The War for Soul

Dear friends, I urge you, as foreigners and exiles, to abstain from sinful desires, which wage war against your soul.
1 Peter 2:11

This war staged in my soul, wherever bodily my soul may be, secretes its poisonous offspring into my heart. Where this noxious sludge is sent along the various canals of my bloodstream to every part of my body. As these liquid transgressions reach the barrier of my skin it finds the weak points and thousands of bumps are erected on the surface of my epidermis from the crown of my scalp to the lowliest of my toes; not an inch of my body is not covered by a miniature grave mound signifying any one of a million times in my life I have sinned against God. Each tiny boil on my skin’s surface holds tribute to a death I deserved to die, but that Jesus died instead. As these affronts to God seek escape, the guilt of knowing that each sin was a conscious decision made against God weighs down, pressing like so many tombstones on my shoulders.

And while I can hardly bare the pressure of my own self achieved guilt, I think back with sorrow, to the justification I claimed for allowing Christ to take the stripes I deserve: because He can take it, and I can’t. There is the Messiah, the promised Redeemer, the Son of God, taking a beating any other man who ever lived would have died from, but not my Lord, He did not die until the very moment He was ready to; when He breathed His last upon the cross.

Die though He did, death could not keep Him! To my ever-growing shame it is this marvelous, glorious and wondrous truth that weighs down on me. I know that because He is made new that I also can be, and it is because of this knowledge that I have not long ago sinned so easily. Forgive me Lord, but I am ever a fool. Even if you redeem me more times than there are stars in the sky, I am destined to fail you again. I am not worthy of the pain you have endured.