I think that most people at first have a hesitation to be honest about their struggles when speaking to someone they recently met, or that they don’t know well. It makes sense. We’re unsure of their reactions. We don’t know if they will be sympathetic or judgmental. We don’t know if they’ll understand.

Even more so, I think that most of us have that same hesitation with God, but for much deeper reasons. We know of God’s holiness, and even though we hear of and believe in Jesus’ sacrifice, there remains a disconnect. God his holy, we are not.

But just as it is with people, the more we get to know them, and the more they get to know us, the more aware we become of their struggles and imperfections. Most, in time, become sympathetic of our struggles and the judgment from people who we’ve become close to stops being a worry. We can look at them and know they’ll understand. We come to trust their sympathy.

John Piper makes, perhaps, the most intelligent argument for why we can have that same confidence before God, right out the gate.

“On the way to the cross for thirty years, Christ was tempted like every human is tempted. True, he never sinned. But wise people have pointed out that this means his temptations were stronger than ours, not weaker. If a person gives in to temptation, it never reaches its fullest and longest assault. We capitulate while the pressure is still building. But Jesus never did. So he endured the full pressure to the end and never caved. He knows what it is to be tempted with fullest force.”

Humans know the displeasure of failure, and that’s something. But no human understands the full force and weight of temptation to sin—except Jesus. When we sin, Jesus knows, and relates to every ounce of weight we experienced before meeting our failure.

As John Piper continues later, “Jesus feels with us, not against us.”

Before Jesus, in spite of God’s holiness, we are able to come with our struggles and failures. Not only before a gracious God with a legal obligation to pardon us, but with an emotional understanding of what led to our struggle and sin. He gets it. And not only in a cosmic, all-knowing sense, but in a real, “I’ve been there” sense. One that is much more potent than any brother or sister we might have confidence in.

Colossians 2:9-10

“For in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily, and you have been filled in him, who is the head of all rule and authority.”

Isn’t this a stunning correlation? I absolutely love the ESV’s translation here, using the same idea of being ‘filled’ with something to describe Jesus’ oneness with God. His being of God. Then, our own fullness in Christ.

Christ was God in man form. All of God dwelled inside the man. Now, as followers and believers in Jesus, we now experience a filling of our own. We are filled by Christ in the Holy Spirit.

How could that not give you chills?

Philippians 3:12

“Not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect, but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own.”

Paul has just finished talking about the perfection we will achieve when we come into glory with Christ. He’s speaking about sanctification. And he’s made it clear that he’s not perfect. He’s admitting his imperfection and his own proneness to sin.

He hasn’t already obtained it, but he’s trying. Imagine that.

But it’s that last bit that I forget. Sanctification is an ongoing process of which we are co-workers with God. God shapes and forms us in all kinds of ways, meanwhile we attempt constantly to mortify the flesh. But why? Because Christ has made us his own.

By Christ’s blood, we were purchased and invited into the family of God. We are objects of mercy, which God is taking great care to conform to his own image. But what motivates us to fulfill our part is the constant and growing knowledge that we were bought with a price, that we are not our own. That we were plucked from the pathway of doom, and placed down in the seat of mercy, in spite of our widespread infection of imperfection.

It it is gratitude. It is our striving to live a life worthy of the Gospel. It is the child who knows his father loves him and does not want to disappoint him. Of course we will. And for that, there is grace too, yet again, feeding the motivation and desire to stand and reflect God’s glory back to the world.

I was in the back yard watching my dog Mikey as I drank my coffee this morning. Like most dogs, Mikey has a real obsession with squirrels. It’s impossible to say if his excitement is sporting or a true bloodlust for the furry rodents. But one thing is for sure, he wants to get his jaws around them and tear them to shreds at every possible opportunity.

Mikey will spend hours tracking squirrels through the back yard. He’s part beagle. That little nose of his will stay pretty close to the ground all the time. Going over and over the squirrels tracks. He knows where they come in and where they go out. He’s even wise to the squirrel nest in a tree tree twenty feet above the yard.

Yet still, in spite of all his hard work and constant ‘research’ of squirrel behavior, he’s never caught one. And still, when one dares to come in our out of the yard, invariably, Mikey isn’t ever close enough to put an end to the trespasser.

