This article will be studied during the week of March 9th through 15th.

You can successfully fight negative feelings.

Theme text,

Miserable Man That I Am, Romans 724.

Song 45, The Meditation of My Heart.

Focus. How to deal with our negative thoughts and feelings.

Paragraphs 1 and 2 question, how did the Apostle Paul feel at times, and why might we relate to what he wrote about himself?

What comes to your mind when you think of the Apostle Paul?

Do you think of a courageous missionary, a skilled teacher, or a prolific Bible writer?

Those descriptions are certainly accurate.

Yet Paul was also a man of deep emotions.

Like many of us, he at times battled with negative feelings.

Romans 7. 21 through 24 reads,

I find then this law in my case. When I wish to do what is right, what is bad is present with me.

I really delight in the law of God according to the man I am within,

but I see in my body another law warring against the law of my mind and leading me captive to

sin's law that is in my body. Miserable man that I am. Who will rescue me from the body undergoing this death?'

In his letter to the Romans, Paul expressed feelings that many of us can relate to. Even though he

was a faithful Christian, he had an inner struggle, a battle between his earnest desire to do God's

will and his inclination to

act on wrong desires. In addition to this inner conflict, Paul at times struggled with

negative feelings about his past and about a persistent problem he was facing. Paragraph 3

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