Today, reflecting on our summer reading selection, “The Practice of the Presence of God,” I am reminded of the devotional scripture from Romans 5:20: “Now the law came in to increase the trespass, but where sin increased, grace abounded all the more.” I wish to share an excerpt from the extraordinary life of Brother Lawrence, a seventeenth-century Christian who experienced a dramatic spiritual awakening at eighteen.

All kinds of spiritual discipline, if they are void of the love of God, cannot remove a single sin from live. We should without anxiety, accept that all our sins have been forgiven by the blood of Jesus Christ. From this perspective we are free to seek only to love Him with all our hearts. We can comfort in the fact that God seems to grant the greatest grace to the greatest sinners as signs of His great mercy.
He said that the greatest pain or pleasure of this world are not to be compared with what he had experienced of both kinds in the spiritual life. He worried about nothing and feared nothing. His only desire is not to offend God.
He did not beat himself up when he sinned. He said, “When I fail in my duty to God, I immediately acknowledge it, saying, ‘All I do is sin, and I shall never do otherwise if Iam left to myself. If I do something well, I give God thanks and acknowledge that everything good that I do comes from Him.”

The Practice of the Presence of God in Modern English
The Second Conversation pgs18-19