Christ Life In Us Romans 8:7-8 The Enemy Within

It is good to be here this morning. Glad for the opportunity to share with you. Obviously circumstances are what they are, but praying for Mike's recovery and he'll be back with us soon. We are in Romans 8 this morning, as Jim read for us. I've titled this message, The Enemy Within. And when I asked Jim to read for us verses one through eight, he said, but can't we read verse nine too? That's got the positive message. I said, okay, read verse nine as well, which we won't be teaching on today, but we're focused on verses seven and eight this morning. I could blame it on two things, I guess. One, I didn't find out I was preaching until Friday, but also just the content of this passage makes it challenging because we're dealing with an invisible enemy. That's a challenge.

When we talk about things that are unseen, unseen realities, it can be difficult for us. And interpreting, what does this mean? How do we get our hands around this concept? It's true, this is reality, but something that we can't see, taste, touch with our senses. We're trying to understand this reality out of the word. And so, in a way, it's been a challenging, but I think rewarding study.

But let's pray as we begin that the Lord would make these things clear to us. Heavenly Father, we thank you for the opportunity to be gathered together this morning to spend time in your word. We thank you for your precious word. We pray that you would write these truths on our hearts so that we can more clearly behold our dear Savior, Lord Jesus. Lord, we pray that as we study the reality of the flesh, that you would make these things clear to us. Areas that are sometimes hard to understand and comprehend, I pray that you would teach us this morning. I pray in Jesus' name, amen.

So why does Paul have to tell us what the flesh is like? Why does he need to do that here? We just want to look at verses 3 through 8 kind of as a chunk. As I was studying this out and wondering why is Paul going through all this here in verses 5, 6, 7, and 8 about the flesh, I kind of came to the realization that what Paul is doing here is he's explaining or defending the statement that he made back in verses 3 and 4.

Okay, so if you read 3 and 4, Paul's saying, for what the law could not do, weak as it was through the flesh, God did, sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh. And here's the reason why, so that the requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us who do not walk according to the flesh but according to the Spirit. Okay, and really what Paul is doing here is that he's recapping for us the things that he explained back in chapter six, which is where he detailed God's work, God's work to free us from the power of sin, which was through the cross and the resurrection. So our death and resurrection with Christ, we were freed from the power of sin and freed to live in the new life that's in Christ Jesus.

And Paul is kind of putting that into this statement. And then, sorry, verse four, where we have that, so that, right here in verse four, so we have so that, that's the Greek word hina, it's a purpose clause, right? So verse four tells us the purpose behind that work. Okay, his objective or his goal. What is God's purpose in our identification with Christ in his death and resurrection?

Well, the purpose is that the requirement, we'll talk about that word in a moment, that the requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us. Well, that word there, requirement, as the NASB has it, okay, that's actually the word dikaioma. And you might recognize in that the root word, which is our word for righteousness, right? The word justified is related to this word as well, or justification. And so this requirement, or we could say righteous requirement, is the, is the objective or the goal, that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us. But notice that it's not the commands plural. It's not the righteous requirements of the law, but the righteous requirement singular. And that's important.

Because where do we see the kind of righteousness that the law was aiming at? who portrayed or demonstrated that? That's Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ in his life is by nature the perfect righteousness of God, right? That's who Jesus Christ is. That's what his life is. It's a perfectly righteous life, a life perfectly pleasing to God. And that is the righteousness that the law is aiming at, so to speak. So the purpose of God's work on our behalf, which is kind of summarized in verse 3, is that we would have the same kind of righteous life that Jesus himself has. That's the whole goal. So verses three and four really kind of summarize a lot of what was said in chapter six previously. But we want to notice the condition in verse four, at the end of verse four.

The requirement of the law is not fulfilled in every person, okay? Notice that the us, okay, so the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, which is who? That's Paul's including himself. He's referring to believers, all those who are in Christ Jesus, but then he qualifies that, right? He says, us, who do not walk according to the flesh, but according to the spirit. Okay, so there's a condition in place there for believers, for those who are in Christ Jesus, to have this righteous requirement of the law fulfilled in us. As believers, we can either be walking according to the flesh or according to the spirit at any given moment.

And the result is that the righteous requirement of the law or the righteousness of Christ really would be fulfilled or lived out in us. But a really important question is why not? Why can't the requirement of the law be fulfilled when I'm walking according to the flesh?

