Caught Between Two Worlds

Rom 7:22-23  "For in my inner being I delight in God's law;  but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members."
Ah, the daily dilemma of all of us caught in the here and the not yet of the kingdom of God.  While my spirit has been reborn and is no longer a slave to sin, my flesh still wages war against me.
I delight in God's law because I know that it is good and right and just.  I endeavor to write it on my heart and burn it into my mind.  I want to serve Him and please Him not only for who He is but also for what He has done for me.
My desires are slowly changing allegiance.
Ps 37:4 "Delight yourself in the LORD and he will give you the desires of your heart ."
As I delight myself in Him and get closer to Him I start to discover the things that give Him pleasure.  As one in love I want to learn as much as I can about my lover in order to please Him.  How could I not love Him.  He gave Himself up as a sacrifice for the atonement of my sins that I should enjoy a full pardon and thus have intimacy with Him.
I have learned to know Him not just as a transcendent God but also as an imminent God who is very much interested in my daily affairs.  I don't just know Him as an intellectual exercise, I know Him because I have experienced His love in a personal way.
I delight in Him.  He gives me the desires of my heart because they are aligned with His.  They are one and the same.
Ps 37:5-7  "Commit your way to the LORD; trust in him and he will do this:  He will make your righteousness shine like the dawn, the justice of your cause like the noonday sun. Be still before the LORD and wait patiently for him;"
He makes my righteousness shine like the dawn.  He makes it happen.  My job is to be still before Him.  Anxiety threatens to overtake our daily lives.  We live under the tyranny of the immediate. More and more things clamor for our attention.  The noise of our daily lives gets louder and tries to drown out God's whispers.  In order to hear His voice I need to still myself, shut out all the other voices and listen for Him.  There is no greater joy than to hear Him speak.  Whether it is a word of encouragement, rebuke, a call to action, a word of knowledge or a word of wisdom, it is a delight to hear His voice.  It is beyond amazing to consider that the almighty God of the universe would want to include me in His plan.
And yet, within my body there is a constant struggle.  My body wages war with my spirit.  My soul, my mind, will and emotions need to be transformed by a constant process.  Working out our salvation is like going up a down escalator.  It requires constant forward motion because if we stop we are moving backwards.  My flesh wants to go back to its unregenerate state. 
Even though the pleasures that I experience in God's presence are so much greater than anything I knew in my unregenerate state my flesh still says, "yeah, but…"  It still craves what it is in the past.  Our memories make things look better than they really were.  We are like the children of Israel wanting to go back to Egypt.  The forgot the bite of the cruel whip of the oppressor upon their backs. Instead, all they could remember is that least they had food back in Egypt.
Prov 26:11  "As a dog returns to its vomit , so a fool repeats his folly."
It can't be put any more graphic than that, and yet our flesh wants to return to that which brought death to us.  At times we feel helpless.  We wonder if we will ever win the battle.  Of course we know that a day is coming when Christ returns that we will be transformed and we will be made whole.
For now we take courage in this:
"No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us."  Rom 8:37   
While we may still struggle, we are no longer slaves to our sinful nature for,
"You, dear children, are from God and have overcome them, because the one who is in you is greater than the one who is in the world."  1 John 4:4

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