Perfection? on: November 23, 2005, 07:44:11 PM Quote Quote The whole theology of Paul in the Romans 6:7,8 is that we are identified with Christ in His death, burial and resurrection and so we have been changed with a whole new set of desires. ... But we still have the remnants of the body of sin in our members. It affects both our physical and spiritual as if it were a person living inside of us. So where is the objection to choice between submitting your "self" physically and spiritually to the new desires of Spirit or the desires of the "old man"? And what does "mortification of sin" mean to you?

What is involved here is what the you is in salvation. Its what goes into the equation of choice. There is a new you in salvation in which you no longer belong to you but to someone else.So if i am changed and given new desires then i am intrinsically different than what i was before as me. In other words there is a different me there. Now that is the essence of choosing because what used to please me no longer pleases me if i reckon myself alive to the new me. In other words i begin to believe that i am different and begin to understand just what that difference is.

Yes i choose and i am responsible. But in reality my life no longer belongs to me and in that sense i have died to my sin and now i am in Christ. I am saying that it is more than just saying that there are good and evil and we choose between the two. It is not a life of living moral choices it is a new creation of the self. Yes all of my faculties are mine and i control all of them, but they have been renewed and so that change is what is intricate in my choices. Heres the metaphysics. Will is not like a scale that has a balance with objects of equal weight on each end. To will is to desire one object over another. I choose based upon what pleases me the most. That pleasing has the understanding involved in my view of the object of choice but the choice is not determined by the circumstances that go into my understanding but rather my desires and the condition of my soul. There is a freedom in the choices that the new me experiences that the old me did not. I am not in bondage to my will or my conscience or the law. I am free in Christ, by reckoning it so. My will is now a pleasure desire