If it please the court...

I was just watching "A Few Good Men" on tv, which, by the way, is the best courtroom movie of all time as far as I'm concerned. In the final scene Tom Cruise's character asks the judge to stop the trial so that Jack Nicholsen's character can be arrested. When he makes the request though he begins by saying "If it please the court..." and this phrasing added more proof to Piper's and Edwards' theology (along with many others). When asking whether or not the court would do something the question is put into the context of the court being pleased by the doing. Therefore, the court does what pleases it. The court doesn't decide something that fails to please it. We, likewise, don't do anything that doesn't please us. Our doing and our being pleased are the same. Or, as Edwards would put it, our will is to do that which is our strongest inclination.

This concept always convicts me. If we always do what pleases us, then what does that mean about when we sin? I know that all of you know this, but it always strikes me. When I sin, it is because I loved the sin more than I loved God. I sought the fleeting pleasure of sin rather than the eternal, all-satisfying pleasure of God. And then I think about how often I sin every day. How often I choose the world over God. And then our thoughts should be turned to the awesome promise of God. That we no longer live in the darkness, we no longer live in the slavery to sin. We don't have to keep seeking our pleasure and satisfaction in this world. We can truly have it in God. We no longer live but Christ lives in us. Yes, we need to remember that we are sinners and our flesh is desparately wicked. But we can't stop there. We need to remember that we no longer live in the darkness but we live in the light now and, through the grace of God and the sacrifice of Christ, we now have the ability to not sin. We must humble ourselves before God by the grace of God and live like the redeemed.

I don't know if this is easy for anybody else, but it's something that I struggle with from time to time. It's like I constantly seek forgiveness for the same sin and forget that that sin has been paid for and forgiven and I need to forget what lies behind and press on to what lies ahead. To kind of sum it up by way of an analogy: I'm no longer a caterpillar but a butterfly and I need to stop crawling on the ground eating the dust of fleeting pleasures and start flying with the wind of God's eternal pleasure under my wings. (Yeah, a little corny, but its the best I've got at the moment.)