THE TWO NATURES

By Graham Bauer

SCRIPTURE

Romans 7:14 - 25
This scripture tells us that we have two natures warring away in us.
The first is spiritual and the second carnal.
We are born again unto God and our spirit wants to serve him but the sin in our flesh (our bodies have not been redeemed yet) wants to rule us. So we find as Paul says a war going on.
We teeter one way and then the next.
This is where we imagine our faith wavers but it does not.
The fleshly man must be trained and disciplined to behave and be subject to our spirit man.
When Jesus comes back He will redeem our soul and body just as our spirit is redeemed.
The proper order of authority is spirit, soul and flesh.
The soul(mind will and emotions) will rise up every so often to take control.
The flesh gets in there as well. Galatians 5 tells us the works of the flesh.
This warring will continue until through habit,discipline and exercising your spiritual senses a truce will be reached within you. There will be skirmishes every so often, sometimes too often. But be assured that what we are experiencing is normal.
We do have to "work out our own salvation" Philippians 2:12 and be diligent least we do fall Mark 14:38 (another reference to this conflict)
Romans 13:14 says to put on Jesus which is exactly what we have been doing.
1 Corinthians 9:20 - 27 Paul talks of keeping ourselves particularly our flesh in subjection. His analogy would indicate that it is a training exercise.
We have to train our faith (by believing the Word) and have to train (by habit) ourselves to pray, read the Word, fellowship with other Christians etc. I too, like every other Christian suffer from doubt and warring of my flesh (and soul).
The temptation of Jesus shows us that satan can only tempt us (see Luke 4) with
(1) Lust of the eyes
(2) Lust of the flesh and
(3) Lust of the Pride of Life
He will search us out for a weakness and persue it. He will wisper doubts and lies to us because he knows of this internal conflict we have going on.
What we are experiencing is normal and the way to overcome is to discipline and train ourselve with faith confession statements.
After time a strength will develop and you will see that satan stirs the conflict without.
Ephesians 6 tells us that God gives us armour to protect us because we fight principalities and powers who are out to destroy us.
Apply the armour daily with a liberal washing and protection of the Blood of Jesus. It sure works!
We are all in the same boat.
Our Lord Jesus paid the price of ALL our sin and has made us righteous in Him.
There is nothing that can separate us from His love and nothing that can take us out of His hand.
Romans 8:35 and 39 says it all.
"Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?"
"Nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord."

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