Jekyll and Hyde
Most Christians see themselves as having a split personality – kind of a Jekyll and Hyde thing. A good or spiritual side, and a lower “carnal” or “fleshly” nature.
We can easily identify with Paul in Romans 7:
Romans 7:14-24 14 For we know that the law is spiritual, but I am carnal, sold under sin.
15 For what I am doing, I do not understand. For what I will to do, that I do not practice; but what I hate, that I do.
16 If, then, I do what I will not to do, I agree with the law that it is good.
17 But now, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me.
18 For I know that in me (that is, in my flesh) nothing good dwells; for to will is present with me, but how to perform what is good I do not find.
19 For the good that I will to do, I do not do; but the evil I will not to do, that I practice.
20 Now if I do what I will not to do, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me.
21 I find then a law, that evil is present with me, the one who wills to do good.
22 For I delight in the law of God according to the inward man.
23 But I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members.
24 O wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?
I heard a sermon years ago that gave some insight into vs. 24, this body of death. (Note: Darby’s translation, pg 166, note u on vs. 24 references the practice below.)
Vs. 24 alludes to a punishment the Romans reserved for traitors to the state. It may have only been done once, but was so horrible that it was burned into the consciousness of Romans so they would know what “this body of death” referred to. The Romans as you well know did not have a law prohibiting cruel or unusual punishment.
For the vilest of traitors, they would take a fresh corpse newly killed and lash it to the back of the prisoner – arms to arms, legs to legs, torso to torso. Then they would take him and chain him up in a cell so he couldn’t get free, and leave him there.
Over time, the corpse would rot, the corruption would pass over to the condemned man’s body and cause gangrene, and drive him stark, raving mad in the process. He would beg to be killed, but his pleas and screams would go unanswered.
“Oh, wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?”
Am I forever to be controlled by the lower nature, against my will?
Will God do anything to help me, or am I left to battle it out on my own?
What has God desired for us?
Romans 8:29 For whom He foreknew, He also predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son, that He might be the firstborn among many brethren.
Colossians 2:9-10 9 For in Him dwells all the fullness of the Godhead bodily;
10 and you are complete in Him, who is the head of all principality and power.
Vs. 10 lit. Greek says “in Him you have been made full.”
“Oh, yaas, aman; when we all get to heaven and see the Lord Jesus face to face, then we shall be like Him.”
Yes, I believe that; it says so in 1 John 3:2. But what about now, down here? Can anything be done about now?
“Well, my boy, we all do the best we can. We all need to crucify the flesh daily. Each of us has our own little load of oppressive faults.”
Dying to Self
Most Christians concentrate a lot of effort on crucifying the flesh and dying to self. There’s just one little problem – the Bible says your flesh is already dead!
Galatians 5:24 And those who are Christ’s have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.
Galatians 2:20 I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me.
Colossians 2:11 In Him you were also circumcised with the circumcision made without hands, by putting off the body of the sins of the flesh, by the circumcision of Christ,
If you’ve studied the Bible much, you know that there are scriptures like this all over the New Testament. It’s a picture of the way God sees us in Christ Jesus. And yet we also have the reality of our lives, where sometimes our flesh gets the better of us and we act out in a decidedly un-Christian fashion.
It’s like we have a zombie in our closet. A zombie is dead, but somehow it still walks around and creates havoc. Now most of the time we have him locked away in that closet, and things are cool. But then something happens to “trigger” us. Somebody cuts you off on the freeway – and out comes the zombie “Yeearghooorrr!” Dead man walking!
The Battle
So therefore many Christians spend their energies on trying to keep the zombie locked in the closet. So they try harder. And fail again. And promise themselves they will try harder. It’s the whole Romans 7 loop all over again.
Galatians 5:16-17 16 I say then: Walk in the Spirit, and you shall not fulfill the lust of the flesh.
17 For the flesh lusts against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh; and these are contrary to one another, so that you do not do the things that you wish.
There is a battle – every Christian has experienced it. We want to study how God meant us to fight and win that battle.
The Structure of Man
We are a three part being, made up of spirit, soul, and body. (See Man in 3D for more detail)
1 Thessalonians 5:23 Now may the God of peace Himself sanctify you completely; and may your whole spirit, soul, and body be preserved blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Our spirit is the part of us that is made in the image of God. John 4:24 says God is a spirit; and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and in truth.
When Nicodemus came to see Jesus in John chapter 3, Jesus came right to the core of the gospel, and told him “unless one is born gain he cannot see the kingdom of God”. Nicodemus is confused by this and wonders about re-entering his mother’s womb.
John 3:5-7 5 Jesus answered, “Most assuredly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God.
6 That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.
7 Do not marvel that I said to you, ‘You must be born again.’
It was our spirits that became new creations (2 Corinthians 5:17) when we were born again. Your spirit is the core of your being, the “real you”. You are an eternal spirit.
Our soul, is our mind, will, and emotions. The word in Greek for soul is psuche, from which we get the word psychology. Our soul is the seat of our personality. Our consciousness resides in our souls. Our soul is eternal like our spirit.
