now, as I try to decide how to deal with my past, the reason I’m uncertain is because of the nature of that past relationship – yes, it wasn’t a marriage, but I treated it like one, and doesn’t that make it different? I wish it did, but it doesn’t. Of course my heart’s affected; I conditioned my heart to behave as it ought to if I were married. But I’m not married, and I never was, and that’s the reality of the situation. I have to recognize that the significance I attach to that past relationship is as wrong as the actions that led it to be significant. That’s what happens when you treat something like something that it isn’t: You feel like it’s something that it isn’t. If I honestly want to know what to do with the present situation, then I have to be honest with myself about what the present situation really is. The truth is that I’ve never been married and that I have no current prospects for marriage, and that’s pretty much all there is to it. You’re either married or you’re not – that’s the Christian stance.

Leviticus 9:14

Besides reasoning about matters of fact, men also make moral judgments–’I ought to do this’–’I ought not to do that’–’This is good’–’That is evil.’ Two views have been held about moral judgments. Some people think that when we make them we are not using our Reason, but are employing some different power. Other people think that we make them by our Reason. I myself hold this second view. That is, I believe that the primary moral principles on which all others depend are rationally perceived. We ‘just see’ that there is no reason why my neighbour’s happiness should be sacrificed to my own, as we ‘just see’ that things which are equal to the same thing are equal to one another. If we cannot prove either axiom, that is not because they are irrational but because they are self-evident and all proofs depend on them. Their intrinsic reasonableness shines by its own light. It is because all morality is based on such self-evident principles that we say to a man, when we would recall him to right conduct, ‘Be reasonable.’
-C.S. Lewis, Miracles

“Why are girls so mean?” That’s the question I ought to be able to answer for the little girl who comes to me crying, but I’ve got nothing and I know it. My whole life, I’ve always been able to identify that group of girls everywhere I go – the ones who cannot be reasoned into any sort of compassion, kindness, or charity. You tell them that they ought to be nice, that they ought to be considerate of other people’s feelings, and it doesn’t even phase them. You can’t argue morality with them because the fundamental moral truths we take for granted are things they have not yet accepted as obviously true.

I’ve never really solved the riddle of why people like that exist, and I didn’t even notice it until this girl came crying to me and I realized that I had nothing to say to help her make sense of it. The only reason that girls like that don’t wound me as much anymore is because I’ve learned that 1) I’m right in being kind and they’re wrong in being mean, and 2) I have sufficient authority over my life now that I don’t have to be around them if I don’t want to. I looked at this little girl and all I could tell her was that she ought to keep doing her part to maintain the peace and to try not to let it get to her, but I couldn’t help her make sense of it and it was the incoherence of the girls’ cruelty that was devastating her. The real tragedies of this life are always the ones that tend to be the most incoherent to us.

Do not curse the deaf or put a stumbling block in front of the blind, but fear your God. I am the LORD.
+Leviticus 9:14

But then I think back and try to remember if I was ever that blindly selfish, and I know that I was. Even if it was only when I was a little kid, that selfishness definitely occurred. So why did I change? Because I learned that I was wrong to think that way. I realized that I didn’t like to be treated the way that I was treating people, and so there must be something wrong with the behavior in general. I realized that two wrongs didn’t make a right and that a system based on the Golden Rule was the only one that could work on a practical level. I realized that I wasn’t entitled to anything. I learned to care about specific people more than I cared about myself, and that made me realize that it was possible for other people to matter more than me. I was inspired by other people who cared about others more than themselves. And ultimately I was saved by a God who showed me in my spirit that loving others is the only thing that makes sense. So these people, these “mean girls,” are maybe just people who don’t know any better yet, and thinking of them that way takes away a lot of their power over my emotions and mostly makes me feel sorry for them like I would for children who didn’t know any better yet. You don’t get frustrated with someone for being too young to know better; you don’t get frustrated with someone for being blind. You just do the best you can to point them in the right direction and let that be that.

Mark 12:29-30

We begin to notice, besides our particular sinful acts, our sinfulness; begin to be alarmed not only about what we do, but about what we are.
-C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Blargh. Fitness is hard, and that’s hard for me to write down. I feel embarrassed whenever I admit this, but the whole athleticism thing seems to have escaped me. I’ve never been able to approach fitness with a healthy mindset, and I think tha’ts probably because I can’t seem to grasp what that mindset would even look like. When I was younger, I went through all sorts of unhealthy approaches like eating disorders, obsessive running, and just all around unhealthy stuff. More recently, as a pushback against all that, I went through a pretty long phase where I just gave up altogether. I ate whatever I wanted whenever I wanted it, and I made a joke out of the fact that I never exercised. But of course I felt terrible about myself the whole time. My most recent battle has been getting to place where I just try to do no harm. I’m not making great strides with getting fitter or anything – I’m just working on not being as bad, not doing the things that I know will hurt me.

And I think that’s an important first step, but at the same time it’s frustrating because I know it’s not enough and I just want to get there, you know? I want to just be fit. But it doesn’t work that way, and I think that may be part of the point. I think that maybe taking care of the body is so challenging and so significant because it is a very real image of care of the spirit. First of all, it takes patience: if you’re not willing to commit to the long haul and make gradual changes, then there’s just no point. Then there’s the fact that it’s one of the truest tests that there is of a person’s will over their natural inclinations: you will either listen to the part of you that knows the right thing to do or you will give in to the demands of your flesh.

