I am a sinner

I am a sinner. I have been afflicted with a deadly wound. It will claim me. Without some miraculous intervention, I am done for.

That intervention has happened. God has taken up the cause of my healing, of my salvation. He has declared the prognosis: "He will pull through." And as the Lord and Author of Life, He is the only one qualified and empowered to make that proclamation. We hold a council, He declares the outcome, and my whole perspective changes. I have hope. I leave that room...

But I'm not saved yet. The sin still pulls and tears at my heart. It sickens me, and I vomit. It gashes me, and I gash those around me. I sob for the pain of it, for the fact that it isn't gone. You told me it would be gone, Lord! That was the promise.

And You did not lie. By degrees, He scrapes it away, cutting back its tendrils as they present themselves, creeping, lashing, destructive. He waits until they are fully exposed, at their nastiest, most vicious, and most deadly, and then he lops their heads off. I beg him to do it, to rid me of it. Often he lets me help swing the sword.

I still have the terminal disease, but He tells me the prognosis is good. He tells me what awaits me is life and not death, and I thank Him in tears. I am not fixed, I am not whole as I should be. Everything I do is tainted with it, but He carries me through. He calls me one of His heirs of life, a gift I have only ill-deserved.

But that man, that carnal man, is being spent to the ground like seed, and the new man planted as Spirit deep within will come forth. I've never fully seen that man, only in glimpses, but I know that he looks so much like my Lord. I can't wait to be him, to be indistinguishable from the one who saved me, to be altogether dead to my sickness, and alive to Christ.