I yearn to be better. I cry out with the apostle Paul

Your comments sometimes reach into three figures.

This week was in the modest forties and the week before celebrated seventy of your mini ‘sermons’.

The response to Raoul Moat last week eventually brought us round to our own imperfections, or, to put it in biblical terms, we’ve all gone astray, each of us to our own way (Isaiah 56 and Romans 3).

Personally, I know what I should be.

I yearn to be better.

I cry out with the apostle Paul, “I do not understand what I do.

For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do” (Romans 7:15).

Nero's tutor Seneca said, “All of my life I have been seeking to climb out of the pit of my besetting sins, and I cannot do it; and I never will unless a hand is let down to draw me up.”

Mark Twain wrote, “Man is the only animal that blushes, or needs to!”

Tennyson yearned for a better Tennyson in his poetry, Ah for a man to arise in me That the man I am may cease to be.

Each of us admits in honest moments that will power is the ‘matchstick under the uneven table-leg of life’.

We wobble, and even when we seem steady, it takes only a nudge to set us off again.

That’s why God sent a Saviour in Jesus, then promised his Spirit within to power us to greater things than we ever dared dreamed possible.