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is someone getting the best of You?

has someone taken your faith,
it's real, the pain you feel,
you trust, you must confess,
Is Someone Getting the Best, the Best, the Best, the Best of You?
Now, I probably will not quote the Foo Fighters all that often (or ever), but I must. Lyrics are everything about a song, but the music can enhance the emotion like it does in this Foo Fighter song. But the fact that lyrics can go by without even comprehending what they are saying happens too often. I tend not to fully grasp the lyrical content of a song right away, perhaps because I am much more a music guy and judge a song by the music purely. Here though are lyrics by Dave Grohl that one cant escape the meaning, the meaning is quite clear and he emphasizes the meaning by repetition, to get it ingrained into one's head. Well, it got into mine!

The difference though between it just getting in my head and actually having meaning has come in part due to my current state of spirituality. See, God has been really grabbing hold of me, communicating to me through the mediums that he does, and so I have been listening a lot more to my surroundings lately. In fact, as C.S. Lewis would state, I have become much more aware and in tune to my world around me and more intellectually inclined then I have ever been. God demands a strong focus on Him, and it takes a strong disciplined concentration to narrow into His presence. I'm not merely describing meditation or anything in that realm, but instead a look past the distractions of life and into the obvious that surrounds us all.

That look allowed me to pick up on the Foo Fighter's new song "Best of You." I could not help but answer Dave's question out loud, "yes, someone is getting the best of me, and I know who he is. It is non other than satan."

I understand now the complexity of the Flesh and the new nature I am dealing with. See, as a believer in Christ, I now have the Holy Spirit. The Spirit helps guide me through this new nature, which I must confess is the hardest thing a man could possibly do. He must re-think every thought before it comes out as something contrary to what God expects of him now. Oh, and also so that eventually every thought is pleasing to God, because he certainly knows what is going on in our craniums. This is so hard, so challenging that the fact of the matter is we, as a believer, will never fully change our ways to perfect heavenly ways, because of that flesh we still live with. The flesh thusly is this earthly body we still have, and this is the vulnerable part of the believer. This is the part that satan can control, if we allow. The thing is though, this struggle goes on and on, day after day, and is not going to let up until we meet God face to face.

So right now, satan is getting the best of me. And I absolutely hate it! I cant emphasize that any more.

Everyone has a different area of sin they struggle with. Paul writes how in Romans 7, the flesh does what his mind does not want him to do. He admits that this struggle shows that the moral law of God is powerful enough to control the mind, but the final outcome may not be what we want it to be. God's law ultimately shows how no one can ever be fully righteous, because we will always struggle with our flesh, or also called the sinful nature. Of course though, that's what Jesus came to do, was to justify us by his sacrifice. Basically it was God saying that we can never live up to His law, so here is a final sacrifice (for the Jews had to have animal sacrifices to atone for their sins). As a believer though, Paul speaks very clearly that we need to stop deliberately sinning (Hebrews 10:26), because of the fact that we know about Him and believe in Him. Satan just seems to get the best of me though, when I am most vulnerable, when my guard is completely down (or just partially), and he seems to be very good at trickery.

I can only keep persevering and changing. That is such a struggle. Let me put it like this. The second greatest commandment is to love your neighbor as yourself. One of the many little but still yet important commands of God is to not be drunk or voluntarily impaired. I am glad that I don't struggle with the latter, but I struggle every single day with the former; I simply fall short more times than not at loving my neighbor. And the majority of the problem is more on the side of inaction that of action. I pass up at saying something nice, or helping someone out of no where much more than demonstrating hate toward my neighbor. I am fairly good with not being envious, or greedy, or even slanderous (though I gossip to much). But in general I could do a lot more at helping others, and that was something that I did not do before COMPLETELY turning my life over to Jesus.

I almost wish that all I had to do was struggle with being a drunk than to have to struggle with being a people person.

Almost.

But in the end I know that satan will try to get the best of me, but I must not let him. Only Jesus can help me, or you, at defeating the temptations and deceptions of this world. Only Jesus is the way to the Father, which is where we wont have to put up with satan and all his crap!

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