How to be Holy

I think we need to speak boldly about the struggle with sin.
People talk a lot about sin in my circles. I run around with
preachers and assorted other people, mostly males, who are
paid to be Christians. Not only that, they are paid to act like
"godly" Christians. I am often confronted with the saying that
some person is a "godly man" who "loves Jesus with all his heart".

I hate to be a skeptic but I rarely believe either designation. To be perfectly honest, I never believe those appellations, titles or designations. They are too lofty, too high minded and too often said by someone who is trying to convince me of something about this particular person.

It isn't that I know all these people and have secret information about their secret home lives or saw them leave a topless bar with a beer bottle and a dancer. I do not know all about the people from first hand experience but by way of a book that told me all their sins. Peccadilloes and weaknesses. When I am preaching about this topic I sometimes tell the audience that I know all about their covetousness, problems with anger, lusts of the flesh and failures because before I arrived I snuck a look at the book written about them and saw it all in black and white.

We have all sung that Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so but how many times have we sung,

I am a sinner, kept by grace, I don't deserve to see His face.
I sin daily, just like Paul so thank you Lord for covering it all

Romans 7:14 We know that the law is spiritual; but I am unspiritual, sold as a slave to sin. 15 I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. 16 And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good.

17 As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me. 18 I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. 19 For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to doÂ?this I keep on doing. 20 Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it.

21 So I find this law at work: When I want to do good, evil is right there with me. 22 For in my inner being I delight in God's law; 23 but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members.

24 What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? 25 Thanks be to GodÂ?through Jesus Christ our Lord!

You will note that this most famous of all the apostles did not call himself a "godly man" who "loved Jesus with all his heart and soul" but a wretched man without hope in himself. If Paul found it impossible to brag about himself how dare we brag about those godly men and women. Take care lest we put humans above Jesus.