A fatal flaw in human thinking is to believe you can overcome your problems on your own. True Christians are offered help unavailable to mankind in general. Are you tapping into this resource?
Are you a Christian? If so, your life is a constant, daily struggle to overcome sin. This leads to a fundamental question: How do you approach that struggle?
Most people think they can solve their weaknesses and problems themselves. We all have the tendency to think this way. But the truth is, we don’t have the power to solve our problems!
The true Christian needs power in his or her life: power to fight, power to overcome, power to conquer, power to vanquish, power to live a righteous life!
Perhaps you agree with this. Perhaps you know it. But do you realize the depth of it? Do you find it easy to forget and hard to apply?
Notice what Herbert W. Armstrong wrote in his Author’s Statement in Mystery of the Ages: “I have often said it is much more difficult to unlearn an erroneous supposed truth than it is to learn a new truth. Even in these past 58 years I had not fully and clearly realized the significance of the fact revealed in Genesis 3:22-24—that, in fact, God had closed the Holy Spirit and eternal life to mankind in general until the removal of Satan at the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. Traditional Christian teaching had always assumed there is a contest between God and Satan—that God has been trying desperately to ‘get the world saved,’ but in this great controversy Satan has been winning. In other words, God had sent Jesus Christ at his first coming to try to win this ongoing war against Satan. Traditional Christianity has taught that ‘whosoever will may come’ and be ‘saved’ through Jesus.
“For some years I had come to partially realize the error of this assumption, but the full truth on this point had not come crystal clear to me until very recently. This truth is indeed mind-boggling. It clears what had been clouded in mystery.”
When it comes to your faults and sins, are you slipping back into the error that you can overcome them yourself? In that moment of choice, that moment of confrontation, that moment when you struggle against sin, does it remain crystal clear to you that you cannot trust in yourself? (Jeremiah 17:5).
“O Lord, I know that the way of man is not in himself: it is not in man that walketh to direct his steps” (Jeremiah 10:23). Again and again, God reveals to us through the Bible that we humans are incapable of guiding our own lives! We are incomplete! We need God to guide us.
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