The love of God demands a response, so we attempt to reform ourselves. But it is hard to change habits, of our natural inclination to be selfish, our pride, and our lusts, Paul writes;
"I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my flesh; for I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For I do not do the good I want to do. Instead, I keep on doing the evil I do not want to do. And if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it (Romans 7:18-20)
When we are working on ourselves, trying by our own efforts to remove from our lives the defects and sin, we fail and fail and fail. It can be soul-crushing.. We can doubt our salvation when certain sins cannot be overcome, but the truth is that we were saved by the Finished Work of Jesus. There is nothing we can do to add to or take away from the work Jesus did on the cross. Yet it is hard to wrap our earthy minds around the extravagant love of God and the unwarranted mercy of grace, grace, grace. The truth is we were never going to be saved by anything we could do. God knew this, it was not a surprise. Only our pride and our small earthly minds ever considered it to be anything different. We would not have imagined such love, and certainly not grace if we were God. To us it is an alien idea, that salvation from sin could have been so recklessly distributed and at such little cost to humanity.
So in our response to God we attempt to become holy because God is holy. We have no idea how to do so. We are like a milk jug that has a half inch of sour fetid residue in the bottom that we cannot get out. No matter how much we bang, shake and overturn the container, we cannot empty this wretched, stinky remaining foulness. It pollutes and makes the vessel useless in our mind. God's way is not to empty, but to fill. He says, let me fill you with more of me and like placing the milk jug under hot running water we are filled with God's thoughts, God's Word, God's feelings, even the Holy Spirit until the vessel overflows and carries away the murk and mess.
In the end, whatever has your attention has got you. Therefore focus on more of God and not less of sin.
