We as believers, reborn of Christ, are conscious of the two opposing principles through all our life on this earth. The one life of Christ in us is truly good and righteous, and the other is of evil, sin in the flesh (Rom 8:3b).

Yet, all mankind, even fallen unregenerate men, has "the knowledge of good and evil" since the day Adam ate of that tree. So the issue "good and evil" confronts all men in their respective natures as they encounter the business, political and social world.  The forces of good and evil  give rise to the constant tensions among nations, races, classes, right down to our own family circles. This is the theme of ethics and religion. 

This also come closest home to us in our own personal lives as believers in whom “the Spirit of Christ dwells,” by the conflict of what the Bible calls “the flesh” and “the spirit.” We witness in our own lives the interweaving of dialectics such as; prosperity and adversity... joy and sorrow... friendship and enmity... justice and injustice... health and disease... kindness and cruelty... through all our life on this earth until the end of the age. 

Though we are Christ’s, we share in this divided fallen world reined over by "the God of this world" - Satan, the adversary. We have part in this world. As all men we eat its food, partake in its activities, earn its money, taste of its sorrows and tragedies, endure its temptations.

Being made of "spirit soul and body" (1Thes 5:23), we accordingly have; world consciousness by our physical bodies, self consciousness by our soul, and God consciousness by our spirit. Though we as believers are one with Christ in our spirit, we are still one with the physical world in body.  Therefore, though we are new men in Christ (2Cor 5:17), we still have a duality of consciousness; world-consciousness by our body-consciousness... as well God conscious by the Spirit of Christ alive within our regenerated human spirit. 

It is not wrong to be self consciousness or world-conscious. After all we are “in the world”... but “not of it” (John 17:13, 16), “in the flesh”... but “not of it” (Gal. 5:24), in our soul-self... but not of it (Gal. 2:20). Obviously a great proportion of our waking hours must necessarily be spent in the affairs of this world, with then Christ must be in the background rather than foreground of our consciousness...but always their and guiding us from within.

That which the Bible calls “sin” only enters when we are consciously drawn into activities and attitudes of "the flesh," which we know to be displeasing to Him.

While we are in this divided world, we cannot have solely a Christ-consciousness.  We must also have a self-consciousness. It is the renewed soul-self by the Spirit that knows how to maintain its abiding place in union with Christ; yet it is also our self-conscious self that is also responsive to all the stimuli of its environment. Therefore we as a self... sense temptation flesh-ward ... as well as sensing the Spirit toward trusting and relying upon Christ within us in every happening of life. It's still a case of “nevertheless I live,” as well as, “yet not I, but Christ liveth in me” (Gal 2:20).

There is the "flesh" of man as the meat of the body, but the name God has given to humanity separated from Himself by the Fall — is “flesh” (Gen. 6:3). We are all “flesh” as men, having been born of Adam.  Even the Saviour, when He came to be among us, was “God manifest in the flesh” of the body given Him by His mother Mary. Not until the resurrection of our body (cf., 1Thes 4:13, 1Cor 15:51-55), unto the final and complete state of unification with our ascended "head" will any member of the human race cease to be flesh. 

Actually, “flesh” implies consciousness of separation from God, this is a self-consciousness apart from Christ-consciousness. That does not necessarily mean something evil, Christ “in the days of His flesh” was conscious of His human self as apart from the Father with whom He was "one" (John 5:19).  It is not the flesh that is evil, but "the lusts or desires of the flesh." And even the existence of  "the lusts or desires of the flesh." are not evil unless we yield to them and permit them to reign. Self-consciousness and flesh-consciousness is the normal and essential prerequisite to a continuous life of faith while we are members of this fallen human race, for such consciousness compels us constantly to “look away” from our helpless selves “unto Jesus” (Heb. 12:2). When we do so, "the flesh" then becomes the useful servant to manifest the Spirit’s will on earth. 

But the moment we fail to "look away" trusting Jesus, we have cut ourselves off from His delivering power and then "the flesh" becomes an evil thing. The natural “desires of flesh and (fleshly) mind” then have us in their grip, and become dominating contrary lusts, we then are their slaves. Thus Paul aptly wrote of the Spirit of life in Christ as the overcomer in us.

2 For the law (normal operation) of the Spirit of life [which is] in Christ Jesus [the law of our new being] has freed me from the law (operation) of sin and of death. Romans 8:2 (AMP)

5 For those who are according to the flesh and are controlled by its unholy desires set their (soul's) minds on and pursue those things which gratify the flesh, but those who are according to the Spirit and are controlled by the desires of the Spirit set their minds on and seek those things which gratify the [Holy] Spirit. 6 Now the mind of the flesh [which is sense and reason without the Holy Spirit] is death [death that comprises all the miseries arising from sin, both here and hereafter]. But the mind of the [Holy] Spirit is life and [soul] peace [both now and forever]. Romans 8:5-6 (AMP)  

There is a dual consciousness of which Paul wrote concerning all of us in Romans 6-8 and Galatians chapter 5. Though we are made new by and with "Christ who is our life" (Col 3:4), we are conscious of two selves, 1) our self, 2) and Himself, “I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me” (Gal 2:20). Today we are still members of a fallen, divided human community that is the world of man. Then also, our renewed self is never to be annihilated, rather is forever the vessel through which Christ is to be expressed. We shall reign in heaven (2Tim 2:12) by and with His life as His agents.