And that really is the question that Paul is dealing with in verses five through eight. Okay, just looking at those verses again. Notice the words for and because. I'm going to use this laser pointer a lot this morning. So we've got verse four, and then in verse five, four. Verse six, four. Verse seven, because. Different words, similar meaning. And then we've got four again. So Paul's for, for, because, for. I think there's one other for somewhere.

Those are explanatory, okay, the word for or gar, and Paul is explaining why the flesh isn't able to fulfill the righteousness of the law. That's the point in what he's trying to explain here. And in order to know that, in order to know why the flesh is unable to do this or crank this out, Paul has to explain to us just what the flesh is. just what the flesh is like, what its nature, what its character is. Okay, so that's what Paul is doing.

And verses seven and eight are really expanding on something that Paul has already told us in chapter seven, verse 18, where Paul says, for I know that nothing good dwells in me that is in my flesh, for the willing is present in me, but the doing of the good is not. And if we look at verses 1 through 11, chapter 8, verses 1 through 11, okay, what Paul is really doing here, I think, is he's recapping what he's been through from back in chapter 5.

Chapter 5, 12, down through chapter 7. Chapter 6 is all about what God has done to deliver us from the power of sin and to free us to have this new life in the Lord Jesus. And we see that, let's just look at chapter six quick. I'm just gonna read through these verses. Okay, because this is Paul's explanation of what God has done to free us, to deliver us from the power of sin.

It says, what shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin so that grace may increase? May it never be. How shall we who died to sin still live in it? There's deliverance, we died to sin. Or do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus have been baptized into his death? Therefore we have been buried with him through baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life, dead to sin, free to walk in newness of life. For if we have become united with him in the likeness of his death, certainly we shall also be in the likeness of his resurrection, knowing this, that our old self was crucified with him, in order that our body of sin might be done away as the NASB, but we can say made of none effect, put offline, rendered impotent even, so that we would no longer be slaves to sin. For he who has died is freed from sin. That's the Roman six message. You died with Christ, therefore you are free from sin.

That's a fact, right? And we can jump down to verse 11 where he says, even so, consider yourselves, count yourselves to be dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus. So that's really the core message of chapter 6. And Paul kind of gives us that in 8.3, right? And then verse 4 as well, that the righteous requirement of the law would be fulfilled. But coming out of chapter 6 and into chapter 7, Paul turns down a dark alley.

He goes from describing this wonderful freedom and the liberty that he has in Christ Jesus to describing the terrible defeat in his Christian life, his experience of this defeat. Paul went from understanding, from seeing that he was dead to the power of the sin nature to discovering that the sin nature was still very much active in him. He found out that he was still being controlled by the sin nature quite a bit. And I've always kind of thought of Romans 7 as a kind of a dark experience, right? If you just read chapter 7 kind of as a theologian just trying to, you know, define the words and the grammar and stuff, it can be kind of dry.

But if you understand that this is a brother pouring out his heart, he's really quite broken here, right? He says, wretched man that I am. Who will set me free from the body of this death? Paul felt trapped. He felt trapped by his own wretchedness. And I don't think Paul's alone in this. Haven't you had the same experience in your life? We see similar cries throughout scripture. I was reminded of a couple. One is Isaiah. He's taken in this vision to the very throne room of God. And what does he say? He says, woe is me for I am ruined because I'm a man of unclean lips and I live among a people of unclean lips for my eyes have seen the king, the Lord of hosts.

And there's another statement from Simon Peter. When Jesus tells them to cast down their nets, and he's like, we've been fishing all night. Now it's day, it's not even time to fish. But they cast down their nets, and they bring in this great catch of fish. And what is Peter's response? But when Simon Peter saw that, he fell down at Jesus' feet, saying, go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man.

And this is actually a relatively common experience, right? We get to this point with the Lord where we just realize our utter sinfulness. And let's be really clear on this. This doesn't mean that we're necessarily living in some kind of gross immorality. Peter wasn't, neither was Isaiah, right? And neither, I don't believe, was the Apostle Paul, okay?

But what was happening in Paul's life, and what happens to us is that we begin to see our sin nature for what it is. Really, we begin to see the true nature of the flesh, and really what's happening is we're beginning to see our sin nature from God's perspective, and that's really important. Because it's really easy to be blind to it.

And I was reminded of something that we read in the little booklet by Reginald Wallace called The New Life, which is also the name of the conference next Saturday. If you haven't read it, I highly recommend it. And I remember the first time I read this, the way that he describes the flesh, because we hear the term the flesh and we, what is that? What does that mean? And it really, his description here really helped me kind of understand. what the flesh is and what it is to walk by the flesh. So let me read from his booklet. He says, again, can it be the will of God that having been lifted into the realm of spiritual life and justified from sin before him forever, that the people of God should continue to be victims of such ugly things as this.

