Things look different thru the eyes of a child. I have been teaching Jake to use my point and shoot camera. We have gone from turning the camera on, to zooming in and out, to shooting close-ups. Some of the photos he's taken are very good! This is one of his great ideas...lying on the floor, he took a picture of himself! Bravo, Jake!
I wonder if God looks at me and cheers me on in my learning? When I learn a new attribute of Him, does He wink at me with a grin on His majestic face? When I show His glory by being kind to someone, does He give a God-sized thumbs up? Does He applaud when I finally understand that His discipline is meant for my good?
Why then do I fight for my will so much, when He is waiting with such great expectancy for me to learn His will? I don't know. But at least I am in good company with Paul, who said basically the same thing in his great "I do the things I don't want to do and don't do the things I want to" writing...or something like that. I always get it wrong :o)
Oh that God never give up on me! I DO want to learn more of His way! I DO want to know Him! I DO want a childlike love of "teach me just one more thing" when it comes to the life He has planned for me!
Thank you, Jake, for the reminder. You are doing great!
Romans 7:4-6; 14-27 (New International Version)
So, my brothers, you also died to the law through the body of Christ, that you might belong to another, to him who was raised from the dead, in order that we might bear fruit to God. For when we were controlled by the sinful nature, the sinful passions aroused by the law were at work in our bodies, so that we bore fruit for death. But now, by dying to what once bound us, we have been released from the law so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit, and not in the old way of the written code.
We know that the law is spiritual; but I am unspiritual, sold as a slave to sin. I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good. As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me. I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it.
So I find this law at work: When I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God's law; but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God—through Jesus Christ our Lord!
So then, I myself in my mind am a slave to God's law, but in the sinful nature a slave to the law of sin.
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