Most of us want to be better people tomorrow than we are today; most of us would like to improve morally, to be more “moral” a week from now than we are at the moment.  To this end, most of us spend at least a little time during the course of our day thinking about what we have done wrong (less time, in fact, I would wager, than we spend thinking about what we have done right) and how we could do better the next time around.  We may wake up in the morning feeling good and determined to do well, only to find that, in a way that we did not expect, we do bad, that we have done the very thing we did not want to do.
     It’s a frustrating lot, really, being a finite yet thoroughly moral human being.  But maybe we are missing the point.  If we are broken morally (which, if we are honest with ourselves, we will admit), how can we fix ourselves?
     Not that he set out to do this, but in his The Year of Living Biblically, author A. J. Jacobs undertakes an intriguing task.  He resolves, for one year, to adhere as literally as possible to the dictums—the rules and regulations—of the Bible.  His task becomes rather amusing as he confronts and deals with various and diverse laws about diet, travel, clothing, even women in menstruation.  He quickly finds that conforming to every rule and precept is decidedly difficult in a modern western society.
     Toward the close of the book, however, he admits that despite spending a year doing this, he is not sure whether he is now a better person than he was before he began.  All of us can relate:  though we may follow moral laws, inevitably we break them, over and over again.  We do better, but are we better?
     Our hearts will only change in the hands of someone other than their owners (us).  Yes, we can do better, and yes, we can be better people, but ultimately the only thing that will make us genuinely and permanently “better” (that is, morally whole and justified before our creator) is God himself.
     Only God can really change a human heart.