"We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to our own way; and the Lord has laid on Him the iniquity of us all.” (Isaiah 53:6 NIV)
Complete sincerity is an unattainable ideal. But what is attainable is the periodic moment of sincerity, the moment, in fact, when we confess that we are not as we have sought to appear; and it is at those moments that we find contact with God once more. The progress of our spiritual life is made up of these successive discoveries, in which we perceive that we have turned away from God instead of going towards Him. That is what makes a great saint like St. Francis of Assisi declare himself chief among sinners.
We cannot, indeed, be content with the fluctuating condition, any more than we can resign our self to always rediscovering discordances between our personage and our person. We hear Christ’s command: “Be therefore perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect” (Matthew 5:48). We find this intuitive aspiration towards perfection in unbelievers as well as in believers. It implies especially a complete concordance between personage and person.
Now it is precisely because we feel the impossibility of following this call that we recognize our need of God and His grace, of Jesus Christ and His atonement. If we thought we did not need God, should we still have a spiritual life?
-- Paul Tournier in “Reflections”
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