Gravity and the Half-Moon

I myself serve the law of God with my mind, but with my flesh I serve the law of sin. Romans 7:25

At the gym the other day, we did a warmup called the half-moon. I found it to be an amusing name and so, I made some semi-crass joke about it. One of my buddies who knows me and my blog well, told me, Put that in your blog. The implication, meant humorously, was that as an author of a daily blog about faith, perhaps, I was being a little two-faced by making such a crude joke.

The comment about my blog was meant to be funny – and it was – but it got me thinking about my own nature. Those things that I think are amusing, and those things I joke about, naturally drift towards the uncouth or ill-mannered. I don’t naturally find a lot of humor in the pious, but rather, in the vulgar. I’m not saying my half-moon joke was evil or sinful. I’m just saying that there is – and always will be – a part of me that naturally bends towards the dark instead of the light.

This is, I think, what Paul was saying in today’s passage. He insisted that when we come to faith in Christ, we receive a new spiritual life. Now, we serve God. The problem is that we still live in these flawed bodies which have a natural and persistent bent, not towards good, but evil.

I want to do right, but my nature has this gravity that exerts a continual and opposite influence on me. In my addiction, I wanted sobriety, but the attraction of my self-destructive appetite won me over, again and again. Even in sobriety now, I theoretically want to live one way, but the gravity of my toxic flesh nature constantly pulls me in a completely different direction.

Daily, as Christians, we’re exposed to and affected by both influences. As new creatures in Christ, we desire the life for which we were made. Our flesh nature though, continually opposes this life as it desperately desires to retain control. So, which way to we go? If we spend our time and effort feeding our own will, then we will likely live enslaved to it. We don’t have to live enslaved though. If we will daily do whatever it takes to abandon our way and follow God’s, then it becomes easier and easier to escape the gravity of our own self-destructive path to walk the path of life.