Your body, or flesh, is made from the stuff of this earth, so it wants the stuff of this earth. Your spirit, however, which makes you a sentient being, is from God and longs for him.
Your flesh constantly compels you to satisfy its appetites which, incidentally, neither you nor I get to decide. The worst desires of your flesh are in conflict with the best desires of your spirit. That will never change. You must decide whether your spirit or your flesh will dominate your decisions (see Paul’s letter to the Romans 7:14-25).
God promises that if we “sow” to the spirit, we will “reap” eternal life. The flip side is that if we sow to our flesh, we will reap corruption and death (The letter to the Galatians, New Testament, 6:7-10). As every living thing produces after its kind, our actions are also seed that will one day result in a like harvest.
All of us have sown bad seed. Jesus, however, paid for that on the cross. If we are willing to put our faith in him and keep his teachings, he will free us from the coming harvest of corruption (John’s gospel, New Testament, 8:31-36).
God’s plan is simple, yet profound. We put our faith in Jesus and are thereby given the right to become God’s children (John’s gospel, 1:11-13). We then turn from sin, and allow someone to baptize us in water as Jesus taught Nicodemus after he professed faith in Jesus (John’s gospel 3:1-5).
This baptism unites us not only with Jesus, but unites us with him in the death he died to pay for our sin (The letter to the Romans, New Testament, 6:3-7). In being united with Christ in his crucifixion, our own body of sin is also crucified, and so we live in peace being delivered by our continuing faith in Jesus.
God loves us in spite of ourselves and by his son, Jesus, paved the way to life through the horror of the cross. God did not do this for us because we are good. He did this because he is good. This good news is for you, regardless of who you are or what you’ve done. In fact, this gift of God exists specifically because of who we are and what we’ve done.
The gift is free and available to you now. What will you do about it?