The Mirror

You were never the one who loved holiness.

Read the twelve sentences you just answered. If you were honest, you saw yourself in every one of them — or in ten of the twelve, or in eight. You already knew. You have known your whole life. You have known every time you chose sleep over prayer, every time you scrolled past the sermon, every time a more holy person made you quietly uncomfortable without knowing why.

The Bible has a word for what you just saw in the mirror. It does not say weak. It does not say struggling. It does not say a sinner who tries hard.

It says dead.

"As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins, in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world…"
— EPHESIANS 2:1-2

Dead does not mean unconscious. You are obviously awake. Dead means oriented away. Your nature has spent your whole life bending toward the self and away from God. Not occasionally. Constantly. You did not notice because you had no other nature to compare it to — the way a fish does not notice the water.

And here is the devastating thing the mirror was always going to show you: this is the self that you thought chose God. This hater of holiness, this avoider of prayer, this self-protector in every disguised form. This is the self Arminianism says reached out and took the gift. But a self oriented away from God does not reach toward Him. That is not how orientations work. A compass does not suddenly point south. An iron filing does not turn away from a magnet.

So if you did come to God — and you did — something else must have happened.
Something else pulled the needle.