drifting toward holiness

I read a sad thought the other day. Someone wrote, "It's nice to know that God didn't choose me to change me. He actually wanted relationship with me, the way I am today." What this person took as a negative, Scripture posits as a positive. God chose us for exactly that. To set us free from slavery to sin and subsequently to glorify Him.

Fortunately we still have godly men willing to speak truthfully in love. Josh Etter writes, "Hard work is not the opposite of grace, it is the result of experiencing grace." I'm glad that God DID choose me to change. Etter then quotes D. A. Carson from For the Love of God:

People do not drift toward Holiness.

Apart from grace-driven effort, people do not gravitate toward godliness, prayer, obedience to Scripture, faith, and delight in the Lord.

We drift toward compromise and call it tolerance; we drift toward disobedience and call it freedom; we drift toward superstition and call it faith. We cherish the indiscipline of lost self-control and call it relaxation; we slouch toward prayerlessness and delude ourselves into thinking we have escaped legalism; we slide toward godlessness and convince ourselves we have been liberated.