Bible Gateway Blog

This is the one-hundred-twenty-ninth lesson in author and pastor Mel Lawrenz’ How to Live the Bible series. If you know someone or a group who would like to follow along on this journey through Scripture, they can get more info and sign up to receive these essays via email here.

An older man walks haltingly through the cemetery at Normandy on the north coast of France. He passes through the sea of clean white crosses and stars of David marking the resting places of hundreds of young men whose lives were cut off on D-Day; they died decades earlier so that multitudes could go on living in peaceable societies as parents and teachers and engineers and neighbors. He drops to his knees in front of the marker of someone who saved his life, is thrust into a moment of self-examination, and struggles to get out a plea to his wife who is standing at his side:

“Tell me I’ve lived a good life…. Tell me I’m a good man.”

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This is the one-hundred-twenty-eighth lesson in author and pastor Mel Lawrenz’ How to Live the Bible series. If you know someone or a group who would like to follow along on this journey through Scripture, they can get more info and sign up to receive these essays via email here.

The idea that we need someone else’s help to do what seems to be our responsibility is hard for many people to accept. Living a “clean” life is our responsibility, and we can’t pull it off on our own. Have you ever made a resolution to improve your life in some significant way, and been disappointed to find that your resolve lasted about 30 days (or 30 minutes), and then you were back to your old ways? I’m not talking about something as simple as changing your eating habits or exercise. I’m talking about change of the heart. “I’m going to start being a patient person—right now!” “I’m going to decide not to have this hot anger inside that keeps burning other people.” “I’m going to stop obsessing about the things I want and stop being jealous of others who have more than I do.” I, I, I. It’s like asking a man standing in a barrel how far off the ground he thinks he can lift himself.

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