I’ve had students, after doing wrong, say “That’s just the way I am! I can’t help it!” Parents have often said, The but doesn’t fall far from the tree! He’s just like his father or.,,,”. But the good news of the gospel is that we can be transformed into Christ likeness. I do not have to repeat the sins of my father or grandfather. I’m not locked into the same mindset because He is in me and I am in Him. He is humbly and gently inviting us into a different way of living.
“The Christian life, from one angle, is the long journey of letting our natural assumption about who God is, over many decades, fall away, being slowly replaced with God’s own insistence on who he is. This is hard work. It takes a lot of sermons and a lot of suffering to believe that God’s deepest heart is “merciful and gracious, slow to anger.” The fall in Genesis 3 not only sent us into condemnation and exile. The fall also entrenched in our minds dark thoughts of God, thoughts that are only dug out over multiple exposures to the gospel over many years. Perhaps Satan’s greatest victory in your life today is not the sin in which you regularly indulge but the dark thoughts of God’s heart that cause you to go there in the first place and keep you cool toward him in the wake of it.” - Dane C. Ortlund, Gentle and Lowly: The Heart of Christ for Sinners and Sufferers
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