Poor in Spirit, continued. Excerpt from Blessed

Continuing the chapter on “the poor in spirit”, excerpted from

BLESSED

Eight Steps to Emotional, Relational, Spiritual Wholeness:

The Healing Power of the Beatitudes

Struggle

Romans 7:19-25New International Version (NIV)

19 For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing. 20 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.

21 So I find this law at work: Although I want to do good, evil is right there with me. 22 For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; 23 but I see another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within me.24 What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death? 25 Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord!

So then, I myself in my mind am a slave to God’s law, but in my sinful nature[a] a slave to the law of sin.

Yes, the upward and downward stair step nature of our lives. We struggle with our internal wiring. We are born with propensities. You might frame this in different ways. “We are hwai-le, broken.” “We are dysfunctional.” “We are sinful.” And of course how we frame this makes a difference in our outlook, but it boils down to our inability to deal with ourselves.

Are these inner propensities sent by Satan, by God? I feel that they are the result of the fall of man. There is Sin, with a capital “S” in the world. It is unredeemed until Jesus returns. The “Prince of the Power of the Air” (Ephesians 2:2) is controlling the world. Some of this is expressed through actual sin, but some of it is expressed through disabilities. ADHD, autism, and diabetes are certainly not sin, but they greatly affect our ability to cope with and effect growth.

“Man killed God,” Nietzsche believed, “because he did not want anyone to look at his ugliest side.” Nietzsche never said it in so many words but it was a concept that he definitely held especially in his writings of “the ugly man.” (Nietzsche) God knows everything, ….including our flaws. We don’t even want God to see this part, and we certainly don’t admit it to ourselves. So, we “kill” this God, often by our own self-righteousness.

Refusing to admit one’s powerlessness is only self-deception: the concept “I am in control.” No one is truly in control. Life is much larger than what we can grab ahold of. It is here that saying from the gospel of John chapter nine comes true, “No one is so blind as those who do not see.” John 9:39-41

(I will continue with “the answer” in the next posting.)

Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. Thus Spake Zarathustra. Translated by Alexander Tille,

              Macmillan Company, 1896.