“The most important one,” answered Jesus, “is this: ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’
+Mark 12:29-30

I don’t think physical fitness is going to be something that I can achieve just by passionately wishing for it or by throwing myself into it in unreliable bursts. It’s going to take practice and patience, and it’s going to take God. It’s not about just changing my habits or just changing my heart – it’s the sort of lifestyle change that demands total commitment. My identity has to be invested in the venture to grow healthy and alive in Christ – in mind, soul, and body.

Psalm 127:1-2

For what we are trying to do is remain what we call ‘ourselves’, to keep personal happiness as our great aim in life, and yet at the same time be ‘good’. We are all trying to let our mind and heart go their own way–centred on money or pleasure or ambition–and hoping, in spite of this, to behave honestly and chastely and humbly. And that is exactly what Christ warned us you could not do. As he said, a thistle cannot produce figs.
-C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

People always talk about there being two key aspects of a Christian’s spiritual growth: heart and habit. They talk about how the condition of one always affects the condition of the other, but we see this go wrong all the time. If I focus all my energy and attention on the state of things in my heart but neglect my habits, I always end up hitting a wall. I may feel like I’m growing for a while, but in then my unchanged habits are like self-sabotage. Someone calls me out on a sinful habit, or I notice it myself, and I feel guilty and confused for having failed to attend to it. Even before that happens, the sinful habits themselves tend to impede my ability to keep moving forward with the change in my heart. The same thing goes if I focus all on my habits but neglect my heart: I may feel like I’m making great strides with self-discipline, but it just doesn’t last. My self-generated motivation runs out and my self-discipline gives way along with it, or my neglected heart starts to come out in other forms of sin that catch up with me.

It’s easy for me to oscillate between these extremes. I catch myself doing one thing so my knee-jerk reaction is to run to the other, but of course that just spells trouble. Recently I’ve been increasingly frustrated by my apparent lack of self-control when it comes to my sinful habits. I’m trying to improve my actions, but it’s so hard to do without giving myself over to unhealthy obsession and pride. I need God to show me how to make Him my righteous motivation, one that never fails an that never damages my heart. But that’s just the issue, isn’t it? God doesn’t want to be a means to an end, no matter how great that end may be. He isn’t some magical method to put to work every time I want something. Why should God live to serve my purposes, and could I ever really want a God so subject to my desires?

Unless the LORD builds the house,
the builders labor in vain.
Unless the LORD watches over the city,
the guards stand watch in vain.
In vain you rise early
and stay up late,
toiling for food to eat–
for he grants sleep to those he loves.
+Psalm 127:1-2

Pride is the chief vice, the enemy of God. A lot of people say it’s the root of all sn, the reason why Satan himself was cast out of heaven. I guess it makes sense, then, that I’ll never be able to beat sin of any kin when my ambition is selfish. I mean, just imagine the consequences of beating sin with selfish ambition – I’d just become more self-righteous. But realizing that sin is rooted in Pride changes things. The more I try to break my sinful habits out of selfish ambition, the more frustrated I am going to be. But the more I am able to defeat my own pride an surrender myself to God, the more my sinful habits will break down. How could they not when I am being drawn into the holy, holy, holy Lord, violently opposed to sin by His very nature? I must remember that God is the end, not the means, and that there is no way for me to break free of sin but to be drawn deeper into Him.

1 Corinthians 6:19-20

Does it not make a great difference whether I am, so to speak, the landlord of my own mind and body, or am only a tenant, responsible to the real landlord? If somebody else made me, for his own purposes, then I shall have a lot of duties which I should not have if I simply belonged to myself.
-C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

There’s so much abuse that I unnecessarily heap on my own heart, soul, mind, and body that I would never want to put on someone else, and the way I always justify it in my head is that, “It’s my (fill in the blank).” It’s my body, my mind, my soul, my heart – I can decide how much is too much for me to take. But that’s just the problem, isn’t it? It’s not supposed to be about how far I can push boundaries, or in a way I’ve frequently heard it said before: It’s not supposed to be about how much sin I can get away with.

Indulgences. Man, they are killer. You may think like I do that it’s okay if it isn’t hurting anybody. But there are a couple of problems with that. One: It probably is hurting somebody – my indulgences damage my character, my spirit, my soul. And if I damage this innermost part of me, then it isn’t going to function as it should and it’s going to come out in the way I act later. It just is, and that’s a fact. Two: Even if somehow we were guaranteed that these indulgences weren’t hurting anybody else, why are we even okay with the fact that we’re hurting ourselves? Doesn’t that seem to suggest that there is something wrong if your own sense of self-preservation isn’t kicking in over indulgences that we really do know are bad for us? Three: If you’re a Christian, then you already know this and there’s no arguing with it – You are not your own.

Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your bodies.
+1 Corinthians 6:19-20

I am not my own. I rejoice often enough at my unity with Christ to know full well that I am the Lord’s. It is the Christ in me that I celebrate; it is the Christ in me that I am truly able to love. So why do I think that I can suddenly cut myself off from the Lord for the sake of an indulgence? Why do I think that the Christlife can go unharmed by the things that harm me? It’s foolishness and I must remember it. My prayer is that the Lord would write this wisdom on my soul, so that I would remember it as well as I remember my own name. I am weak with indulgences; my self-discipline is underdeveloped. Unless I consciously reason my way through my actions when I am tempted by these little things, I will continue to cave to them and weaken myself further. Knowing that I am not my own, knowing that all my actions must either nourish or wound the Christlife within me – that changes things. I must strive to keep that in mind.