Thursday, January 1, 2009

New Year Resolution: Overcome personal flaws with GRACE

One of my New Year's resolutions is to over-come my flaws through God's grace. I have learned to understand the true nature of the Christian life which is unpredictable and expanding called "sanctification". God does not desire to destroy my will, but to sanctify “my will into His will”. As Christian, I know that the world is no longer my master and that I am an over-comer because of the Holy Spirit that is within me. That’s the definition of a Christian. That's a mark of a true follower of Jesus Christ. I have learned to accept the existence of my weaknesses. I am always searching and identifying my strengths and weaknesses rather than dwell solely on the negative aspects of my weaknesses. I will have to remember that I will often fall short of my resolutions that the world will not come to an end it that happens.

Failures are just lessons of bad habits that I keep bringing back. I just need to pick myself up and start again. Let the mistake be a lesson and learn to make adjustments as I go along. I know that God's love hopes all things (1 Corinth 13). I understand that God's Grace with love refuses to take human failure as final. With Christ in me, my human failures are never final. He is not finished with me yet.

God has given us the grace to sanctify us. The sources of "thorns" can be weaknesses, insults, distresses, persecutions and difficulties. Paul just needed to focus on God rather than the problem. God uses thorns to perfect His "power is perfected in weakness". Through GRACE, "Perseverance must finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything." (James 1:4).

The main thing to understand and remember is that Jesus is MY SHEPHERD that He will supply all my needs (Phil. 4:19) and that He knows everything about my life (Ps. 139:3), cares about me (1 Pet. 5:7), has the power for every difficulty (Ps. 62:11), is perfecting me to be like Christ (Phil. 1:6), and that nothing escapes Him (Ps. 147:5), that will lead me to be stable, not anxious living.

Its time for me to be serious about going to church and focus on grace that will help me overcome my personal flaws.

Happy New Year.

1 comment:

Nancie said...

Amen. God is still working in us. Our Christian journey is a life long sanctification. God is doing a deeper work in our souls daily to conform us more and more to our Lord Jesus Christ. Hope this year will be a very blessed and fruitful year for you, spiritually and in other areas. Praying for you and family.