Walking In the Spirit

In order for the Divine Will of God to be manifested and fulfilled in your life, it is imperative that one learn how to "walk in the Spirit." Hopefully everyone understands that once you accept Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior, you receive the gift of the Holy Spirit, who is the third person of the Godhead (John 3, 1John 5).  If you do not have the Holy Spirit living inside of you then you do not belong to Christ, which means in essence that you are not saved (Romans 8). So every Christian, every born-again believer in Christ, has the Holy Ghost. However, that is not enough. In order to have the perfect will of God executed in your life, you must learn to walk in the Spirit. It's one thing to "have" the Holy Spirit, it's another thing to learn how to walk in Him.

When you first get saved, you are described as a babe in Christ (1Peter 2). As a babe in Christ, this means that you have to "grow up." The challenge of growing up spiritually in Christ is the wrestle with the flesh (the sinful nature). Every person (not just born-again believer) is born with a sinful nature (Psalm 51).  Once you accept Christ and receive the Holy Spirit, the flesh wrestles with the Spirit and makes you do things that you know are wrong and against the Divine Will of God (Galatians 5, Romans 7). This is expected of babes, but something's suspicious if you're an adult and you're walking around with diapers on pottying in your pants. We have too many Christians that have been saved for far too long and been in Christ long enough to continue stumbling in the things of the flesh. The reason this is the case is a lack of maturity, and a lack of understanding in regards to how to appropriately address the sinful nature.

In order to appropriately and effectively deal with the sinful nature so that one may learn to Walk in the Spirit, one must learn how to crucify the flesh. This is where a lot of new Christians mess up, because they're taught to just stop sinning. Wrong. This doesn't work. Your will power to obey God is not greater than the sinful nature's ability to coerce you into sin (Romans 7). Until a believer learns this, no matter how sincere or even disciplined they are, they will continue to wrestle with indwelling sin and have some area in their lives that is not submitted to the Divine Will of God. The key to perfection is Crucifixion of the Flesh.
This in turn will create the necessary capacity to Walk in the Spirit.