How Good Can I Be?

The Second Helvetic Confession and the Confession of 1967 agree regarding my capacity to be good.

Wherefore, man not yet regenerate has no free will for good, no strength to perform what is good. The Lord says in the Gospel: “Truly, truly, I say to you, everyone who commits sin is a slave to sin” (John 8:34). And the apostle Paul says: “The mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God; it does not submit to God’s law, indeed it cannot” (Rom. 8:7). Yet in regard to earthly things, fallen man is not entirely lacking in understanding. 2nd Helvetic

The reconciling act of God in Jesus Christ exposes the evil in men as
sin in the sight of God. In sin, men claim mastery of their own lives, turn
against God and their fellow men, and become exploiters and despoilers
of the world. They lose their humanity in futile striving and are left in rebellion,
despair, and isolation. C67

If I commit sin (that is practice sin) I am a slave to the sin I commit. Slavery suggests a loss of freedom. Yet, I am, as a regenerated human being, free to sin or free to not sin. In my unregenerate state I was utterly incapable of not-sinning. But Christ has set me free from the bondage of sin. I am no longer inherently a slave to sin. Yet, I sin. Believe me, its true. I sin.

When considering moral weakness, I have heard it said, (Hell, I've said it) "I'm only human." The more modern confession, cited above, says that while sinning I lose my humanity. I believe that the Second Person of the Trinity did not to teach us how to be Divine but how to be truly human. The First Adam sinned in hopes of being "like God" the Second Adam displayed righteousness by being human. (That thought, like all thoughts, is not original with my expression of it.) The more I am like Jesus, the more human I become. The more sinful I become, more I display the hubris of my first grandparents and, by extension, the Devil himself.

I desire, today, to shake off the false since of divinity and become more and more human. It seems impossible, given what I know about myself, that I could ever be conformed to the very "image and likeness" of Jesus. Maybe in the glory of heaven, I'll be morally and spiritually perfected. "O to grace how great a debtor, daily I'm constrained to be."