Jack Pelham

Sorry, buddy, but there comes a time when—
Even though you’ve been hurt
And you’re not feeling well
And you’ve got your own issues and triggers—
We’ve got to face the fact that your sin life—
Complicated as it may be by these things—
Rests firmly on your own disinterest
In being wholly righteous.

Big boys and girls learn to suck it up
And do what’s right—
Even when it’s hard.

And you, sir, are quite obviously not trying.

There are those who count themselves
Deliberately the nicest sort
And who think it a grave sin
To confront another human about his sins.

Kay and I were watching Suits, where it was said that character Harvey Specter was hated by many of the other attorneys in the law firm because “he’s always right”.

Huh?

What good have we really done
When we rail against the hypocrisy of others
And yet play the hypocrite ourselves?

Man was to be judged
According to how he would behave
Concerning God,
Concerning the angels,
Concerning other men, and
Concerning the animals.

We are planted in this Greenhouse
To grow in righteousness,
Yet from the moment we sprout, the others
Start saying that it’s up to us
To decide what it’s all about.

The moment he figures out that
He has met someone smarter than him,
His heart sinks a bit, in recognition
That he himself should be smarter.

Not every true thing is conveniently obvious. And even so, large numbers of people may well operate on the assumption that all true things are—or should be—obvious. It is a common overestimation of human capability, often based on the assumption that what can be detected should be detectable without effort—and more particularly, detectable by our natural human senses.

Here are a few ways it happens:

In some things,
If getting help
Is beneath you,
Then so is success.

When faced with a reality in which your spirit was created by God and will have to give an account for what you’ve done when your life is over, these are your choices, as it appears to me:

1. Embrace the situation and sincerely do your best to please God, learning as you go.
2. Reject the reality, and live however you want, either:
   1. Forthrightly denouncing the reality in full (as an atheist might),
   2. Being sloppy about some of the details of what God wants, and pretending that sloppiness is OK, or
   3. Deliberately twisting some of the details into something you like better, and pretending you’re devoted to God as you do it. (Think about it: #2 is also an example of this #3.)