In Touch - May 14, 2006

In Touch Daily Devotional 
by Dr. Charles Stanley

Sunday May 14, 2006

Maintaining a Spirit-Filled Life

Colossians 3:1-3

Christian psychologist Bill Gillham reminds Christians that they are not fighting an inner civil war. Though it seems a battle rages between our old man and new man, Gillham says this belief is a trick of the devil.
    

Romans 7:20-23 is the ammunition Gillham uses to explain this truth. In this passage, the apostle Paul explains that it is not our old selves we are fighting but a "a different law in the members of my body," which is sin, "waging war against the law of my mind…" The enemy is attacking our minds!
    

T. W. Hunt writes: "Philippians 2:5 tells us that we are to have the mind of Christ. This verse is part of a poem (Phil. 2:5-11) that was originally a hymn. This verse says that we are to think like Jesus thinks. In the original Greek, the command is in the form of the verb phroneite, the plural imperative of the verb phroneo, ‘to think or to be minded in a certain way.’ Our mind is to have the same characteristics that Christ’s mind has…
    

"The spiritual mind will develop in the same way that a little child’s mind develops. Even at spiritual birth, we have the ‘mind of Christ’ (1 Cor. 2:16), but in subsequent growth that mind must contend with established habits, the culture in which we live, and the work of Satan. In us, the mind of Christ matures in a process of growth."

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