A couple weeks ago I was up at a retreat with my church. The speaker gave this analogy:

The Christian walk is like 3 people. One representing the body, one the soul and one the spirit. When we become a Christian and accept Christ into our lives, He comes to link on to our Spirit. However, we need to work at changing the soul, for it does not just change automatically. When the spirit and soul both change then the body will as well.

Now, if that just went over a couple heads, let me re-explain what he was talking about. Many expect that as soon as they accept Christ into their life it is supposed to change. They are just supposed to all of a sudden become a “good little Christian”. However, from that standpoint, that is not a true statement. When a man becomes a Christian, God enters into their life and links on to their spirit. However, a soul does not change on its own. It takes time.

After sinning for so many years, no matter if it was short or a longer amount of time, the body, brain and heart become so used to sinning. They begin to think it’s normal to sin. Our brains learn how to justify a sin in our thinking. Therefore, we must make a deliberate decision to change. It is not automatic. We can find hope though in the fact that Christ’s death on the cross was enough to overcome sin. We are able to defeat sin and we don’t have to fight it alone.

Someone said to me once, “if you are fighting sin, that is in a way a good thing.” I looked at him for a moment, as if waiting knowing that what he just said couldn’t be the only thing he would tell us. He then went on to say, “It’s a good thing in the sense that it means you haven’t given up fighting sin.” There is almost a sense of goodness in fighting a sin, because it means we are fighting. We are always going to be fighting sin or be consumed by sin, but fighting the sin and desiring to get it out of our life is so much better than doing nothing about it.

In other words, becoming a Christian does not change everything in your life. Becoming a Christian won’t make your life perfect. The more time we as Christians spend getting to know God and working at battling that sin, the less it will get in our way. It’s also important to remember that we are not called to fight alone. We have God on our side, fighting with us, and with God on our side, nothing is impossible.