It is so easy to fall into the mindset of "saving ourselves." It's not only a worldly, "self-help" mindset, but also (perhaps even more so) a religious mindset . For the longest time I believed the religious adage expressed so powerfully in Galatians: "God saved me, but now it's all on me to clean myself up." Or in my case, "I'm so grateful to be the wretch that God saved, I have to spend the rest of my life trying to somehow pay Him back for that gift." I learned the hard way that is a horrendously miserable place to live.

Through much prayer, study, and mind renewal, I've come to realize that I can't do anything! The "apart from me you can do nothing" in John 15:5 actually means just that. Strikingly humbling, but incredibly freeing. The process of learning to "walk by the Spirit and not gratify the desires of the flesh" and to "keep in step with the Spirit" is neither a worldly nor religious self-improvement process. It's simply surrender. It's learning to love Him. To seek Him. To choose Him daily and to ask Him to fill me with His desires. To learn to know His voice (John 10:4). The natural result of this laying down of MY "rights" and lesser loves is that the closer I get to His holiness, the more of my junk gets burned away in His purity, and the more righteous I become.

I trust the Holy Spirit to convict me and redirect me when I'm wrong, but I do my very best not to fall into my old trap of wasting my time staring at everything wrong with me when I could be fixing my eyes on Jesus, the Author and Perfecter of my faith and being transformed into His image as behold and contemplate the glory of the Lord (2 Cor 3:18).