Now I know we don't, Bob and I talked about this after, we don't like to focus in on the things of the flesh, the nature of it, but just listen to this list, okay? These are the ugly things of the flesh. He says temper, irritability, this one moodiness, and by the way, he gives some really great descriptions to these as well.

How about this one, jealousy? Pride. Selfishness. He calls that the me first spirit. Unforgiveness. How about this one? Anxiety and fret. He defines that as the tendency to worry when difficulties and dangers threaten. Well, don't we have the right to worry a little bit when dangers? No. Harshness. An ungracious and ungentle spirit. Or this one, complaining. A grumbling, unsatisfied spirit. We fall into that all the time. Or criticism, you know, the inclination to backbite gossip and feast on the weaknesses of others. And then he concludes this by saying, need we enlarge on such a repulsive catalog. These are not regarded as gross sins, but they are nevertheless outworkings of the carnal nature or the flesh. Right? Doesn't that shed some light on our own sin?

You know, through the experiences that Paul described in Romans 7, he was coming to know the true character of the flesh and to understand just how the flesh operated in him. And that's actually an important and even a valuable thing to learn. Okay, so Paul, was coming to know the enemy.

And maybe you've heard the phrase, know thy enemy, anyone? There's a longer version of that, but it's sort of a principle, a military principle. I know we have some military folks in this room or military background. And it's sort of this principle that you need to know your enemy in order to have any hope of victory over the enemy.

And when it comes to our Christian walk, we have to know the enemy that we're dealing with or we'll never have victory. We don't even know who we're dealing with. And I've been thinking about you know, how to illustrate this, and I couldn't think of maybe a specific illustration, but the idea of the invisible enemy.

The closest thing that came to mind was actually something I'd heard about the Vietnam War. And I know some of you have ‐‐ were involved in that conflict. Maybe not ‐‐ I don't know if anyone was on the, you know, face‐to‐face with the enemy. But from the stories that I've heard, one of the incredible difficulties with the Vietnam War is that it was jungle warfare. And they could not see the enemy until they were on top of them. And so that was kind of the invisible enemy difficulty. You can't defend against or attack an enemy that you can't even see, that you don't even know is there.

And when I was thinking about that in terms of the sin nature, would we really know the sin nature apart from the Word of God? I don't think we would. I don't think we would have a clue, quite frankly. So Paul came to know, I'm going to point out two fundamental truths that Paul came to know about this invisible enemy. And I think a lot of it happened through this Romans 7 experience.

The Lord taught Paul some critical things about his greatest enemy. And I use that term greatest enemy intentionally because sometimes we tend to think that, well, our greatest enemy is the devil, or our greatest enemy is this evil world in which we live. But no, I believe, though those are our enemies as well, enemies to the Christian life, our greatest enemy is the enemy within. And that's the first thing that Paul learned. He learned that the greatest threat to his Christian life was dwelling in him.

And the sin nature, he learned, is attached to us. It indwells our physical bodies, as he said back in chapter 7, verse 17. He said, it dwells in me. And so even though we have been delivered from the sin nature's right to dominate us, the sin nature has no more authority to exercise its will over us, the sin nature is still most definitely present in us. and it will use any opportunity that we give it to control us. So that's the first thing. The second thing I believe is that Paul learned just how evil the sin nature is.

He stated it in 7 verse 18 where he said, for I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh. Okay, for the willing is present in me, but the doing of the good is not. And that's really exactly what Paul is reiterating in chapter eight, verse seven, where we are this morning.

He says there, because the mind set on the flesh, or the mind of the flesh, the inclination or the bent of the flesh, is hostile toward God. For it does not subject itself to the law of God, for it is not even able to do so. Okay, so the flesh, which is dominated by the sin nature and dwelt by the sin nature, is not even able to subject itself to God's law. And by law here, I think that Paul is simply referring to God's authority. The flesh will not submit to God. In fact, it can't. It's not just that it won't, but it can't. That's what it actually says here. The flesh is totally hostile to God.

