When Bill was in his twenties he asked Jesus Christ to forgive his sins and give him the gift of eternal life. During the last fifteen years he has had a few spiritual "moments," but mostly Bill has struggled against his lusts, his anger, his pride, his selfishness, and his worldly ambition. He stumbles when he tries to balance his priorities and usually ends up scheduling his family right out of his life.

Bill likes church, but the messages on Sunday just don't seem to do very much for him. All in all, he feels pretty lukewarm. He's not cold toward God, but neither is he passionate about his relationship with the Lord.

Bill, like millions of other Christian men, lives a defeated Christian life because he does not understand the ministry of the Holy Spirit. As a result his experience is like that of the man Paul describes in Rom. 7:15-23:

I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do... I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do - this I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it... For in my inner being I delight in God's law; but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members.