flyfishing said:
No i meant after salvation on earth.. If any man is in Christ he is a new creature, 2Cor 5:17.. In other words when CHRIST came in your heart...
Boy, there are a lot of variables in this. We are a new creature. We are not flesh only. I offer this as the picture to assist, but do not mean it to be an accurate description.
Humans have three natures, Flesh, soul, spirit.
When you are born you are pretty much flesh only, (though the other parts are there like seeds) you need only food ,warmth, comfort. Very soon the soul begins to develop.
The soul is your mind, thoughts, reasoning, emotions, feelings. This is as far as the unregenerated go. They learn to control their flesh nature which simply demands satisfaction for all its needs, by their soul. He tempers his drives by intellect, reason, morals, emotions feeling. his means that this person is easily destablized by how he feels, whether he is sick or well, happy or sad, all things, almost everything that he believes and how he acts is controlled by feelings and emotions. This is where most TV evangelists try to operate. It is the same place that Satan has his best hold on you, and this is why God does not want us to live by our soulish natures. He wants us to operate through faith by way of the spirit.
But inside this soul is a little nodule that is the spirit. The spirit is dormant, comatose, except for it has a small amount of resedent spark called conscience, the sort of built in idea that there is a difference between right and wrong. And it is sort of like the TV. It is turned off, except for one circuit that is listening for a command from the remote, telling it that someone wants the TV turned on, and then it powers up all its circuits.
Our conscience is listening for a command code from God to awaken all its circuits, which is the full life of the spirit. And in this circuit is a blank memory allocated for Gods Torah, His word. When we, by an act of our will, accept God, (often because our conscience has been insulted by our actions and we feel a need to seek forgiveness) God then sends in the code signal, your spirit comes alive and you get a down load from the Spirit, who takes up residence in you. Your spiritual eyes are opened, scriptures now begins to make sence, because what you are reading agrees with the copy printed on your heart, you become a new person who is able to love even the unlovable, and who is able to operate outside os the soulish demands of the feelings emotions and demands of the flesh.
Now it is not your feelings and emotions that control you, or even your thougfhts and undestanding. Now it is the spirit of God working through your newly activated spirit, that assures you that what God says is true, that despite what he evidence says, you have what you prayed for. (Faith is the evidence of things not seen...) So now the regenerated person has a completely new command line. Spirit controls soul, soul controls body.
I have an indept teaching on all this if you want I can make it available to you.
CIF