Bless y’all for hanging with me through Chapter 2 - Christianity 101 of why we a Spirit-filled believer can struggle so much…let’s continue…John Eldredge’s quote at the end is SO powerful…
How did we become such messed-up beings?
First, we inherited a whole boatload of issues from Adam’s debacle. I mean really.
Therefore, just as through one man sin entered the world, and death through sin, and thus death spread to all men, because all sinned...Romans 5:12
Adam’s sin and brokenness became our sin and brokenness, let alone all the sin and brokenness we come up with on our own. Next mix in the evil that the devil plagues us with in our thoughts and hearts:
...in which you once walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit who now works in the sons of disobedience, among whom also we all once conducted ourselves in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, just as the others. Ephesians 2:2-3
Until the Lord takes each of us home to heaven, we are subjected the schemes and ploys of our adversary. Although he is a finite being, he through his demonic minions takes delight in our vulnerability and weaknesses – most especially when we are most susceptible – our early childhood. The traumas, hurts, and wounds suffered in our youth, compounded with our fractured inheritance from Adam – can cause a place in our souls for the enemy to set up shop.
As author/teacher John Eldredge writes:
You see, we don’t really develop our core convictions so much as they develop within us, when we are young. Down deep, in the inmost parts they form, down in the deep water, like the shifting of the continental plates. Certainly, we’d reject the more disabling beliefs if we could; but they form when we are vulnerable, without our really knowing it, like a handprint in wet cement, and over time the cement hardens and there you have it…Now what we’ve come to believe about those ultimate issues was handed to us early on, in most cases by our families.