The Journey: Living by Faith in an Uncertain World

Author:Billy Graham
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780849918872
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Published: 1991-01-01T22:00:00+00:00

seventeen

CONFRONTING THE ENEMIES WITHIN

Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.

— Psalm 51:10 ESV

One of Shakespeare’s characters had it right: The fault lies within ourselves.

Recently I heard about a woman who seemed to be a perfect example of Christian character: active in her church, respected in her community, above reproach in her personal life, always available to lend a helping hand to others.

But one day her doctor gave her the bad news: She had only months to live. Almost instantly she became a totally different person. She quit her job, dropped her old friends, and turned her back on her church. She announced that she had been good long enough and intended to spend her last days catching up on all the fun she had missed. Bars and nightclubs became her regular haunts, and she began running around with a new set of acquaintances who had no use for morality or virtue. Until the day she died, she scorned everything she had practiced the rest of her life. Her only appearance in church during those last months was on the day of her funeral, in her coffin.

Why Did It Happen?

How could someone who was apparently so upstanding and honorable suddenly throw it all overboard? How could someone who had openly identified herself as a Christian abruptly turn her back on decency and morality—and even common sense?

Only God knew her heart and mind, of course, and only He knows why she acted the way she did during those last months. Only God knows also if her professed faith in Christ was genuine, or if it was false and meant only to impress others. We must never set ourselves up as anyone’s final judge.

But one thing is clear: Her faith had not changed her on the inside. Until those final months her outward behavior was beyond reproach; she avoided what was wrong and did what was right. Down inside, however—in the deepest recesses of her heart where no one could see — she secretly envied those who lived only to please themselves, and her envy finally overwhelmed her.

In other words, to her the Christian life was only a matter of outward behavior. She apparently never understood one of the Bible’s most important truths: God not only wants to change our actions; He also wants to change our hearts. In other words, God wants to change us both on the outside and the inside. The apostle Paul put it this way: “Do not offer the parts of your body to sin, as instruments of wickedness, but rather . . . offer the parts of your body to him [God] as instruments of righteousness” (Romans 6:13). He also wrote, “Be transformed by the renewing of your mind” (Romans 12:2). Both our bodies and our minds need to be committed to Christ, for only then can He begin changing us into the people He wants us to be.

What Difference Does It Make?

Why is God so concerned with what

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