Sinful Nature

Really interesting post over at Challies Dot Com talking about Sin. His post is entitled "Sin: What we do, or what we are?" Check it out HERE. If you're familiar with Calvinism, and the acronym TULIP, this is the "T" in TULIP: "Total Depravity."

Challies concludes that

No one has properly apprehended God’s grace until he has understood his own sinfulness and knows that he fully deserves God’s just and holy punishment.

The evangelical church of our day is a wrathless church—a church that speaks often of God’s love and grace, but rarely of the deepest necessity of this love and grace. The church today needs an infusion of the gospel, the whole gospel, which speaks not only of God’s love, but first of our desperate need of reconciliation. The gospel portrays us as we really are—as sinners who sin because of our fundamental guilt, our fundamental hatred of God.

Only when we see ourselves as sinners can we truly see Christ as Savior. Only when we have identified ourselves as fallen in Adam can we truly and properly identify ourselves as raised up and set apart in Christ.

Have we fully come to grips with our sinful nature? II Corinthians tells us that God's power is made perfect in our weakness, and so the power and glory of the cross is most powerful and glorious when we realize the scope of what it accomplished.

Thoughts?