Tell Yourself the Truth

A good practice: wake up each morning and assess in the quiet of your heart and before The Lord how your day before went.  Think through the things you did and said.  Acknowledge in total truth, as much as you can, the motivations for those things.  Ask God to help you to be honest about them.  And find the patterns of sin.  You might start to see how you are totally selfish, self-focused, easily-angered, jealous, bitter, lazy, undisciplined, ungodly, harsh, rude, whatever it may be.  Confess before The Lord that this is the person you are in the flesh, reminding yourself of Romans 7, that you do what you don't want to do, and of Romans 8, that there is victory when we walk according to the Spirit.  Pray preemptively for your day, and plan for the things you know: I will be stuck in traffic and instead of being angry, I will listen to a sermon and sing songs of praise; I am going to be up through the night with my little one, and I will not mutter complaints, fueling that spirit, but I will instead, pray that I would bring grace and discipline (if necessary and appropriate) to him/her in the night; I have an ongoing disagreement with my spouse, but instead of commenting further, I will shut my mouth and pray; I have to deal with the anger of my child, and I will be compassionate rather than angered in return; I have a house in disarray and I need to clean it to be a helper to my husband and an example to my kids- so I won't give in to laziness or making excuses as to why it's not done again.  There is absolutely no shortage of daily challenges.  But adding insult to injury is when we are dishonest about our sinful responses.  And if you absolutely cannot figure out how you tend to go wrong, ask someone!  Your first inclination to their answer might be to defend yourself and give all kinds of reasons for why they see what they see.  Don't do it.  You are the one who benefits from hearing the truth, because it allows you that much more ability to truthfully confess and pray through your weaknesses, giving you a leg up on your sinfulness and allowing you to begin having victories, where formerly, there were just failures.  God gives grace to the humble- and you cannot be humble until you acknowledge your sin.