Jesus in the Gospel According to St. Matthew in Matthew 5:48, tells us to be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect...St. Peter in his first epistle (1 Peter 1:13-16) repeats Leviticus 11:45 and tells us to be holy in all we do; for it is written: Be Holy for I AM Holy...Jesus in Mark 10:18, says, why do you call Me good, no one is good, except God alone...Jesus tells us to love one another (John 13:34)...And we learn from Jesus that Only God is good...
God created us in His Own image (Genesis 1:27) and He gives us a Holy Spirit...This part of us yearns for perfection, holiness, goodness, and love...We are to be perfect...We have a need to be holy...God is both perfect and holy...We try to be perfect, but we cannot be perfect...We try to be holy but we are not holy...We want to be good, but we are not good...Earth needs and should be more like heaven...Jesus tells us when we pray to pray for God's will be done on earth as it is in heaven (Matthew 6:10)...He tells us to love one another...We know the way to peace in this world is to be perfect, holy, good, and to love...We are not perfect, holy, good, and loving...This is a reason for war, disputes, wickedness, evil, and other negative things...This is life's paradox...But because God made us in His image we do want to be perfect, and we do want to be want to be holy...
We know that God's moral laws is a way to peace throughout the world...We know we should be good...Human rights would be the way they are to be, if we were perfect, holy, and good...Without God's and His moral laws we would not know what it is to sin...Without God, because He is perfect, holy, and good, we do not know how bad we really are...God sent His Son to teach us about absolute moral law...His Son knew how to interpret the Scripture and personally knows God's moral attributes (Jesus was with God since the beginning, John 1:2)...What Jesus taught us, is how we are to be and how we should live...We have a tendency, at times, to try to be like God...We sometimes think we can advise Him...For us to even partially understand, we needed to be there since the beginning...Unless we know everything and know all, and all the facts, we are at a loss...It seems the more we think we understand, the further we get into life's paradox...Job learned this at the end of Job's Book, after God spoke...Job finally understands there are things that only God can understand...
One prayer I especially like for my sins, is the one from the tax collector in Luke 18:9-14...It is a very short prayer...God have mercy on me, I am a sinner...
St. Paul gives the best examples of our daily struggles in Romans chapter seven...He starts talking about coveting...St. Paul knows that it is a sin to covet...Our sinful nature comes from our flesh... We know that the Law of Moses is spiritual...Therefore, we know we should not covet...St. Paul was a great teacher of Jesus' ways and teachings...He would have known that sin like coveting can start in even an idea...Jesus tells us that anyone who looks at another woman lustfully, has already committed adultery with her in his heart (Mark 5:28)...When we want to correct people and don't even realize (it) when we correct them (or maybe we do realize), we are hypocrites...Jesus tells us before we try to take the speck out of our brother's eye, we must take the large plank out of our own eye (Matthew 7:3-5)...When we think ill of others and look down on our fellow brothers, we must step back and look at ourselves, before we criticize in words or in thought...We are no better than anyone...God sends the rain to both the good and evil...He allows the sun to shine on the righteous and unrighteous (Matthew 5:45)...We are all God's children..
St. Paul understands these problems and daily struggles...St. Paul knows because God made us in His image...Paul want to be good...But Paul hated what he did...The flesh is weak...God gives us free will and we sin...But even though he understands this paradox, and hated it, he can't correct it (if St. Paul can't correct it, I too will be even worse than he-how much more of a wretched man am I, than he)...But as we go about our lives, we know that God's laws and ways are good...The Law of Moses was the way to live and please God...We want to please God, but we can't please God...For I have a desire to do good, but I just cannot seem to carry it out...For what I do is not good, but I want to do good; no, the evil I do, is something I do not want to do- and this I just seem to keep on doing...Now, if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who does it, but something else inside me...It is the sin that is living in me that causes this paradox...It is something living in me, something in me at work (that is inside me, doing this evil)...When I want to be good, evil is right there with me...This is hard to understand, because, I want nothing more than to please the LORD...
St. Paul writes what a wretched man I am!!!...Who will rescue me from this body of death?...Thanks be to the God -through Jesus Christ our LORD...So while I am a slave to God and His law, in my sinful nature I am a slave to also my sins (and this sin inside me, that causes me to do evil)...The evil one with his temptation and sin is always at work...Like St. Paul, we must understand this...We need to continue to look to the Son for help...He was sent by our Father, to help us with this paradox of sin...He is our hope...He died for our struggles with these sins...He died for our us...He died for our sins...
So as we seek God and read the Scripture and have faith in God, a war is going on inside us...Man is divided...Our sinful, our evil nature and our faith in Him and the Holy Spirit are at war inside us...We sometimes may feel like a prisoner with this sin inside us...St. Paul, as he said and wrote, understands this internal conflict...And understanding sin in the terms of the Bible and the way St. Paul explains sin, helps us in terms of understanding ourselves and the world a little better...Life would otherwise seem unexplained in the areas of evil and pain, as we fell from grace in the Garden of Eden...But sin in the terms of the Bible and the Fall of Man sheds light on what has happened to the world...
The Spirit is willing but the earthly flesh is weak...We sin and need God's mercy...