The War Within

“When I want to do what is good, evil is present with me. For in my inner self I delight in God’s law, but I see a different law in the parts of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and taking me prisoner to the law of sin in the parts of my body. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, with my mind I myself am serving the law of God, but with my flesh, the law of sin.” (Romans 7:21-25 CSB)

Thoughts.

We all have them and ones we don’t want inside our head. That’s because you are in the middle of a war by the enemy of Christ.

The thoughts in our head come from our sinful nature and even after we are saved we still live in a sinful body, and we have sinful thoughts.

It isn’t the thoughts that are the problem – it’s what we do with them.

Do we pick them up and play with them, or do we recognize how unhealthy some of them are, reject them and cast them down?

Will we ever stop having them? Not likely as long as we are living on this planet. But as you exercise and train your spirit to help resist those thoughts you will become stronger and develop the instinct to no longer allow those thoughts access to your internal playground.

They will be as stones thrown against a wall that bounce off and fall harmlessly to the ground.

Don’t let the enemy trick you into thinking you are a failure just because you, along with EVERYONE else, have a spirit that wars against your flesh.

God has not given up on you.

Having bad thoughts is not the same as accepting, believing and acting on them. Consider the words of Paul at the top of this post as he wrote of this human struggle.