Galatians 2:20-21 I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me. I do not set aside the grace of God, for if righteousness could be gained through the law, Christ died for nothing.

Do you become frustrated at times at how easy you either deliberately do or get tripped up by the things you were so sure you had overcome? I do. The Apostle Paul had the same experience and he confessed the level of frustration it caused him: “I know that nothing good lives in me, that is in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do – this I keep doing.” (Romans 7:18-19) This caused him to exclaim: “What a wretched man I am. Who will rescue me from this body of death?” (Romans 7:24).

Paul identified this state of affairs as war – because, though in his mind and inner being he delighted in God’s law, his physical being was subject to the law of sin. Is there hope? Yes, through Jesus Christ. Paul did come to the point where he could say: “I am crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me.” This calls for the ascendancy of the Spirit of God in our lives. It is not a battle we can fight by making repeated pledges to do better, it calls for conscious submission to the power of the Spirit in the moment of temptation. We are not meant to be slaves of sin.

“Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, because through Christ Jesus the law of the Spirit of life set me free from the law of sin and death. For what the law was powerless to do in that it was weakened by the sinful nature, God did by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful man to be a sin offering. And so he condemned sin in sinful man, in order that the righteous requirements of the law might be fully met in us, who do not live according to the sinful nature but according to the Spirit.” (Romans 8: 1- 4).