Though we as believers in fact have human constitutions, human appetites and human passions, and corruptible human bodies, and are immersed in all the activities of this divided world, does not mean that we still under the dominion of the fallen Old Man’s fallen flesh nature (cf. Rom 6:6-7, 7:4, Gal 2:20). Our Old man died with Christ (Rom 6:3-4). We  have our freed human nature but we are not yet clothed with our incorruptible body. With the Rapture and our new incorruptible spirit bodies, our nature will be so completely unified with the Lord that there will be no more consciousness of separation, nor of good and evil, nor of temptation.

Our present privilege is to be God’s "ambassadors" (2Cor 5:20) while we remain here on earth and away from our home of "citizenship" (Philip 3:20). We today are His redemptive agents while we remain here on earth. It is by or through us that God now offers His grace to men, even as He did for Israel by a man, Jesus of Nazareth as the redeemer of all Men.

Thus likewise we, as humans among humans, we are as open as Jesus was through our human natures to all human enticements, as we are in our spirits to the drawings of the Holy Spirit. As Paul tells us, we “walk in the flesh” (2Cor.10:3), but so far as our real life in the Spirit is concerned, we “have crucified the flesh”(Gal. 5:24), and are “not in the flesh, but in the spirit: (Rom. 8:9), and do “not war after the flesh” (2cor.10:3), and do not “mind (not set our mind upon) the things of the flesh” (Rom,. 8:5). 

In other words, we are in the flesh body, but not of it... in the world but not of it, and we are a self, but not of our self... we are, at our core spirit source, members of Christ's body; we are of His cross and of His life, nature and mind.

Therefore, we shall never in this life be free from a sense of self as a distinct individual, and praise God never free of the realization of the indwelling Christ at the same time. We shall never on earth, therefore, be free from temptation in a world that exists to tempt, nor be free from the daily necessity of vigilance to abide in union with Christ.

Paul's great chapter triumphant living, Rom. 8, significantly enough is the very chapter which warns us against the subtleties of "the flesh." Paul their expresses our groanings amidst our rejoicing as we long for the final redemption of our bodies. We are saved, not only in faith, but in the confident expectation of our coming eternal union with Him "eternal in the heaven" (2Cor 5:1).

For this reason, then, it is of utmost importance that we must understand the exact relationship between our renewed self in Christ and the other Glorious Self, which is Christ Himself dwelling within our spirit. This is the hardest lesson we have to learn. It can't be learned except in the hard way. Frankly, nothing but frequent and strong doses of tasting the false activities of our independent self can teach us this lesson. The independent self is peculiarly subtle because we wrongly think we must be the righteous ones for Him. Not understanding that its Christ in us who is the righteous one we set about doing our own good in His name. This is not genuine good in the positive sense, this is  "do good things" by self-effort, therefore this is good that is done in the negative sense. This then would produce a self-purified self, still empty of the reality of Christ alive in us, just as the cup for the coffee may be clean, but may be empty of what really matters, the coffee that it is meant to contain.

Our problem is that we have become so accustomed to living by our "old man" (cf., Rom 6:6, Gal 2:20) in our old life, by the self-activity of the self,  that we carry it over to the new life, hardly noticing w we have done. Thus Paul write;

22 Strip yourselves of your former nature [put off and discard your old unrenewed self] which characterized your previous manner of life and becomes corrupt through lusts and desires that spring from delusion; Ephesians 4:22 (AMP)

But the "new man" is actually and simply Christ in us; we are merely the hidden filaments through which His power and light shines out, as the cup which holds the coffee, so as nearly as possible, we in our self don’t count.  We ourselves are conscious of this as we look in the face of our Beloved. We realize and recognize Him as our life. Seeing Him, we just don’t see ourselves.

In our innermost consciousness He is the life of our lives. But at the same time, we are necessarily immersed in worldly activities which demand every form of self-activity, constantly of necessity diverting us from conscious Christ-reliance. As stated earlier, Christ then is in the background but always their to guide, prompt and restrict us by the sense of Him within us. 

Our problem is how to live, naturally and freely, normal lives which are yet at their roots Christ living in and through us. For many of our waking hours our direct attention is centered on the mundane human affairs, but we must be alert to recognize sensitively and quickly when the pressure of the sudden impact of things is pulling us off-centre, to hopeless self-reliance. In the course of this we are learning and recognizing what the writer to the Hebrews called “the dividing asunder of soul and spirit.” All these things then are truly working for the good.