How to learn to replace sinful desires or canal ways of our life with godly ones? It starts with the seed and the root of the new life, after the casting away and the rooting out of the old.
It starts with the awareness and conviction that we don’t belong to ourself. “I am not my own. ” All things rather belong to God and should be for Him as well. And the gateway to learn the fear of the Lord is “death unto self” thru the practical, the mundane, the common things of life.
Conviction of sin, as the Lord put it and Paul beautiful expounded in Romans 6-7, is more about the sinful nature or the flesh of an old life-it is in desperate need of exerted liberation and real cure, like a fatal disease. There is no good things in me-David, at the inspiration of the Spirit of Christ, would genuinely acknowledge and confess.
And the only cure is the Cross-deny the old self and embrace the new, even our life of as a son of God in and for the Lord. “Don’t you know you have been baptized into the death of Christ of Jesus?”
If indeed so, then we now are His. First, a bond slave-having no right of our own; then a rightful heir-all good things of God the Father belong to us (all the blessings in the heavenly realms, with their origins not of world, nor are they for the life in this world); and finally nothing for ourselves-for the Love of God unto the World, like our Lord we learn to choose to empty ourself in God and enter in the same path of Glorification, the summit of the Ascension is the Cross where the King is crowned by the thorns of a cursed world (token of sin) and is glorified in His Death as the “King of Glory”, even in the Kingdom of God and for the ages to come.
From the death of self to His glory for us as a son of God is the Way of eternal life. There is NO other way.
Even so, come! Lord Jesus, in your Holy Ones and unto this world. We pray!