Longing and Joy

Meet me here, friends, over this cup of lukewarm coffee and this lukewarm heart but be prepared. This is not a morning of ease and laughter.

Some things never change, or at least feel like they never change in this murky muddy heart. I am facing the sorrow of looking in my heart and seeing the sin that made my Savior’s shed blood necessary… not only seeing it but acknowledging that I indulge it and guard it, hide it and help it to remain. Sanctification. The Holy Spirit’s work. Do I fight the work He wants to do? Why does this Sanctification Road seem so slow and steep? It is the constant heartache of my life – the slowness of my change. I hear the summons but I don’t respond. Romans 7:24 ~ “Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?”

“For sin that made my Savior bleed, I hang my head in shame;

Yet for the cleansing that I need, that precious blood I claim.”

Already but not yet. Longing and Joy. This is what I cling to ~ “For by a single offering he has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified.” Hebrews 10:14  ALREADY perfected through the single offering he made on the cross.

Sometimes the progress seems horrifically slow, but I’m sure that the change in my life is occurring by his grace. Some days I feel the setbacks so harshly, but looking over my life I can see the technical weaving of his grace through my life like a complicated fugue…separate melodies in different ranges weaving, dodging, crossing, building. In music, dissonance glorifies resolution. True, I think, in this process of sanctification, too.

John Piper on the subject:

Being sanctified means that we are imperfect and in process. We are becoming holy – but are not yet fully holy. And it is precisely these – and only these – who are already perfected. The joyful encouragement here is that the evidence of our perfection before God is not our experienced perfection, but our experienced progress. The good news is that being on the way is proof that we have arrived.

The suffering of Christ secures our perfection so firmly that it is already now a reality.

So the battle is to become what I already am. My firm foundation is Christ, the death of Jesus is the key. “He has now reconciled [you] in his body of flesh by his death, in order to present you holy and blameless and above reproach before him.” Colossians 1:22.

Now to face this day with my heart wrapped in this truth: praying for my change, glorifying in perfection already bought and paid for. Time for a fresh cup and a bit of Bach.