PERFECTLY IMPERFECT

Speak a word for me when you are near him; entreat him to increase my love, faith, humility, zeal, and knowledge, a thousand-fold. Ah! I am poor and foolish; I need a great supply; I cannot dig, and yet am often unwilling to beg.
—John Newton

Alas! my dear friend, you know not what a poor, unprofitable, unfaithful creature I am! If you knew the evils which I feel within, and the snares and difficulties which beset me from without—you would pity me indeed!
—John Newton

I am so weak, inconsistent, and sinful…My strength is perfect weakness–and all I have is sin.
—John Newton

Not a trait worth remembering; and yet these four and twenty hours must be accounted for.
—Robert Murray M’Cheyne

I am daily more and more sensible of the desperate wickedness of my deceitful heart, and my miserable ruined state as a sinner by nature and by practice. I feel utterly unworthy of the name of a Christian, and to be ranked among the followers of the Lamb. And I have no wish to palm myself upon any Church, any minister, or any Christian, as though I were anything special. I am willing to take a low place; and whoever doubts my Christianity, only does what I do myself continually. Now that you are likely to see more of me, you will be sure to find out more infirmities and failings, both as a man and as a minister, than you have as yet, perhaps, discovered. A few weeks is too short a period to know a man. There is in most, and I am sure there is so in myself, much waywardness, selfishness, obstinacy, and evil temper, which is not at first developed. People, from a short and imperfect acquaintance, expect great things, which subsequent communion does not realize. And many are foolishly apt to imagine a minister is more spiritual than anyone else, and in conversation is more profitable. As to myself, I disclaim any such remnant of priestcraft. I am very carnal, very proud, very foolish in imagination, very slothful, very worldly, dark, stupid, blind, unbelieving, and ignorant. I cannot but confess that I have a dreadfully corrupt old man, a strange compound, a sad motley mixture of all the most hateful and abominable vices, that rise up within me, and face me at every turn. So that, instead of expecting a profitable and spiritual companion for your fireside, you must make up your mind for a poor invalid, shrinking from every breeze, and a proud, presumptuous, hardened creature, that can neither be softened by mercies, nor humbled by trials.
—J.C. Philpot

It is perhaps because you have all ceased praying for me that God has turned away from me … I really cannot stand it any longer … Pray for me, I beg you, for in my seclusion here I am submerged in sins.
—Martin Luther

(These Qoutes describe how true believers will often feel the depth of their sins. Every time I read them, I am reminded of words of Paul in Romans 7:24-25.

O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?
I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord. So then with the mind I myself serve the law of God; but with the flesh the law of sin.

Romans 7:24-25

If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. 1 John 1:9 KJV