It's exhilarating to begin to see what it means to be man—the beloved of God. But to know what God has made man to be, and then to begin to live what that means, is demanding as well. It requires not only understanding the magnificence that is inherent and permanent in one's self as made by God; it requires also a wise recognizing of what is not and never was the truth of man.
The pressures upon the individual to believe a false view of one's self and to act that out, and the spiritual determination to see to it that this does not happen, involve a mighty grappling. The Apostle Paul, in the midst of the battle to be man as man really is, wrote in dismay even as you and I may have at times cried out, "The good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do." Rom. 7:19.
Why is that? How does it happen, especially when we feel so very wonderful when we've done something well—honestly, excellently, unselfishly—even if no one else knows about it? The human spirit always soars whenever one has done something good and done it well.
