2nd Problem - Our Plan B
Born Again but Still Running on Plan B
Sinful behavior is the result of fallen humanity attempting to find purpose and meaning in life independent of God.
At the time immediately following our salvation, regardless of our physical age, we are considered by God to be infants in Christ. We become new creations in Christ, children of God and therefor heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ but we are still strongly entrenched in our old ways of thinking about life and about taking care of ourselves through our use of imperfect human reasoning. We learned how to live our lives apart from God.
The problem is closely linked with the way we were created by God. God not only created us as physical beings - flesh and blood - but also more importantly He created us as spiritual beings. Our mind, according to scripture, is an eternal (immortal in Christ) part of our being whereas our brain is a physical (mortal) part of our being. Our brain stores all our memories which are basically made up of our thoughts and emotions and past choices (our will) which come to us through our five senses - sight, sound, touch, taste and smell. It all gets recorded in our physical brain as either short term or long term memory. The more emotionally intense the event, or the greater the repetition, the longer we will remember it. Our mind, the eternal in Christ part of the mind/brain combo, is like the software that allows a computer to do useful things. Software has no substance just like words written in a book have no physical substance. The brain is like a computer's hardware - physical memory, processor and circuitry. The brain cannot do useful high order work without the mind to direct it.
So, before we came to know God and accept His free gift of salvation through Jesus Christ, we learned how to look out for number one, ourselves, through mostly selfish and self-centered means. We learned to live by the standards of the world, the flesh and the devil (Eph 2:1-3). The real problem is that we have all this remembered "garbage" stored away in the physical memory banks of our brain and the brain is not designed to quickly replace "garbage" thoughts and their associated emotions with godly, God centered, thoughts and their related emotions. Scientific studies have determined that is takes at least 66 days for us to fully replace bad habits with good habits, "garbage" thoughts with "good" thoughts or replace lies with truth. It takes a focused and consistent effort on our part to replace the "ungodly" ways of thinking with "godly" ways of thinking. This is what the scripture is referring to when Paul says in Romans 12:2, "Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.". It is a process to be transformed. The testing takes time and effort. It takes a resolve and perseverance to choose God's will and God's truth over the world's ways, the devil's lies and our propensity to pamper our flesh (if it feels good do it).
All temptation is designed to get us to live our lives independent of God - Plan B.
The devil's three temptations of Jesus were all designed to get Jesus to sin by making a choice outside the will or council of his Heavenly Father. Jesus correctly answered each temptation based on what his Father required.
Man's Plan B is based on reason. God's Plan A is based on faith.
Read more about how we developed our Plan B
Let's move on and take a look at: