The christian life; a life of opposing extremes.

The paradox of extremes must be tasted for it to sink into our understanding and our hearts.

We MUST burn ourselves up in our sheer efforts to fight to please God; we MUST also admit, daily, our complete powerlessness and inability to please Him except for the grace and power God makes flow into our lives.

Work out our salvations with fear and trembling, for it is God that works in us. What is this? This is a paradox! We live a paradox, and that is the way it is meant to be.

Every account by a saint, strong and enduring in his pursuit of seeking and pleasing God, speaks of this. This is the basic principle: that we live out lives of paradox. Some churches only teach one extreme; total grace without painful effort, or painful effort without grace to make it have more than a mundane effect. As a result, so many people lose their way; trying to walk the road of a follower of Christ with only one leg.

A strong Christian must live out both extremes, remembering that His understanding is beyond our understanding; His ways are beyond our ways.

Simply because it is difficult to understand does not make it false. If so, then faith has no meaning and only what we understand is real; and that is obviously not true - at the end of the day, we understand so little about the world.

We must trust in what the Word says, and do both. We need to sacrifice our whole lives to Him day by day. At the same time, we need to daily cry out to Him for his mercy and grace, because we are in essence powerless and weak.

The weak are strong; the poor are rich; we are both wonderfully created and recipients of the birthright, and the most horrible and unworthy of creatures, sinners to the core.

Live out the paradox. Take joy in being created wonderfully, and, at the same time, day by day, accept having contrition and brokenness and humility, because we are such terrible creatures - from which we have the wonderful gratitude of knowing the grace of the Son of God dying on the cross for our sakes.