THE FLESH AND THE SPIRIT

- A Walking Contradiction

Paul sums up this internal spiritual war quite nicely in Galatians 5:17, “For the flesh sets its desire against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh; for these are in opposition to one another, so that you may not do the things that you please.” Paul says that as Christians, we don’t always do what we would really like to do, namely, please God completely with our lives. This is because the desires of the corrupted flesh make war against our spiritual new man and sometimes we give into those fleshly desires. Our inner man loves God and loves His law and so the more we grow in grace, the more sensitive we are to our own sinful tendencies and the more we hate them and desire to stop giving in to them. One great scholar put it this way,

The more seriously a Christian strives to live from grace and submit to the discipline of the gospel, the more sensitive he becomes to the fact that even his very best acts and activities are disfigured by the egotism which is still powerful within him--and no less evil because it is often more subtly disguised than formerly.