And when Paul says that the sin nature is not capable of good, we have to be clear what that means. We talked about the Reginald Wallace list, right? The kind of the, you know, irritability and moodiness and all of these things that we don't generally think of as sins so much, or at least not very bad ones. But it actually goes beyond that, way beyond that, okay? Because when we hear Paul say that, you know, the flesh is not capable of good, we might wanna challenge that, saying, well, surely, Even the unbeliever is able to do at least some good, some of the time, is he not? Because we all have this idea that people can do some good and some evil.

I don't know, how many of you are familiar with the story of Jekyll and Hyde, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde? Yeah? Okay, I've only actually seen it as a stage production. I haven't read the book. So I can't comment too extensively on it, but essentially you have this man who discovers some way to separate out, you know, his good side and his bad side, right? Kind of like Star Wars. They got the light side and the dark side, right? But the underlying premise in that story is that we have a good side and we have a bad side.

And that's true in a sense, but that's how people think about themselves. That's a very basic conception. Interesting thing is that most people, they'll admit that they're not as good as they could be, But most of them think of themselves as more good than they are bad, right? Well, I'm a pretty good person, I'm a good person. But they'll admit that there's some things I could work on, right? There's always this idea that, well, I can improve, I can get better, this self-improvement mentality.

In fact, I was remembering a high school English teacher that I had, and I don't remember why this came up. Strange things come up in English class, don't they? And he asked the class if we thought we were good people. And every hand in the class shot up except mine. I was the only Christian in the class. So he zeroes in on me and says, well, why don't you agree with that? Why don't you think you're a good person? And I don't remember exactly what I said, but I know I'd had enough of the Roman VII experience to know, no, no, I'm not a good guy.

But the teacher found this really intriguing, and I could tell he was kind of trying to process what I was talking about. And he said, he was a Canadian English teacher, so. And he said, ah, you must see yourself as a diamond in the rough. And that's the way people think about us. They think about themselves. We're mostly good, or at least we're partly good, and we're working on getting better. We're working at improving. But is that what we are? Are we diamonds in the rough?

That's not the way the Bible talks about man at all. When God sees man, he doesn't see material that he can polish up and improve. We see this mixture of good and bad because we see, well, we got some good deeds over here and we got some bad behaviors over here. What God sees is pure evil. Pure evil.

Proverbs 21.2 says, every man's way is right in his own eyes, but the Lord weighs the hearts. He sees what we don't see.

And have you ever thought about God's judgment through the flood and God's words before the flood? It says, then the Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great on the earth and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. I thought, oh, those terrible people before the flood. Thank goodness he got rid of those, right, and started fresh with people that weren't like that, right?

But what we miss is after the flood. Okay, when Noah offers his sacrifice, it says, the Lord smelled the soothing aroma, and the Lord said to himself, I will never again curse the ground on account of man, for the intent of man's heart is evil from his youth, and I will never again destroy every living thing. Man was still the same. Man hadn't changed.

Every intent of his heart is evil. And so when Paul says that the flesh is incapable of doing any good thing, that's totally consistent with all of scripture. All of our human good is what? Filthy rags. Right? So it's not just the bad things that we do that are sinful out of the flesh, it's the human good. Our own goodness is sourced in our sin nature.

And so we have to stop thinking that our own goodness is what God's after. Our human good is just as repulsive to God as our bad. And the things that we think are so wonderful and praiseworthy are all sourced in a nature that is actually hostile against God.

So let's review the two things that Paul learned, two critical things about Paul's enemy and, of course, our enemy as well. One, the sin nature is still present in the Christian even though we've been judicially freed from its power. And we can walk according to it, and we often do, right, even though we are dead to it. And point two, the sin nature is not capable of any goodness from God's perspective. The good that I would, I do not. It's really important that we come to understand those two facts about our sin nature.

Otherwise, we'll be like the man who had this burning desire to be free from his sin. And he thought, if only I could be alone with the Lord and leave the world's cares and concerns and temptations behind, I'd be free from the bondage to my sinful tendencies.

And so the man went out far away from town. He built himself a cabin in the woods. And after much preparation, finally the day came for him to leave the world behind. And he brought only his Bible, some very basic essentials, some bread and a jug of water.

And as he went out to his cabin, he entered, he closed the door behind him, and overjoyed to have found victory over sin, he fell to his knees in praise and thanksgiving. However, in the process of kneeling, he knocked over his jug of water, and needless to say, the words that came out of his mouth were neither praise nor thanksgiving.

So if we don't understand the nature of the flesh, we'll be just as foolish as that man. And the church is full, in our own lives often, are full of ideas about how to have victory over sin. The problem is that we fail to recognize the nature of the problem that we're dealing with. And because of that, we don't see God's solution. We don't see it as necessary. If we don't understand the problem of the sin nature, we don't see God's provision, his solution as really necessary.

