Be Determined

“For I delight in the law of God, in my inner being, but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?

Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, I myself serve the law of God with my mind, but with my flesh I serve the law of sin.”

~Romans 7: 22-25

There is a legend attributed to one of the Indian tribes that says every man has two wolves inside him. One is good and the other, evil. A young man asked the wise old man how to know which one was the strongest, and the wise old man answered, “The one you feed the most.” The same is true if we apply the story biblically. We have two natures, one that strives to do good, and the other that wants to slap the skin off someone’s face if they look at us sideways. Our old nature feeds the sin that dwells within us, and even when we are saved by accepting Christ as our Savior, that old nature can haunt us. Like Paul, our minds might determine to serve the Lord, but we still battle our fleshly desires.

“Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, to make you obey its passions. Do not present your members to sin as instruments for unrighteousness but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and your members to God as instruments for righteousness (Romans 6:12-13).”

Just as we are what we eat, we are spiritually what we practice, and if we aren’t practicing righteousness, we are practicing unrighteousness. Practicing righteousness is more than reading a few chapters of the Bible, a devotion, and offering up a quick prayer in the morning. Practicing righteousness is something we do all day long in everything we say and everything we do. Like eating food, what we put into our bodies determines how healthy we are. Eat junk food and sugar all day and your body is going to reflect that. Put junk into your mind and you’re going to reflect that in what you do and say. What you read, the music you listen to, and the TV shows you watch have an impact on your mind. The people you hang with do too. The jokes they tell, the conversations they have, the things they do, also have an effect.

Practicing righteousness does not come naturally, it is something we decide to do. We set our minds on things above (Colossians 3:2-17) and determine to practice those things which bring life—compassion, kindness, humility, and patience.

“For when you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness. But what fruit were you getting at that time from the things of which you are now ashamed? For the end of those things is death. But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the fruit you get leads to sanctification and its end, eternal life. For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord (Romans 6:20-23).”

Read Hebrews 10-13

© 2018 Marie McGaha