Our body is our earth suit. Just like an astronaut needs a spacesuit to survive in space, our spirits and souls need an earth suit to interact with this physical world. The body is mortal, it will die and turn to dust. And we can live quite well without it (though not on this earth). But God will resurrect our bodies and give us a new one that is eternal to match our spirit.
1 Peter 2:11 Beloved, I beg you as sojourners and pilgrims, abstain from fleshly lusts which war against the soul,
The spirit and flesh fight over the control of the soul. Whoever controls the soul, controls you.
The Flesh
So what is “the flesh”? Is it the body? No. The flesh is a spiritual force, although it can be related to and connected to the body.
Your physical body is not evil. Paul in 1 Corinthians 3:16 and 1Corinthians 6:19 says that our bodies are the temple of the Holy Spirit. The teaching that the body = the flesh and is evil actually came from Greek gnostic philosophy that infiltrated the church.
The characteristics of the flesh or “lower nature” are actually characteristics of spiritual death – the nature of our spirits when we were separated from God.
Ephesians 2:1-3 1 And you He made alive, who were dead in trespasses and sins,
2 in which you once walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit who now works in the sons of disobedience,
3 among whom also we all once conducted ourselves in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, just as the others.
The reason the flesh became connected with the body is because it took the natural functions and desires of the body and perverted them by making them dominate the whole man and elevating them to a position they were never meant to have. Desires of the body in themselves are not inherently sinful in their proper place and context.
Food – perverted to gluttony
Sexual desire – perfectly acceptable in the context of marriage
Sensual pleasures (things that make you feel good). Who doesn’t like getting their back scratched or their shoulders rubbed? But sensual pleasures perverted can turn into things like drug addiction.
Spiritual death trained the human body and soul to be dominated by selfishness, resulting in the deeds of the flesh (Galatians 5:19-20).
2 Corinthians 5:17 Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new.
Now in the Christian the spirit is reborn and made into a new creation in the image of God. The spiritual source of the flesh nature is no longer there. But the soul still has its own “programming” – it’s still trained to act like the flesh. It needs to be retrained to follow the leading of the newly recreated spirit. That is how we can be transformed.
Transformation
Romans 12:1-2 1 I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service.
2 And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.
Vs. 1 is about commitment, giving yourself to God, dedicating and submitting yourself. It is a good and necessary thing. But that alone will not bring transformation.
Vs. 2 says we are transformed by the renewing of our minds.
Basically you have to change what you think and what you believe. You do that, and real, lasting transformation will come.
So what is renewing the mind, and how do we do it?
I’ve mentioned that the soul is the seat of our personality and where our consciousness lives. It is also what governs our behavior, and this is a key point. I am a computer programmer by profession, and I like to use the analogy that the soul is like our computer program – the set of instructions that tells the computer what to do. When we are born again, our spirit is changed instantly, but our soul and body are not. That is akin to taking a program that has bugs in it, and putting it on a brand new, state of the art computer. Because the old, buggy instructions are there in the program, the new computer will make the same mistakes as the old – it will just do it faster.
To really fix the problem, you have to debug the program and correct the instructions that cause the wrong behavior – i.e., you have to reprogram the computer. And that is what renewing the mind is all about: reprogramming our soul to have new instructions.
Almost all computer programs take input of some type, be it a user clicking on things or typing things, taking data from a database, etc. Even when the program is perfect, if it gets bad data, it will not produce desired results (the best programs will recognize and reject bad input). We call that “garbage in, garbage out”.
Our soul was programmed by our upbringing, the circumstances of our life, decisions we have made in the past, and by things inherent in our individual personalities. To reprogram our soul, it is going to have to have new input.
Start with, what are you looking at? What you look at will influence what you think. What you think will influence what you believe.
What are you feeding on?
Feed on the word of God.
Not so much of how you don’t measure up, your shortcomings, but who and what the Bible says you are.
“But it doesn’t seem true because I’m doing this”. You know what you’re doing, and God knows what you’re doing, but He said those things about you anyway.
Second, what are you saying? What is coming out of your mouth?
You may have to be like God and “call those things that be not as though they were” (Rom 4:17).
James 3 talks about the tongue being like a bit in the horses’ mouth or a rudder on a ship. Both of these control the direction the horse or ship is going in. We could also liken it to the steering wheel on a car. You don’t like the direction your life is taking? Start by turning the wheel – speaking the direction you want to go in.
Advances in medical science and study of the brain shows that your brain goes about trying to produce what you say out of your mouth.
Third, Listen to God.
It is a good thing to read and study the Bible, the word or logos of God. But it is even better to hear the word or rhema that He speaks to you personally. A word from God can change your life. He wants to speak those words of life to us, but we have to get into the position where we can hear.
We are so used to instant on in this world – if we want information, we can do a search on our computer or phone and have the answer right away. We get impatient if we have to wait for things.
But the expression “wait on the Lord” is there for a reason. I believe it is less a matter of God making you wait than it is for us silencing the voices and distractions that are all around us and in our heads to hear that still small voice of the Lord. It may take some diligence and practice. It’s almost like a barrier we have to break through, to get our minds to focus not on the natural, but the spiritual.
It gets easier, and the reward is great.
