I love his story, I think its more like the normal Christian experience than we like to admit.  Most churches look at people like this and judge them, I look at him and see hope. If there is hope for a man who struggles with such weighty issues, then there is hope for a man like me. Thank God for Jesus.

 Visit I Am Second for more stories.

What does it take for people to wander through the wilderness for 40 years seeing God work all kinds of miracles and still in the end rebel against Him? Unbelief. That’s what this passage teaches.

It tells us that no matter how great the miracles that we witness, no matter how great God’s provision is for us, that we have in us a bent toward sin that will take us captive if we let our hearts be hardened by sin. Just as many of the Israelites witnessed God’s continual mercies and still hardened their heats toward him, so do many of us.

Many of us have seen God completely change the lives of people around us, replacing the agony of their lives with the joy of Christ. We have seen Him heal marriages and cure the incurable. We have seen Him change communities and restore families. And yet, we are content to sit on the sidelines and watch Him work in others and never submit our lives to Him and ask Him to do those things in us.

So we wander. Enjoying God’s provision, but grumbling about the way that it differs from what we want or the way we think it should be. And we go after the things that He has warned us to flee from. But because of our unbelief in His sufficiency we replace Him, little bits at a time, with things that feel good and make us feel happy for the moment.

And as we give ourselves to those things our hearts grow harder and harder toward God, and many of us become angry at God because He doesn’t give us the things we want or do for us the things we require. 

But in the end, the only thing that we needed was Him.

It is our unbelief, and the unbelief of others around us, that drives us from Him. And we are admonished to “exhort one another every day… that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin (v13).” 

May we engage each other, and teach each other of the gretness of God so that our unbelief may not harden our hearts toward Him.

It is sometimes just as difficult to watch others struggle with, or in some cases surrender to, their sin.  It is hard to watch someone destroy all that God has built in and around them for fleeting moment of happiness.

In my better moments I want to strangle the version of me that is enslaved to sin.  I just want to yell at him, “look at all of the blessings that you have, don’t you get it?  You have everything you need and most things you want, but your ridiculous actions are robbing you of the joy that those blessings bring.  And for what? Being a little numb to the world for a few minutes? You are a joke, man.” But the shame of it is that, while living in my sin, I cannot see the destructive power of it. In those moments I don’t recognize the devastating consequences of my actions.

I see this in others too. I see their blindness to the light. And I just want to shake them and say “wake up, God has better plans for you.”

It is hard to watch.

I feel like Trinity from the Matrix. She tells Neo “You’ve been down there, Neo. You already know that road. You know exactly where it ends. And I know that’s not where you want to be.”

But no matter what I do, or how passionately I plead, it is still their choice. And sometimes all you can do is watch, pray, and wait for God’s humbling.

Oh, how I long for that day that God will flip that switch and give me a new body that is not broken under the weight of sin and is not bent toward anything but Godliness.  And how I long for that to be true in the lives of all of those I love.

Maybe this says a lot more about me than I want to share, but this is a blog about my thoughts, so at least it’s real.

This past weekend my wife and I watched a movie that I knew very little about and didn’t have any real longing to see, but since I have netflix and it costs so little to watch a movie that I otherwise wouldn’t spend money to rent, we watched the movie Mr. Brooks.  It stars Kevin Costner as a serial killer who struggles with a “hunger” to kill and a desire not to.   I thought the movie was great, in a rather disturbing kind of way, and I would recommend it, if only for the reason I talk about below.  (Spoiler Alert)

It is a brutal movie and not something that I usually enjoy, but I was struck by the main character’s fight with his alter ego about his killing.  Mr. Brooks did not want to kill.  He had given it up for his family and tried treating his “hunger” for murder by attending Alcoholics Anonymous and proclaiming that “I am an addict”.  He had gone a number of years without killing by modifying his behavior and successfully ignoring the voice in his head that wanted to kill again.

But Marshall, the voice in his head, did not go away.  He kept pesetering him, tempting him to kill to feed his “hunger”.   And no matter how hard he tried to ignore it, the voice would not be silent and Mr. Brooks gave in again.

I am no serial killer, but I feel like Mr. Brooks every now and again.  I feel the weight of his hunger.  I feel the pain that is a hunger for things that I don’t want, a hunger for things that I thought I no longer had an appetite for.  But a hunger that comes back to haunt me until I no longer have a desire to ignore it.

I am not sympathetic to serial killers, but I am sympathetic to those who, like Mr. Brooks and Mr. Wright, struggle with sins they thought were beaten, but come back to haunt them. That’s why I am so thankful for grace, because it sticks with me even when obedience doesn’t.