Try to take these one by one:
Frenchy -- God FINALLY hardened Pharaoh's heart, but if you read the text, you will see that for the first plagues Pharaoh hardened his own heart. God, being outside of time, knew that would happened and so reassured Moses that He would finish the job and that the final condition of Pharaoh would be a God-hardened heart. You must let Bible explain Bible. Remember Hebrews where the writer begs his readers to NOT harden their own hearts as their ancestors did in the wilderness. People harden their own hearts, and if they insist on that path, God will finish the job for them.
"Seek and ye shall find" is definitely NOT to believers. Immediately after the seek, knock, ask, passage is the following: "Which of you, if his son asks for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a snake? If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him!"
Jesus says His listeners there are evil. That is NOT redeemed. The Holy Spirit did not come until Pentecost, and it is then that they were born again. Jesus is talking to average men in the Sermon on the Mount.
Frenchy, I'm sure you were sinning at 14, but sinning does not make you an adult! Biologically at that age your brain is a mess, in the middle of disconnecting some neuron connections and connecting others. Legally you are still a child. Spiritually you are not yet held accountable for your messed-up actions and thoughts. It may well have happened shortly after that, but unless you were WAY ahead of the rest of us, you were simply a messed-up teenager at fourteen and God knew that and waited. For your sake.
Your daughter had not yet spiritually been separated from God at 5. It is not until the late teens or early twenties that we wrestle with God on our own and reach our own relationship with Him. That is one of the points of the Exodus story. As a child, you are separated from the sins you commit and they are 'dead', as Paul says in Romans 7 -- they are powerless to separate you from God. Because NO child can comprehend God's law (learn it, yes, comprehend it, no), sin cannot exercise its power over them, even though they sin. They are covered by the Blood of Christ until the law is understood by them in their late teens/early twenties. Then they are separated because they sin with full knowledge. Then they must choose which way to go -- make excuses or submit to God. You were right on schedule. Your precious daughter has had a good upbringing I am sure and knows Bible. But her time of being alone with God as an adult will come, too, and it is then she will have to do her own wrestling and make her own decisions. Right now she is believing you and that is not a bad thing.
But the time will come when she will be separate from you and then it will just be her and God.
Brutus -- Please put Galatians 5:17 back into context. Paul spends the entire first section of the letter discussing the futility of trying to rely on the law for what the Spirit and only the Spirit can do. He emphasizes this at the beginning of chapter 5. And so he says, in verse 16: "Live by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the sinful nature." That sentence comes first. If you live by the Spirit, you WILL NOT gratify the sin nature.
Being a Christian is to be indwelt by the Holy Spirit. Philippians 1:6 says He is faithful to complete the good work He has begun which is, as Romans 8:28-30 tells us, to be transformed into the likeness of our Lord Jesus Christ. To say that I still have the same war with the flesh I had thirty years ago, in my twenties, is to say the Holy Spirit has done somewhere between nothing and very little with me! And that is not true. I am amazed at what He has done with the mess that was me. And as I look back, amazed, I know I am in His good Hands and that I am perfectly safe. That knowledge and the love He has put in me have stopped the war with my flesh. I live in my flesh, and I understand its weaknesses: when I am tired, I know to sleep. When I am hungry, I know to eat. When I am restless, I know to get up and work physically. But in all of that, I try to discern what the Lord is asking of me at any given moment and obey. How can there be war in that? There is perfect peace. If I mess up, He shows me, I apologize, am forgiven, and He and I keep on going. My goal is for Him to express Himself through me, not for me to concentrate or focus on 'battling my flesh.' When my focus is on Him, He does the battle and He always wins. I am at rest that way. My burden is light.
Now, if you will check the Romans passage you referred to -- 7:21 -- you will find this is NOT a saved man talking. Since Romans 7:7, Paul has been giving a narrative of the person who sins volitionally, dies spiritually, and has that enormous battle inside because he knows the law is right and good and cannot obey it on his own. In verse 14, he says "We know that the law is spiritual; but I am unspiritual, sold as a slave to sin."
No way is that a saved person in that part of the narrative! For just a chapter before, Paul has asserted "You have been set free from sin and have become slaves to righteousness" (6:18) and many similar verses.
The Jews delighted in God's law. They were proud of it, that it had been given to them, and depended on it and tried to follow not only it, but all the additions the Pharisees and Sadduccees had added. So Paul writes, of this unsaved man, "So I find this law at work: When I want to do good, evil is right there with me. 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 that is at work within my members. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?"
This man states he is a prisoner of the law of sin. But the man born again in Christ has been set free from the law of sin. This man says there is a war waging in side, but in chapter 8, the chapter of the man saved by grace, we find "the mind controlled by the Spirit is life and peace." War and peace cannot coexist with a person. The state is one or the other.
And yet, when I state I have the peace of Christ in me and no war, I am told I am not a Christian! What kind of nonsense is that? I have what Christ promised and so I am told that means I am not a Christian.
The Lord Jesus Christ is my life, my love, my Lord, my God. I was born again in him in my mid-twenties, over 30 years ago, and I have certainly had time to see Him work and therefore I can say with total certainty, "I know in whom I have believed."
