Live rightly - for the best Reason

1 Peter 1:17, 21: "You call out to God for help and he helps—he’s a good Father that way. But don’t forget, he’s also a responsible Father, and won’t let you get by with sloppy living. Live out your time here as (a) foreigner(s) with reverent fear.

I am a foreigner in my workplace, my community, my 'frontline' as Mark Greene (author of Fruitfulness on the Frontline) would put it.

...Your life is a journey you must travel with a deep consciousness of God."

A deep consciousness of God. As Matthew Henry says, "the Word of God been planted in my heart by the Holy Ghost. is a means of spiritual life, stirring up to our duty, working a total change in the dispositions and affections of the soul, till it brings to eternal life."

I feel this. Not often, but just now, as I struggle with angry thoughts and wishes for revenge. I feel my thoughts in an uncomfortable struggle inside me.

Almost like a feeling of indigestion, where the body struggles to digest unpalatable foods, I feel my ungodly responses trying to rise to the surface and spill out of my mouth. I feel the struggle and live in grateful amazement that my sin is not winning my soul. It is NOT turned into action.

I live with huge tension, constantly trying to turn every thought into obedience to Christ, I am discovering this truth: "Those who think they can do it on their own end up obsessed with measuring their own moral muscle but never get around to exercising it in real life. Those who trust God’s action in them find that God’s Spirit is in them—living and breathing God! Obsession with self in these matters is a dead end; attention to God leads us out into the open, into a spacious, free life. Focusing on the self is the opposite of focusing on God. Anyone completely absorbed in self ignores God, ends up thinking more about self than God. That person ignores who God is and what he is doing. And God isn’t pleased at being ignored." Romans 8:5-6

And so 1 Peter 1:21 says: "It’s because of this sacrificed Messiah, whom God then raised from the dead and glorified, that you trust God, that you know you have a future in God...Through him (Christ) you believe in God, who raised him from the dead and glorified him, and so your faith and hope are in God."

My faith and hope are in God. That 0 and WHO -  is what enables me to get through times of trials.