There's a war going on, and it's a war between the flesh of man and the spirit of God.

Though the power of the flesh is broken, the flesh is not totally annihilated at conversion.

The call speaks of a state of humanity that he calls the flesh.

And we've already noticed that Luther said that the great triad of enemies for the Christian

growth contained the world, the flesh, and the devil.

And when we're talking about the flesh, I want us to understand that when the Bible talks

about the struggle that we go through with the flesh, it is not simply talking about the body.

That the struggle between the flesh and the spirit cannot be equated with a struggle

between the body and the soul or the body and the mind.

But rather, what the New Testament is talking about when it talks about this fear struggle that

goes on in the Christian life between the flesh and the spirit is the struggle between the

power of sin in our natural fallen humanity against the influence of God, the Holy Spirit,

in our lives, so that the whole struggle and process of sanctification involves what Paul calls

warfare. There's a war going on, and it's a war between the flesh of man and the spirit of God.

Now, I get so irritated when I hear preachers stand up and say, you know, come to Jesus,

and all your problems will be over. Because that's just simply a lie. My life didn't get

complicated until I became a Christian. Before I was a Christian, though I was not happy,

I had a relative degree of peace. I knew that I was doing things that I ought not to be doing.

I mean, I had not totally annihilated my conscience, but I was on the way to it by repeating certain

actions. You can so seer the conscience and put callisters upon the soul that where you once

perhaps fought a little twinge of guilt, now you can do these things through repetition that

don't bother you anymore, and you experience what the Bible calls hardheartedness.

...