but in your mind and in your personality you will be a Christian. It is this fact that enables Jehovah’s witnesses in their international assemblies and in their international organization to get along together in peace, harmony and brotherly affection. We no longer let national traditions, pride, rivalries, political differences and social standing twist our heads and divide us. In this respect we are no longer worldlike, but godlike, for God shows no partiality.

Keeping the Mind Renewed

 1. Why is it not easy to keep the mind renewed and live in harmony with it?

WE MAY get new knowledge in our heads and have new ideas, but it is not easy to keep the mind in this new state and to order our lives in harmony with it. Not in this world in which the “god of this system of things” is on the loose together with all his demons. And not now while we are in imperfect flesh with its downward inclinations toward sin, selfishness, forgetfulness and disregard for God. The apostle Paul, even though he was favored with such uplifting visions and revelations, did not find it easy to keep in the new way of living according to the knowledge he had of God’s revealed Word. He had a continual battle, and it was not all in the mind, so that we should say, “The battleground is in the mind.” He had the bodily imperfections, the passions and the groveling tendencies of his flesh, to contend with the same as we have today. And as he describes the battle he had with himself, not to speak of the battle with the Devil’s organization on the outside, we can see described our own battle with these bodies of ours which are dying because of inherited sin:

 2. How did Paul describe the battle we have with our bodies?

² “For the good that I wish I do not do, but the bad that I do not wish is what I practice. If, now, what I do not wish is what I do, the one working it out is no longer I, but the sin dwelling in me. I find, then, this law in my case: that when I wish to do what is right, what is bad is present with me. I really delight in the law of God according to the man I am within, but I behold in my members another law warring against the law of my mind and leading me captive to sin’s law that is in my members. Miserable man that I am! Who will rescue me from the body undergoing this death? Thanks to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! So, then, with my mind I myself am a slave to God’s law, but with my flesh to sin’s law.”—Rom. 7:19-25, NW.

 3. Whence comes “sin’s law that is in my members”? and how does the “law of my mind” combat it?

³ Take note of these apostolic expressions, “law of my mind” and “sin’s law that is in my members”. A law is a rule of action or conduct according to which a person or thing will operate or move. Jehovah God the Creator did not put sin’s law in mankind. It was our first human parent Adam under influence of the Devil that put it in human flesh and he passed it on to us as an inheritance. Unless controlled