God is faithful even when we are not

I have been discovering quite a bit about myself lately.  I've found :  I'm selfish.  I have little patience.  I am not as grounded in my faith as I thought I was.  I am reliant on other people.  I complain too much.  I ask for God's help too little.  I am inconsistent in many areas of my life.  I am nit picky.  I judge others.  And of course, I am too hard on myself from time to time.  I hate to be wrong.  And the list is still growing.  My faults.  They are many.  And quite a few of them I thought I had conquered or overcome.  Or maybe I had through His great mercy and grace but then decided to take back the wheel and crashed and burned again, and am now back to my starting point.  God is good.  He's teaching me again.  He's showing the way.  So many times we hear the words and the sermons and believe we are living them out but in all actuality we are just going through the motions and "doing" the right things but not asking Him to do them through us.  If it is just an act of obeying the law and not surrendering to Him, the One who makes all things possible we will just strive to do our best and fail eventually.  I believe that is why Christians get so frustrated.  We want so desperately to do what God has laid on our heart to do but rely on our own strength and ability to do it.  It's as if we pray for God's help in our lives and then forget we even prayed for it when the test is at hand.  It comes back to the joy of the Lord.  Joy to renew our strength.  We will not forget that the Lord is our only source of true strength if we do not forget the price that He paid for our victory.  And we can rejoice in Him daily for what He has done and is doing in us!