We Christians have a remarkable tendency to focus almost exclusively on the fruit of the problem. We do this as parents with our children, pastors with our parishioners, husbands with wives, and wives with husbands. We do this with ourselves.

The Gospel, on the other hand, always addresses the root of the problem. And the root of the problem is not bad behavior. Bad behavior is the fruit of something deeper. Our chief problem, as Jesus made clear, is :not what goes into a man," but the defiled heart - the root.

Christian growth consists not of behavior modification but of the daily realization that in Christ we have died and in Christ we have been raised. Daily reformation, therefore, is the fruit of daily resurrection (Romans 6:1-11). To get it the other way around (which we always do by default) is to miss the power and the point of the Gospel. In his book God in the Dock, C. S. Lewis makes the point that "you can't get second things by putting them first; you can get second things only by putting first things first." Behavior (good or bad) is a second thing.

"Life is a web of trials and temptation," said Robert Capon, Episcopal priest and author, "but only one of them can ever be fatal, and that is the temptation to think it is by further, better, and more aggressive living that we can have life." The truth is, you can't live your way to life - you can only "die your way there, lose you way there... For Jesus came to raise the dead. He did not come to reward the rewardable, improve the improvable, or correct the correctable; he came simply to be the resurrection and the life of those who will take their stand on a death he can use instead of on a life he cannot."

Moral renovation, in other words, is to refocus our eyes away from ourselves to that man's obedience, to that man's cross, to that man's blood, to that man's death and resurrection.

Learning daily to love the glorious exchange (our sin for His righteousness), to lean on its finished-ness, and to live under its banner is what it means to be morally reformed!

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Helping people live life with Jesus everyday,