How do you do right when part of you wants to do wrong? Pain comes when you deny your flesh. Pain occurs when you’ve hurt someone or someone hurts you.
Please pay close attention to the following story because it will lay the groundwork for dealing with what I call, "the pain
of the moment."
Once upon a time there was a young woman who was talented, pretty, and smart. But she had a terrible temper. When she got angry, she said hurtful things. Not only did she hurt others, she hurt herself.
Her father became concerned about her and wanted to help. He gave his daughter a bag of
nails and a hammer.
“Whenever you lose your temper,” he told his daughter, “Go out back to that old fence. Take one of the nails and hammer it into the fence as hard as you can. Hold nothing back."
Over the next few
weeks, the daughter did exactly as her father said. Eventually, all the nails were gone.
"Now," her father said, "I want you to pull out one of the nails." The daughter did so with great effort. The father said, “Notice that, even though the nail is gone, a hole is still left. This fence will never be the same. Saying or doing hurtful things produces the same kind of result. There will always be a
scar left behind."
While a powerful story about the painful aftermath of wrong actions, that's not the part of the story I wanted you to think about.
I want you to think about what happens next.
The young
woman takes her father's story to heart. She wants to change desperately.
But what does she do the next time she is angry and her flesh demands that she hurt someone or herself out of the pain she is feeling?
While our issue may not be the same as this young woman, we all have moments when our flesh
demands that we do the wrong thing.
I call that moment of deciding between right or wrong, “the pain of the moment.”
How we choose to handle that pain determines our destiny.
You might think that I’m going to say that dealing with the pain of the moment requires more willpower, gritting your teeth, or trying harder to do the right thing.
But you would be wrong.
The Bible talks about this very struggle in Romans, chapter 7. As Believers in Christ, we have supernatural help so that we can choose right in the pain of the moment.
The following article gives you three steps to take in that moment of
decision.