While traveling recently, a
couple shared with me that they had gone through a great time of trial in their
marriage. They both said that they had learned a lot about themselves and more
about how bad they really were by nature. I have thought about it since and
concluded what a great mercy from God that trial was. It is always a good thing
when were are made to see ourselves for what we really are. Self-righteousness
is always a thing that must be repeatedly put to death in us for it rears its
ugly head again and again. Self-righteousness leads to self-trust rather than to
trusting God. Paul confessed the same kind of God-sent trials in his own
experience. “But we had the sentence of death in ourselves, that we should not
trust in ourselves, but in God which raiseth the dead:” (II Cor. 1:9) The
sentence of death is upon all that we are and do by nature. “The flesh profiteth
NOTHING…” We learn by God’s grace that in us, that is in our flesh, “dwelleth no
good thing.” We harbor high notions as to what we are and especially what we are
compared to others. But it is a false notion and when we are tried we learn what
we really are apart from God’s restraining, keeping grace. Again Paul says, “I
am carnal, sold under sin… For the good that I would I do not: but the evil
which I would not, that I do… I see another law in my members, warring against
the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in
my members. O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this
death?” (Rom. 7) God alone can deliver us and Paul then says, “I thank God
through Jesus Christ our Lord. So then with the mind I myself serve the law of
God; but with the flesh the law of sin.” While we are delivered from sin in
Christ, we must be constantly delivered from the power of sin. The flesh always
serves the law of sin and therefore God continually brings us under the sentence
of death that we might learn anew not to trust in ourselves but God. God will
lift His restraining hand and let us see what we really are as sinners, ungodly
and unclean. In this we learn to look to Him constantly, to have hope only in
Christ and to know that He alone is the only righteousness we possess. Hard and
shocking as these failures are to us, it is the Lord’s mercies that we are not
consumed and learn not to trust in ourselves, our works and our
self-righteousness. We are “kept by faith, ever learning to trust Christ alone."