The longer I live, the more aware I become of the depravity of my heart. I look back at myself as a young believer, and I think I defined my sin as bad behaviors---losing patience with my mom, telling a white lie, etc. But today I see that the behaviors are just the symptoms of my lost heart. The real problem is deep inside---my motives and thoughts that are often far from holy. I have to keep giving myself to God over and over again---asking him to forgive me and starting anew, asking him to cleanse me from the inside out. I don't want to be like the Pharisees who Jesus likened to whitewashed tombs (looking good and oh-so-pious, from the outside, but rotten and dying on the inside.)
What brings all this up?! Believe it or not, it's the Facebook thing again. As you know, I gave it up for Lent and what I miss most is playing Scrabble. Well, ever since I did that, I've noticed myself scrambling (or should I say "scrabbling" ;) to replace the space that Scrabble took up. I've played live games with my family, tried to play on my daughter's ipad (not half as fun, since I play against strangers and hours can go by between turns) and even just surfed the web for the latest trivia on movie stars and such, just to kill time and disengage from life.
As I've observed myself, I started to see that I was honoring the letter of the law (not getting on FB) but not the spirit of the law (moving toward God and real life, and away from distractions).
My husband found himself doing the same thing I was. For Lent, he said he'd only watch t.v. if others were watching with him. The benefits were two-fold---first, he'd probably end up watching less t.v., and secondly, if he did watch, it'd be a more social activity. The next thing he knew, he was watching movies on his laptop because, you see, he hadn't made any vow or promise regarding movie-watching. :}
You might think to yourself---oh, watching t.v. isn't so bad! And there's nothing wrong with Scrabble, for goodness sake! You're right on both counts. But what we realized is that we are surrendering too much of our time and hearts to these things, rather than to God. We want to yield more of ourselves to him, not to so-called "soft addictions." Again, it's not the outward stuff that matters; it's the heart. And my point is that the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. May God continue to have mercy on us and to work on all of us---from the inside out.
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