The bottom of my weakness (Journey continued)

When an unclean spirit goes out of a man, .... he roams and comes back and finds the house clean and swept and empty .... he returns with seven devils ... and the last state of the man is worse than the first. (Matthew 12:43-45).

They say that nature abhors vacuum. The best way to take the air out of a glass is to fill it with something else.  You can't take the bad out of our souls without putting something else there. Holy Spirit is the one that fills the void best of all, but you have to ask Him in.

I am a living illustration of the verses at the top of the post. After coming to the end of my goodness, my house was clean and swept, but empty.  As part of coming to the end of my goodness, I was learning that many of the good things I had done previously was to gain the approval of others, and many of the bad things I did not do was because I was not willing to suffer the consequences of doing them. It was not because I was inherently good.  In the breakup of my first marriage I had had murder in my heart. Who knows what I was capable of, had I thought I could have gotten away with it.   I was staring to see that the I was capable of rationalizing just about anything.

At one stage I wrote down that I should ask myself would this or that (of what I wanted to do) hurt others. When I read later what I had written, I knew by then that if I wanted to do something badly enough I didn't really care if it hurt others or not. I had returned to my selfishness with a vengeance, the latter state was indeed worse than the first.   

A Scripture that has impacted me greatly is in Jeremiah 17:9. “The heart is deceitful above all and desperately wicked who can know it?” I had had murder in my heart, and intuiting the truth of this verse helped me to realize that each and every one of us is capable of  every heinous sin in the Book.  Well I knew it about you before :).  But now I was learning this truth about me.  My heart is deceitful, and I hadn't even known it. How deceitful is that? But I was beginning to know it,  and it scared me. Just what was I capable of, and if I did not turn what would I finish up doing and being? All pretense of goodness was gone, and the badness within me was like a bottomless pit. I was not liking what I saw, and I was liking even less where I was headed. I had not yet come to the end of my weaknesses, but I did not want to go there. No sir. Thanks very much, but no thanks.