"I want to be different today from what I was yesterday..."

"...as the fruit of the Spirit becomes more manifest in me."

I think these post on top of each other...so if you're just getting here, the post before this is a little explanation about why I'm doing this. If you'd rather not go back - these are a few of my thoughts from Chapter 1 of Forgotten God by Francis Chan.

Ok, so this is working backward a little bit, as this is one of the closing sentences in the first paragraph...but it sure did sum up what I've been trying to get at. I'm not who I want to be. I desperately want to be a person of compassion, gentle, hard to anger, and unselfish. Recently during a communion time at church I was so frustrated with myself because I felt like every week during that time I was praying for the same thing - this week I want to do better, I want to be better. Then the next Sunday would come around and I'd find myself in the same place.

In the introduction Chan talks a lot about the power of people who are possessed by the Holy Spirit and the incredible things that the 1st Christians were able to accomplish through that power. That when we try and do things on our own, we only get human sized results, but to think of what could be accomplished if we let God work through His Spirit in us??

One thing that really stood out to me was this: "the Spirit is more obviously active where people are desperate, humble, and not distracted by their pursuit of wealth or comforts."

I really feel like the distance I was feeling in my relationship with God was my pursuit of my own personal wants, comforts, and desires. A couple of posts back I touched on that part of my life, so I won't revisit it here, but we need to get out of the way! I was just thinking the other day - we are supposed to be good stewards right? Usually we think about our money, but what about our lives? God is blessing us with breath and life and resources every day to live out His will, and I've been wasting a whole lot of that (ok - the majority of it) on myself. What could God have accomplished through me by now if I had been a better steward of my life?

What do you think about this: "I don't want to keep crawling when I have the ability to fly."

How do we go about getting out of the way?