I love life, and I do not celebrate anyone’s death, but I will openly celebrate the death of a destructive idea, the end of an evil practice, or the silencing of an influence that keeps pushing people toward ruin.
Those are not the same thing.
A harmful influence may end through repentance, retirement, removal, or the natural closing of a season. Whatever brings it to an end, I am grateful when the damage stops. I can value the life of a person without pretending everything that person does is valuable.
We all make these judgments, even when we act too polished to admit it. We criticize what we reject and defend what we embrace. We poke, prod, ridicule, draw cartoons, make memes, and occasionally launch a verbal cannon when a flyswatter would have done the job. Sometimes we speak publicly. Other times we hold the entire argument inside our heads and win it before the other person even knows we invited him.
Human beings are funny that way.
People claim to possess permanently kind hearts while carefully dividing everyone into two piles: those deserving kindness and those who have apparently used up their supply. I cannot point too hard at them because I am capable of doing the same thing.
I can be gentle and harsh, patient and aggravated, merciful and judgmental—sometimes before lunch.
That does not excuse my failures. It exposes the struggle.
The real battle is learning to love what is good and hate what is evil without allowing that hatred of evil to turn me evil in the process. Righteous anger can be useful, but pride is always standing nearby, eager to grab the steering wheel. Before long, we are defending truth with a mouth that no longer sounds truthful.
I know that road because I have traveled it.
Following God requires continual correction. I must listen, examine myself, repent, and adjust before I become too harsh, too crude, too frequent, or simply wrong. It is easy to spot a splinter across the room while dragging an entire lumberyard around in my own eye.
That is the human flux: the constant pull between the person we know we should be and the impulses still fighting inside us.
Scripture never paints people as smooth, polished creatures who glide effortlessly into holiness. We stumble, repent, rise, learn, forget, and sometimes trip over the same rock we clearly remember tripping over yesterday. Every person remains responsible for his own soul, but none of us can repair the soul by sheer force of personality.
The civil war inside the human heart is too heavy to settle alone.
Peace does not come from declaring ourselves good, pretending our worst impulses are harmless, or rearranging the wreckage until it looks respectable. It comes when we surrender the battle to Jesus Christ. He does not merely point toward the way out. He enters the fight, exposes the sin, forgives the repentant heart, and gives us strength to walk differently.
The struggle within us is real.
The Savior who delivers us is real too.
“For I delight in the law of God after the inward man: But I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members. O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death? I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord. So then with the mind I myself serve the law of God; but with the flesh the law of sin.” —Romans 7:22–25
—Jeff Wager
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