Good Reminder

I've been reading Oswald Chamber's My Utmost For His Highest every morning and I love how God allows you to read something at just the right time. I read this a few weeks ago but I thought I'd share anyways.

"He is a Man of sorrows and acquainted with grief." Isaiah 53:3

We are not "acquainted with grief" in the same way our Lord was acquainted with it. We endure it and live through it, but we do not become intimate with it. At the beginning of our lives we do not bring ourselves to the point of dealing with the reality of sin. We look at life through the eyes of reason and say that if a person will control his instincts, and educate himself, he can produce a life that will slowly evolve into the life of God. But as we continue on through life, we find the presence of something which we have not yet taken into account, namely, sin- and it upsets all of our thinking and our plans. Sin has made the foundation of our thinking unpredictable, uncontrollable, and irrational.
We have to recognize that sin is a fact of life, not just a shortcoming. Sin is blatant mutiny against God, and either sin or God must die in my life. The New Testament brings us right down to one issue- if sin rules in me, God's life in me will be killed; if God rules in me, sin in me will be killed. There is nothing more fundamental than that. The culmination of sin was the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, and what was true in the history of God on earth will also be true in your history and in mine-that is, sin will kill the life of God in us. We must mentally bring ourselves to terms with this fact of sin. It is the only explanation why Jesus Christ came to earth, and it is the explanation of the grief and sorrow of life.

I keep re-reading this section-it's a great reminder. Sin is still present. It has been and will continue to be until Jesus Christ returns. Sin is seen in my life, the Maasai, my family, in the states-it's everywhere! God demands that I strive to be pure and virtuous even though sin is present. "For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing, it is the gift of God." I am not some special person created in heaven, but a sinner saved by grace.