Living Above Reproach

Living Above Reproach

Around a year ago now when I started my journey back to God I remember being on our fall retreat and during worship I remember seeing a vision of sorts of myself being harassed by demons as the sun rose and they then fled from me as if they could no longer affect me. Now of course I still sin and fall but ever since that I've been trying to live my life completely devoid of sin, and my goal from that day forward has been to live a life above reproach. My friend Aaron was telling me about his mentor of the faith still struggles with sin, and his mentor, and his mentor, the truth is as long as we live in this dichotomy of flesh vs spirit the flesh will always have a place at the table, but it's how we limit the flesh and respond when we fall to it. For me this reminds me of a mathematical equation. Whenever there is a limit of a function at X, and as the function approaches X it's limit is infinity, there is never a point on that function when it has reached the limit infinity, but it gets infinitesimally close to it and that's how I view sin in our life. We can never live a life completely absent of sin but we can work on it and get infinitesimally close to that goal. Now the closer we get to that goal, there are many advantages to it. First off, we draw closer to God as we live more in His likeness, but also we become a more vibrant light in this world in order to draw those out of darkness to the light. We live our lives as examples of Christ and simply by our actions we further the case for Christ. By living this life above reproach we draw ourselves closer to God while also drawing others closer to Him as well, which is ultimately why we are here. The thing that really hurts me though and that I'm still trying to figure out how to handle is that the closer we get to this goal the harder it hurts when we do fall to the temptations of the flesh. I believe the reason for this is that we know more of the good and so though bad is just all the more further from it and that larger gap or separation is where that larger pain comes from but the beauty of it all is that it allows all the more for grace to abound. So I encourage you as I write this to really encourage myself in continuing to constantly strive towards this goal and to not be distraught when we fall short at times, just allow it to further push and motivate us as we continue down this path of life.