Rationally, with all this constant investigation, you’d think that he’d be honing in on the critters. Like a police detective, Inching closer and closer to capturing them. But that never happens. You know why? Because he’s a dog. His memory span is about 15 seconds. He can’t employ reason, just instinct, and some element of habit. But never reason.

This all got me thinking—we kind of do this too.

Who has done more research and investigation of my own habits than me? No one. Yet I will consistently walk into my own pitfalls.

Just think about it. Have you ever been to a party, drank way too much, puked your guts out, then throught a hazy hang-over said, “I drank way too much. I’m not going to do that again.” What happened a month later? Too much drinking. Puking. And dehydrated resolves to reform your habits.

So maybe not the drinking. But how about dating someone who’s bad for you? I’ll bet you’ve gotten into that (kind of) relationship more than once. How about speaking carelessly and hurting people’s feelings? How about pornography? Yeah. I see all this and a lot more in the people around me—and of course my own ludicrous failure to learn from the mistakes I’ve made. I think most people can relate to the apparent inability to learn from our own personal research of ourselves.

Problem is, you’re not going to be able to fix this. Even with a massive resolve to do so, the best you’ll ever do is push the problem into some other context.

Enter Jesus. Problem solved. On so many levels—though perhaps not the ones you’d expect—problem solved. Problem so very, very solved.

Romans 5:7-8:

“For one will scarcely die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die— but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”

John Piper responds:

I have heard it said, “God didn’t die for frogs. So he was responding to our value as humans.” This turns grace on its head. We are worse off than frogs. They have not sinned. They have not rebelled and treated God with the contempt of being inconsequential in their lives. God did not have to die for frogs. They aren’t bad enough. We are. Our debt is so great, only a divine sacrifice could pay it.

I respond:

God didn’t have to die for frogs. They aren’t bad enough. Dang.

Imagine a boss or supervisor at work who simply cannot be satisfied with anything you do. Each time you discover a new way to fulfill his wishes, you discover ten new things that you’re not even coming close to getting right. When you finally rectify those things, you discover ten more you’re missing completely. This is the law.

No matter how much you seek to follow it, satisfying it will always be out of reach. The law is intended for one main purpose: to drive us to repentance by showing us the destitution of our plight.

That is why Paul writes in Romans 3:20:

“For by works of the law no human being will be justified in his sight, since through the law comes knowledge of sin.”

We cannot be justified by something that is endlessly revealing how short we’re falling of success. The concept of being justified, heck, even having any hope for this life, by our works—by the things we say and do and feel—is simply unreasonable. What human being can say with honesty that they’ve even been honest their whole life? No one. And before a righteous God, that has rendered their works null.

Even quantum traces of logic and reason will say that if there is a just and righteous God, grace is our only hope.

The idea of faith is kind of ambiguous. Sometimes we mean belief. Sometimes we mean ambition. Sometimes we mean almost nothing and it’s really just a Christian buzzword. To sum up ‘faith’ isn’t an easy undertaking and I’m not going to try it here. But what did occur to me during a conversation with a friend the other day was this concept that faith may not be something we can really measure. Well, not with any real confidence.

The two weeks leading up to the beginning of my Christian walk were strange. Looking back now, I feel confident in saying that my Christian walk actually began before I sat down to pray ‘that prayer’. When I sat down to pray, I believe it was merely my own mind catching up with my heart, so to speak. Yet, in that time period, had you asked me if I had faith, I would most likely have said, ‘no’.

Whether or not people’s ‘salvation’ can happen at some time other than when they sit down to confess their faith for the first time is a matter of discord. Regardless, I think the concept extends much farther than that.

We’re told in scripture that even the faith of a mustard seed will move mountains. Curiously, we see no mountains moving. We hear the man crying that Jesus help his unbelief—for faith. My question is this: how presumptuous are we to think that the totality of our faith is not only something we can quantify, but something that we must support ourselves.

Within every believer dwells the Holy Spirit. A counselor, a prayer warrior, a comforter, a seal. How can we think, “I have X amount of faith”, while in us dwells the creator of the universe? We are in no position to claim how much or how little faith we have.

Our faith sometimes surprises us, I believe that is because we often do not know the true extent of our faith, but God does and luckily he treats us accordingly. Well, that’s what I think any way.