One of the things about the flesh principle within us, is that it is a master of getting us in a spiritual corner. And this can be crippling.<\/p>\n\n\n
Let me convey what I mean here with an illustration. It’s a scenario we all know very well. Imagine you’re pouring a cup of tea. And someone approaches you and looks at you with raised eyebrows, “Making a cup of tea are we?” The question is loaded. You respond, “yeah I fancy one – sorry – did you want one too?”. And then the punch line – “no thank you – it’s just nice to be asked”. Ouch!<\/p>\n\n\n
The point of this, is that you can’t win. If you had asked in the first place, you would have been turned down, and since you didn’t<\/em> ask, you’re made to ask anyway, only to be turned down. You’re cornered. Leaving aside the finer details of a scenario such as this, the point is, the person who approached you is being unreasonable. A better word is implacable. Really, really, awkward.<\/p>\n\n\n We need to understand that the flesh is like this. If we listen to the flesh, if we answer to its calls on our thinking and actions, we will always lose. Only by refusing its unreasonable demands upon our hearts and minds and by subjecting ourselves to the demands and freedoms of The Spirit of God, can we get out from underneath its crippling influence.<\/p>\n\n\n Take for example, the use of spiritual gift. If the Flesh has its way, one of two things will happen. Either, you will use your gift in a proud way or, you will be convinced into thinking that you shouldn’t use it because you are not good enough. It’s a lose-lose situation. And notice, how either case, is totally at odds with the other. In other words, in the first case, pride is the issue and in the second case a false-humility is the issue (pride dressed up in another way). There’s no middle ground here, it’s just one extreme or another. And most of us can relate to this.<\/p>\n\n\n At times, we’ve used our gift and we’ve been proud about it. We feel good about what we did and take private pride in how effective we were. Nothing done for God there then – not really, apart from his sovereign hand over it. And then at times we haven’t used our gift, because we didn’t feel worthy, or maybe we had shame about the pride we’d had previously, or any number of other totally pathetic excuses. It’s a lose-lose situation. The flesh is totally unreasonable and whether we apply it to gift or any other dimension of spiritual activity, the flesh will always have us in a corner. Truth is, we can be quite naive to this clever ploy of the flesh. We need to watch out for this kind of thinking. It doesn’t make sense and whenever we detect ourselves as being spiritually crippled, we can know for sure that this is not God’s will.<\/p>\n\n\n So what do we do? Well you cannot reason with the person who wants to be asked, but when asked, doesn’t actually want a cup of tea. Likewise, you cannot reason with the flesh. Anyway, the flesh has been crucified with Christ at Calvary, so there is no need<\/em> to reason with a principle which you should be reckoning as dead. We need instead, to adopt the clear thinking of scripture.<\/p>\n\n\n Let’s return to our scenario about spiritual gift and apply this there. Scripture makes it quite clear that spiritual gift, in fact this applies to natural gift as well, is not inherently ours. For natural gift, scripture teaches us that we are ‘fearfully and wonderfully made’. So who you are, with all your skills and abilities is a product of God’s creative hand in your life. When your brain is firing on all cylinders and you’re living out God’s intentions for you – yes, it’s you who’s doing that – but only because God made you that way. You owe all your talents to God. So, any time you feel any tinge of pleasure about what you’ve achieved – and that itself is not wrong, don’t succumb to the flesh and be proud of that, take time to thank God. Does this mean you have to thank God every time you do something well? Well, why not? It’s not difficult to send up a quick thank you to your Father in heaven – and when you do – you are filled with a sense of wonder that God has entrusted you to steward that moment in time by employing his gift of grace, in whatever form it may manifest itself. You do not purchase that ability, you did not acquire that ability. The clue is in the word – it is a gift. And if anyone takes any pride in a gift, it is the giver, when he sees it being used.<\/p>\n\n\n “For I say…to every man…to think soberly, according as God hath dealt to every man the measure of faith”<\/p>\nRomans 12.3<\/cite>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n At the same time, to be in receipt of a gift, is to be obliged to use it. Imagine if someone bought you a valuable gift and your response was – “oh no…I’m sorry, I can’t take that; I’m really not worthy of your kindness”. There is really nothing very attractive in that kind of response. Who says the giving of the gift has anything to do with your worth anyway? Can’t you be loved, just because you are loved, or does love always have to be withheld, until it finds a worthy recipient? These are strange notions to the word of God. He doesn’t give us gifts because we deserve them. For reasons only known to him, he decides to employ us in his service and gives us gifts because, we’d be useless without them. They are a necessity, not a nice-to-have. It’s the flesh that convinces us, that our lack of worth is a problem. It certainly would be, if our employment by God was based on law, but it is based on grace. We don’t think too well of the sinner who doesn’t feel the obligation of God’s love towards him and rejects, the ultimate gift. But it doesn’t stop us falling foul of the same unregenerate thinking.<\/p>\n\n\n As we have said, since our ability to serve God is based on a gift, from him to us, we are therefore obliged to use it. No false-humility will pass. If there is a problem of unconfessed sin in your life, then you must confess that sin and enjoy the forgiveness which Christ can give you, and then get back to serving him.<\/p>\n\n\n In a roundabout way, there’s something humorous about the unreasonable person who tries to run a guilt-trip on you whilst you make a cup of tea. It is somewhat laughable. As they try on their put-down, they score an own goal against themselves, because when ever we make someone else look bad, inevitably we come off looking bad ourselves. But there’s nothing really that humorous about the attempts of the flesh to cripple us from serving God. Christian service has a significance about it which means that any attempt by any means to impede your service for God, has to be swiftly detected, dealt with and moved on from. You cannot win with the flesh. Each day, each moment, we must refuse its unreasonable demands upon our hearts and subject ourselves to the demands and freedoms of The Spirit of God. If we do this then we won’t so much win, we will conquer, more than conquer.<\/p>\n\n\n …we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.<\/p>\nRomans 8.37<\/cite>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" One of the things about the flesh principle within us, is that it is a master of getting us in a spiritual corner. And this can be crippling. Let me convey what I mean here with an illustration. It’s a scenario we all know very well. Imagine you’re pouring a cup of tea. 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