The way up is down

J

⁷Submit yourselves therefore to God Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. ⁸ Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. ⁹ Be wretched and mourn and weep. Let your laughter be turned to mourning and your joy to gloom. ¹⁰ Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will exalt you.

This past Sunday, I heard a great sermon on James 4:7-10.  In the sermon, the pastor spoke extensively about drawing near to God, and what that would take given the passage.  The introduction to the sermon was around a Christian in the 1700s who kept a diary over 30ish years where he consistently notes that he tries to get up early in the morning.  Again and again, he resolves to be up early for prayer and time in the word, but it is clear he consistently fails to do so according to his entries.  He is depressed by this and even questions why he continues to resolve to do something that he clearly coming up short on.  All of this was to point to our deep need to admit our weakness, weep / mourn over it and thus be able to more fully experience the grace and exaltation that comes through Christ.

I imagine that I have heard all of this in sermons before, but it struck me at a deep level on Sunday.  The presumptive attitude that allows me to approach God, thinking that I am doing pretty well is probably my chief barrier to a rich relationship with him.  Cleansing hands and purifying hearts is not a experience where I really get to maintain my dignity on my terms.  This scares me to be honest, and while I was convicted, I have had a hard time actually doing it in this week.  So today, I am going to resolve to confess not my lack of spending time with God regularly, but rather the errant attitudes of my heart of complacency, idleness and presumptiveness.  Yikes, that sin list grew fast and ugly.