So I intend to continue my narrative....a continuation of yesterday. Today I am contemplating what it looks like to rely upon the Holy Spirit in living a life in "God's will". Being filled with Him. "The cruz of it, I believe is realizing that being filled with the Spirit is not a one'time act. As we read in Galatians about the Sipirit and the flesh, walking with the Spirit implies an ongoing relationship. Being filled with the Spirit is not limited to the day we first meet Christ. Instead, throughout Scripture we read of a relationship that call us into an active pursuit of the Spirit every day.
Imagine I buy a treadmill to lose some weight. Three months later, I take it back to the store and complain to the clerk that it didn't work- I didn't lose a pound. He asks me,"Did it not work properly?" I respond: "I don't know if it works. I never ran on it. I just know I didn't lose any weight, so I am done with it!"
This may seem like a silly example, but change the details and suddenly it sounds familiar: "I have prayed for the Holy Spirit to free me from my lust, and I am still addicted to pornography." Or, "I have prayed for years to be able to forgive my dad, but I am still racked with anger and bitterness 30 years down the road." "I have prayed for years to be free of my gluttony, but despite prayer, spiritually based support groups and dieting, I am still a compulsive, unhealthy eater."
Fill in whatever sin plagues you and suddenly the treadmill illustration doesn't seem so silly. In fact, it seems like those prayers for freedom from that ongoing sin didn't really "work" in much the same way the treadmill didn't help me lose any weight.
Receiving freedom and healing in answer to prayer is generally not something that is done to you, a situation in which you are just a passive participant. Occasionally God works this way and heals or frees a person outright. He is certainly capable of this. Bit in my experience, God typically asks us to play an active role in the journey toward wholeness.
God doesn't need our help, but invites us to participate. Often this journey to freedom takes time, sometimes a very long time. And it takes perseverance. It takes participation on our part. We have to get on the treadmill and run - merely looking at the workout machine doesn't do a whole lot.
Living by the Spirit implies a habitual, continual and active interaction with the Holy Spirit. While this sounds exhausting, it really isn't because all of this living and action is done in the power of the Spirit. It is not by your own strength."

Now I don't know what areas that you all are struggling in, (well I guess some of us have shared where) but I can get caught up in inactivity in those areas of struggle. In other words, I am willing to put work into my physical body, my intellectual body, or my emotional body, and even spiritual body. I do the things on the outside and gain wisdom, but some areas I think that I have held to myself because it might take too much work. The truth is that as I give up the control and let God into those areas, He picks up the load for me. He carries my guilt and pain until I fail and want to punish myself with the guilt. A part of me feels that because as a human, as Robin, I fail, that I do not deserve to have my burden lifted or carried. I don't deserve it, but thank God!!!!I don't have to. Tomorrow, I will try and finish these thoughts. Today, "Now I have given up everything else - I have found it to be the only way to really know Christ and to experience the might power that brought Him back to life again, and to find out what it means to suffer and to die with Him. So what ever it take, I will be one who live in the fresh newness of life of those who are alive from the dead." Phil 3: 10,11