• Starting today August 7th, 2024, in order to post in the Married Couples, Courting Couples, or Singles forums, you will not be allowed to post if you have your Marital status designated as private. Announcements will be made in the respective forums as well but please note that if yours is currently listed as Private, you will need to submit a ticket in the Support Area to have yours changed.

Even though I know

Sabertooth

Repartee Animal: Quipping the Saints!
Site Supporter
Jul 25, 2005
10,749
7,215
63
Wisconsin
Visit site
✟1,124,520.00
Country
United States
Gender
Male
Faith
Charismatic
Marital Status
Married
Politics
US-Others
Upvote 0

Greengardener

for love is of God
Site Supporter
May 24, 2019
632
597
MidAtlantic
✟198,413.00
Country
United States
Gender
Female
Faith
Non-Denom
Marital Status
Married
This walk is indeed an individual one of choice. With a loving Father who wants you to agree with His best practices, and an enemy who for some reason gets kicks from killing, stealing, and destroying in our lives, while we live in bodies that have strong and steady self-centered urges... we see Jesus, Who overcame, calling us also to overcome. Welcome to the struggle. I agree with Unqualified, who appears qualified to comment here: resist. It's worth it. God who calls you is worth it. You are worth it.
 
  • Friendly
Reactions: Unqualified
Upvote 0

ViaCrucis

Confessional Lutheran
Oct 2, 2011
39,416
28,838
Pacific Northwest
✟808,676.00
Country
United States
Gender
Male
Faith
Lutheran
Marital Status
In Relationship
Politics
US-Others
Even though god loves me I’m tempted still to sin

That's true, that is part of the cross we are called to carry in this life--the struggle between the new man and the old man; between what we have been made by God's grace in Jesus Christ (and God is continually making until the day Jesus returns) and the old Adam that still clings to us, what Paul often calls "the flesh" in his letters--the old Adam, our old, dusty, mortal, sinful, disordered humanity.

Such struggle is a defining element of the Christian life. The Eastern Orthodox often call this struggle podvig, a Russian word that has no single English word translation, but is often translated as "spiritual struggle"; in the Lutheran tradition we describe this as the present living paradox of being "simultaneously both saint and sinner" (Latin simul iustus et peccator).

There is what we have received by grace and that which we are being conformed to by God's grace and the power of the Spirit--the new man in Jesus Christ. And there is the old Adam clawing at us and trying to drag us back down into our sinfully distorted desires and passions (called concupiscence in Western theology).

This is why the Church and the gifts which God has given His Church, namely God's Word and Sacraments, are the very means which God works His grace-filled work in our lives.

-CryptoLutheran
 
Upvote 0

aiki

Regular Member
Feb 16, 2007
10,874
4,352
Winnipeg
✟251,568.00
Country
Canada
Gender
Male
Faith
Baptist
Marital Status
Married
Even though god loves me I’m tempted still to sin

Yes. You still live in a fleshly body with its powerful, natural impulses. You have the patterns and habits of your old, selfish, godless life that God must dissolve and replace with new Christ-centered ones. This takes time, during which trial and temptation will confront you.

The key to being transformed isn't to struggle with yourself, pushing down desires, stuffing away what you really want to do but, rather, yielding yourself to God at every crossroads of choice between your way and His.

Romans 6:13-22
Romans 12:1
James 4:6-7, 10
1 Peter 5:6


Your "job," if you like, is to receive from God His work in you, by faith, to remain in it unmoved, and then to reflect His work in you in how you live. It is not your place to possess, procure and produce the Christian life for God.

More On The Three Spiritual R's: Receive, Remain, Reflect.

In Scripture, God repeatedly tells us that He takes the responsibility for changing us:

Philippians 1:6
Philippians 2:13
2 Corinthians 3:18
1 Thessalonians 5:23-24
1 Peter 5:10
Jude 1:24-25

Since we walk with God in love (Matthew 22:36-38; 1 Corinthians 13:1-3; 1 John 4:16-19), He will not force us to His will and way. At every point of choice between Self (and sin) and God, we must choose God's will and way by submitting to Him and thus agreeing to His transformation of us, opening ourselves to the profoundly-altering work of the Holy Spirit. As we walk through each day this way, we are changed in our desires, our thinking and our conduct - often so deeply and subtly we don't, in any particular moment, see we are changed. Only in looking back over weeks and months is God's incredible alteration of us apparent.

Temptation, then, isn't an awful enemy, necessarily, but an opportunity to submit to God again and, by faith, wait on Him to move us away from Self and sin into the holy communion with Himself for which He made us.
 
Upvote 0