What a Mystery We Are!

“I find then a law, that, when I would do good, evil is present with me.”

(Romans 7:21)

Are you not often a mystery to yourself? Warm one moment—cold the next!

Abasing yourself one hour—exalting yourself the following! Loving the world, full of it, steeped up to your head in it today—crying, groaning and sighing for a sweet manifestation of the love of God tomorrow! Brought down to nothingness, covered with shame and confusion, on your knees before you leave your room—filled with pride and self-importance before you have got downstairs! Despising the world and willing to give it all up for one taste of the love of Jesus when in solitude—trying to grasp it with both hands when in business!

Touched by love—and stung with hatred! Possessing a little wisdom—and a great deal of folly! Earthly minded—and yet having the affections in Heaven! Pressing forward—and lagging behind! Full of sloth—and yet taking the Kingdom with violence! And thus the Spirit, by a process which we may feel but cannot adequately describe—leads us into the mystery of the two natures perpetually struggling and striving against each other in the same bosom. So that one man cannot more differ from another than the same man differs from himself.

But the mystery of the Kingdom of Heaven is this: that our carnal mind undergoes no alteration but maintains a perpetual war with Grace. And thus, the deeper we sink in self-abasement under a sense of our vileness, the higher we rise in a knowledge of Christ and the blacker we are in our own view—the more lovely does Jesus appear.