Risk

God is compassionate and His compassion is based on his understanding of our frailty. He knows we are weak and prone to failure. It doesn't make our failures right; some will never be right but he does understand why we do things. People do things for reasons. C. S. Lewis said, “To a starving soldier, bad love is better than no love at all.”

We can understand why men go to pubs and why young men drink. It’s a religious feeling they get from drinking called transcendence. They feel there isn’t enough of themselves to be worth anything but when they drink, they feel bigger in the universe. We can understand it and so can Jesus. It doesn't make it right but then nothing is right outside of Jesus. Even a tee totalling Pharisee is not right outside of Jesus. Sometimes we beat ourselves because we don’t understand that salvation is not a “cure-all”; it doesn't remove our weakness so there is no longer any risk. There will always be a risk and some temptation; a bias toward sin, the pull will always be there while we live in the flesh. Though the power of sin is broken the penalty of sin is cancelled sin can still launch an attack in our flesh.

God has not taken away the risk of sin from our life. We can minimize the risk but we can’t eliminate it. Recently when two men decided to row from Australia to NZ, they could minimize the risk by preparation but they couldn't eliminate risk entirely.

Friend, there is no “zap” to cure your human weakness. God works through human weakness not through human strength. We can rebuke the devil and we should, but the weakness stays along with His great and free Grace in our time of need!