On evil and good, and the Holy Spirit

Gone for a week on a family vacation, during which there was to be no blogging. But I'm back now, and recovering from the flying sardine can experience that is air travel in America.

My goal with this blog, as I recall, was to "say something reasonably intelligent almost every day." The modifiers "reasonably" and "almost" allow me to leeway. The point of it all is, I suppose, to engender a habit of thoughtful expression. Anyway, today I'm trying to resume the habit.

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In the Bible we learn that God can bring good from evil, and in fact often does (see the story of Joseph and his brothers, for example). This is another way of saying that nothing can deter God's plan. His goal for every believer is that they walk in holiness and the fruit of the Spirit, growing in Christlikeness from day to day.

It's easy enough, though, to find examples in our own lives of times we seemed to grow in the other direction. We kept in step with the flesh instead of the Spirit. We didn't follow God but walked in our own way, and always, we told ourselves, for very good reasons. Perhaps we hated someone, but told ourselves quite rationally that the person in question hated us first. We were simply just responding in kind. It was just desserts, that's all.

My point is, we Christians reason this way all the time, justifying ourselves and our sins, our fallings away. The path to Christlikeness is not a smooth and steady climb. But it's good to remember that that which provokes a sinful response in us was intended to do just that. The world, the flesh, and the Devil are all in on this little game. However, though the Devil may use circumstances and your own habits of a lifetime to provoke you into a path of unrighteousness, God can use those same circumstances to draw you back into the way of righteousness. What was intended for evil, he uses for good.

So, to keep in step with the Spirit means sometimes to ask yourself, how can this circumstance, which can so easily provoke me to sin and has often done so in the past, be turned to the good? How can I respond in a way that pleases God? With the Spirit, all this is possble. Without the Spirit, we are quite literally lost in sin.