And so let's look at verse 8, where Paul says, those who are in the flesh cannot please God. Now, we explained earlier that verses 5 through 8 are the explanation or the defense of Paul's claim in verses 3 and 4. And Paul's defending the fact that those who walk according to the flesh cannot fulfill the righteousness or the requirement of the law. And to prove that, Paul goes through all of this telling us about the flesh, telling us what the flesh is like, its true nature.

And then in verse 8, he's bringing that to a conclusion, to a point. And in verse 9, he changes. And what you'll see is that, beginning in verse 9, he starts with, however, And so he's explained all this about the flesh, and then he changes and he says, however, right? And then from there on down it says, but, yet, but, and he's contrasting with everything that he's just said about the flesh. And we're getting there.

Lord willing, Mike will be teaching us that next week. But here in verse eight, he's drawing to a conclusion all that he said about the flesh. And he says that if we understand, if we really understand the flesh, then we have to conclude that those who are in the flesh cannot please God.

They cannot please God. That's the bottom line. Why not? Why can't they please God? Because the sole aim and desire of the flesh is to please self. and not God. And when we understand that, we have to conclude that those who are in the flesh cannot please God. And this is an absolutely watertight argument, and Paul didn't come up with it. The Lord gave this to Paul.

But I want you to notice here something very, very important about the way that Paul shifts the language in verse 8. Did you notice that actually someone had to point this out to me yesterday? He uses a different preposition. I mean, I saw it, but I didn't see the significance of it until yesterday. He uses a different preposition in front of the word the flesh, right?

Back in verses four and five, Paul's talking about the one who is according to the flesh. And that word according to is a preposition kata. It means to be in conformity with something. According, conformity, we kind of get the idea. But here he's talking about those who are in the flesh, a different preposition. To be in something, or maybe here we could say in union with something. united to it. You're one with it. And there is a big difference between being in a condition of accordance with the flesh and being in the flesh.

As a believer, you can and do walk according to the flesh, but you can never again be in the flesh. And we have to connect verse 9 where it says, however, you are not in the flesh. but in the spirit, if indeed, and it's assumed true, the spirit of God dwells in you as a believer, okay? So in verse eight, Paul's talking about the unbeliever when he says, those who are in the flesh cannot please God, okay? Why can they never be pleasing to God? Because they are in the flesh. The unbeliever is completely dominated 100% of the time by the desires of the flesh.

That's the only life source they've got. As a born-again believer, we've got two options, so to speak. We've got two indwelling natures. We've got the sin nature, and we've got Christ's nature, his life through the Spirit. And we can be walking according to one or the other at any given moment. And now only one, only the Lord Jesus rightfully has that place of authority, so to speak. Because we're dead to this in nature. It has no claim on us. We're freed from its authority. But do we always count on that fact? No. We often fail to realize our freedom from its power. And we often allow this in nature to dominate us. Okay?

And so that's the difference here between walking according to the flesh and being in the flesh. The unbeliever is completely unable to please the Lord ever because he is completely always dominated and controlled by the sin nature. The believer can either be walking according to the flesh or according to the spirit, which means that we can be either fulfilling the righteous requirement, as he says in verse 4, or not at any given moment. It has to do with out of which source. we're living.

So what can we take away from these verses? We've been focusing our attention here on the flesh, which is not a nice topic, right? But as we said earlier, the first step to victory, or at least a very important principle in victory is to know your enemy, know what you're dealing with. So now that we know a little bit better this in nature, we begin to understand what it takes to actually have victory. So let's think this through and apply scripture, okay?

Again, the indwelling sin nature is our worst enemy. It's attached to us and always seeking to control us. And two, the sin nature is only capable of sin, our human good and our bad, as we as we call them, and scripture does too. The scripture talks about human goodness and human, Paul calls it a righteousness of my own derived from law.

And so we can use that term, but we have to understand it from God's perspective. It's all filthy. But what do we have to conclude from that? This is the important takeaway this morning. What do we have to conclude, given those two facts about our sin nature? I think the conclusion is this. There is no hope of you and I ever living the Christian life out of the flesh. We actually have to give up on living the Christian life so that I can allow another to live it through me.

