One of my struggles in my faith has been sin. The perception of sin. It's like this.
I wake up in the morning and go about my day. I have to live hard because I love God.
And as I'm doing that, the hours start to tick by, and then I start to count them in triplicate, like YouTube or Netflix. I then say a prayer of repentance to get myself back on my feet. In terms of spiritual attack, because I'm not awake in the Word, evil spirits, unclean spirits, have filled my mind, and I'm confronting those sinful things with the blood of Jesus. Praying against them. It's okay to use an exorcism as an analogy. It's just that it's "faith," not tools.
So, can we say that my love for God and my failure to love God is the dirt on my outside?
Can my current identity be determined by something external to me?
For example, if I am in poor health, do I have no faith? I know because I've been sick recently, and it's a 'feeling' that when you're sick, you're just lying there and your identity changes.
But when it all came crashing down, I realized that,
We are vulnerable, and that vulnerability is what we are allowed to be, and we fight.
The fact that you fight does not determine your identity, but if you have the identity of a living being, like a worm wriggling, you will fight and resist sin.
But a good fight does not prove my identity. Fighting is in the sense of participation. An omnipotent God does not need our prayers and power. We are literally just a conduit.
What we gain by being required to be holy is that something happens in terms of our participation.
The bottom line is that there will always be temptation to evil and lack. There will be pain in the world and problems to solve. We cannot understand everything. I don't want to define it as knowing everything, or knowing God's intentions. But I would like to think that through the narrow lens of being a writer, we can "categorize" our identity and confession as something we can participate in.
So let's not get hung up on bigger confessions, longer prayers, or more perfect faith because of our weaknesses. Faith and the Bible itself deny such striving and perfection. Believe, then fear not. If you don't believe, you don't know God well enough. If you know the true meaning of omniscience, if you know God as love itself, if you allow the Holy Spirit to place faith in you, you will have faith. In a way, I think faith is not a resolve, it's just the knowledge of a great God.