No Escape – Part 1

This week Michael writes: Wherever you go there you are. You can't escape from yourself. The Apostle Paul said, "In my flesh dwells no good thing."  As Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry said after a naval battle in the War of 1812, "We have met the enemy and he is us." Reality is that if you think of yourself, you'll be depressed, if you think of the circumstances, you'll be stressed, but if you think of the Lord, you'll be blessed.  

Without a relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ, men and women can't escape the insidious preoccupation with self. The basis of the sin nature is egocentric pride. The devil beguiled, enticed and lured Eve in the Garden of Eden when he appealed to her pride. He said to her, "If you eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge, you'll be like God." He was backhandedly saying to her, you won't need God. When Adam and Eve doubted and disobeyed God, they lost their innocence and astronomically much more. First, their eyes were opened to the nature of sin, guilt and the associated shame, but also ushered in death into the world. God had said, "On the day you eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you will surely die." They died spiritually that day... sin in doubt and disobedience separated them from God. Later, they physically died. We inherited Adam's sin nature, his DNA, the genetic "man code" ...  a code without God and without hope. The sin nature makes men and women fearful, lonely, inadequate, and insecure. Where is hope?  

According to Romans 5:12, “Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned:” Verse 15 says, “But not as the offence, so also is the free gift. For if through the offence of one (Adam) many be dead, much more the grace of God, and the gift by grace, which is by one man, Jesus Christ, hath abounded unto many.”

Most men and women don't like themselves because of sin in their life. As Paul said, "The things that I don't want to do I do, and the things that I want to do I don't do.  O wretched man that I am who shall deliver me from this dead body."

The self absorbed man and woman says, "I may not be much, but I'm all I think about." Egotism is excessive preoccupation with “self”. The world's human code says "I'm capable of meeting my own needs." Self confidence is confidence in my own abilities.  The world repeats the devil's original lie:  You don't need God...you can do it all by yourself. However, Jeremiah 17:9-10 says, “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it? I the LORD search the heart, I test the mind, even to give every man according to his ways, and according to the fruit of his doings.”  

Let’s continue Michael’s message on “No Escaping ourselves” in the next post.

In Christ, Brian