And who is that? It's the Lord Jesus Christ. Now sometimes I like to shock people with the statement, God does not intend, believers, God does not intend for you to live the Christian life. And that will usually raise a few eyebrows for a Christian. But notice I didn't say that God does not intend for you to have a Christian life or a Christ-like life. I said that God does not intend for you to live it. And that's because he intends to live it through you. And we have to be clear on that. That's not just splitting hairs. That's actually really important. God does not intend for you to live the Christian life. He intends to live it through you. And if you think about verse eight carefully, Alyssa pointed this out to me. See, I had a lot of help in this. message. If you think about Romans 8 verse 8 carefully, it should remind you of another verse. Anyone else have this one come to mind?

8.8 says, those who are in the flesh cannot please God, but Hebrews 11.6, Aztec says, and without faith, it is impossible to please God. What does that tell us?

Does walking according to the flesh require faith in God? No. That's just completely natural. We just do that without thinking about it. But what about walking according to the Spirit? What does that require? That requires faith, right? When we walk according to the Spirit, we are resting our faith in the specific things that God has revealed to us in His Word, specific things that He has done. It requires faith to walk according to the Spirit. We've got to believe Him. We've got to believe Him when He says what He's done about our problem. And what has he done about our problem?

Namely, two things, if we just boil it down to these two things. One, that we have died to sin's authority over us. Romans 6, 7 says, for he who has died is freed from sin. Have you died as a Christian? Yes. If you're a Christian, you have died. Do you have any experience of that death? Do you remember when that happened? No. But how do you know that you died? Because God's word tells you. Because God's Word reveals to you the truth that you have indeed died. You died with Christ when he died on the cross. So you have died. And if you have died, then you are freed from sin.

And so that's the first, that's the one side of it. The other is that we, in Jesus Christ, we have a new life. Jesus Christ himself is our new life. How do we know that? Again, it's on the basis of God's Word. Would you know that if you just sat down and contemplated? No. We know that on the basis of God's Word, Romans 6, 4.

Therefore, we have been buried with him through baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead, through the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life. So walking according to the Spirit doesn't just happen. As a believer, it requires faith, and faith has to be in specific information, specific facts. It requires faith in the revealed facts of what God has done for us and with us by separating us from the dominion of sin through death and joining us to Jesus Christ as our life today, right now. And as we depend on Him for that, as we walk by faith, depending on those truths, resting in the reality of those truths, that is the very means by which He lives His life in us. That is our responsibility, is to depend on Him by faith to live that life. And so it's faith that makes that righteous walk. possible, makes it a reality in our lives.

And that is what fulfills that righteous requirement of the law, the righteousness that is summed up in the Lord Jesus Christ, who he is by nature. His nature is now our nature. His life is our life. But it doesn't just happen, right? We have to be we have to be depending by faith on what he has done in order for that life to be manifest and expressed and lived out in us. And that is the life that is truly pleasing to the Lord. That's the life that he wants in us. That's the life that he'll produce in us as we depend on him for that.

Let's close in prayer. Heavenly Father, I thank you for your word. I thank you that you haven't left us in the dark as to this this invisible indwelling enemy, this nature that's so familiar to us and honestly comfortable to us. We operate very comfortably in the flesh. It's just where we naturally hang out.

And Lord, if it wasn't for the work that you've done to separate us from the power of sin, we would be just like the world, constantly, continuously dominated by our sin nature, by our flesh, which is completely worthless to you, has no value to you whatsoever. And so Lord, we thank you for the work that you've done to free us from that total domination of the sin nature, and what you've done to recreate us, to resurrect us in your Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, so that He could be our life. He could be the source of this new life, this righteous life, which is totally pleasing to you. And Lord, that's the life we want. You know, the more we see your son, the more we behold him in your word, the more we want to be like him.

We want to be pleasing to you. That is our desire. But like Paul, we often find ourselves in the Romans 7 scenario where we realize what we are, what we're made of, and the ways in which we're still regularly walking by the flesh. And we see the wretchedness of it.

And Lord, we pray that we would more and more begin to count on what you've done to free us from that, that we're no longer slaves to sin nature. We're free from its dominion, its power over us. It's good and it's bad. Everything about it is no longer our master. And so Lord, we thank you for the work that you've done.

And we just pray that we will grow in faith, that our faith in your accomplished work would grow and increase, and that through that, your son Jesus would be glorified in us as our faith gives the opportunity for Him to live and to manifest His wonderful character and nature through us moment by moment. It's also that He would be glorified. That's our prayer, our desire, and we thank You for Your provision in that. We pray in Jesus' name, amen.