Better at Fighting My Flesh
Rather, clothe yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ, and do not think about how to gratify the desires of the flesh.
Romans 13:14 (NIV)
Our thoughts, our actions, our emotions, our drives, our passions, our pursuits—they are all subject to the desires of our flesh. Our flesh, our human nature, is that part of us that lives apart from the influence of Christ. Paul says you can live better than your flesh. Every one of us can live better than our base nature.
While you are maturing in Christ throughout your life, you will have to ask God to help you live as you should, and you will live your entire life fighting the pull of your nature to do the opposite.
How do we fight these habits? How do we live better at fighting what tries to influence us outside of the influence of the Holy Spirit? Paul says: Here’s how you live better fighting your flesh: Stop making provisions for your base nature.
In the original Greek, this means stop processing the pull of your flesh. You can’t do anything about its invasion, but you do have a choice about how you process it. Paul says to stop giving your flesh a contribution in the consideration of your life’s plans. Be quick to dismiss the flesh.
You can’t stop a thought from circling around your processing center, but you don’t have to give an audience when selfish people start making suggestions to you. You can choose to feed your spiritual discernment and to seek wisdom from the Word of God, watching how Christ has exemplified this Himself.
Scripture doesn’t say “negotiate.”
Scripture doesn’t say “bargain.”
Scripture doesn’t say “compromise.”
Scripture says, resist the devil and he will flee.
This is all Paul is suggesting. If you know your flesh is going to take you in a direction that’s not under the influence of the Spirit, make no provision for the flesh. Cut its access. And its access is your attention, your time, your affection, your responses.
Make no provision for the flesh. Here’s how: clothe yourself in the Lord Jesus Christ.
That means making the choice to start the day intentionally aligning our thoughts with Christ, doing a head and heart check through the revelation His Word gives to us, submitting our entire day to Him in prayer, letting the Lord exercise dominion over the subtle ways our flesh is begging for responses from us. This is what Scripture means when it says to submit your ways unto Him.
Better Choices
Therefore, dear friends, since you have been forewarned, be on your guard so that you may not be carried away by the error of the lawless and fall from your secure position. But grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. To him be glory both now and forever! Amen.
2 Peter 3:17-18 (NIV)
Thank God for our freedom to choose. It’s a gift given to us by God. But while we are grateful that God has given us the freedom of choice, we also can confess that we could be giving God a lot better choices.
We can walk a more powerful spiritual life. We can honor God in the multiplicities of our lives. We can resist the influential pull of the culture and not feel pressured by the intimidating volume and certainty with which false teachers promote their false ideas and beliefs, their desires and opinions. It requires the spiritual discipline to say: “I love God so much for giving me choices that I want to honor Him by giving Him better choices”.
You decide in your life that for you to honor God, you’re not going to chase easy choices. You can decide: “I don’t expect that with blessing comes ease of all decision making. I will not avoid hard choices, but not only will I not avoid hard choices, I will not be led by others’ choices. I’m going to steward the privilege God has given me to make a choice. And as I grow in faith, I’m going to offer Him better choices.”
While God has blessed you with the freedom of choice, can you acknowledge that you have not always been a good steward of that freedom? And if you are honest, you and I know we could offer God a lot better choices with regard to our lives—choices about what matters most.
What you and God have fought to do to get you where you are should not be so cheaply negotiated by the opinions of other people.
God has redeemed you and set you where He has positioned you. Only you know how much God has had to intervene in the cracks and crevices of your life’s progression to get you to a place of peace, to help you love yourself again, to make you not ashamed of who you have become. You don’t sell that cheaply. You protect that.
Fight to make better choices for God. Fight because the forward movement has been so transforming that you need to protect your progress. You are connected to God’s revealed mind, His express knowledge and thoughts, His eternal will.
Better at Building Relationships
If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone.
Romans 12:18 (NIV)
We can do relationships better. In Romans 12, Paul is teaching that you might be, in some of your relationships, the only witness for Christ. Or if not the only witness, you might be the strongest witness, which means if the person you are engaged in a relationship with is ever going to get a right and clear picture of Christ, it’s going to be contingent upon what they observe in their relationship with you.
Paul is simply teaching that the people you are in relationships with might shape their desires differently regarding Christ if they witness your life responding to the leading of the Spirit. That means your witness matters.
This is why he puts the pressure on you to spark the conversation. It’s why you have to make the reservations and initiate the considerations. It’s why you have to be the first to reach out. It’s why, even if you haven’t done anything wrong, you have to offer the first apology. It’s why you have to arrange the agenda and navigate the terrain. It’s why you have to make all the decisions. And yes, it’s tiring, and I know it’s fatiguing, but God knows what He put in you, and He knows it works. You just need to be faithful.
You can shift your language from “God, this isn’t fair” and “Why is it always me?” to “God, what a blessing that you trust me to carry this kind of weight. Thank you that you’ve settled your Spirit in me like this, that I’m going to at least fight to react in obedience.”
In many people’s lives, you are perhaps the only person who brings Jesus into the conversation. And that’s why God depends on you. Because when they watch your reaction, when they listen to your commentary, when they see how you respond to things that are happening in your life and how you are staying together with so much chaos swirling around you, it provides lenses for them into what it means to live in perfect peace. When your mind is steadied on Jesus, being a witness becomes more important than anything else.
Better at Loving Me
The one who gets wisdom loves life; the one who cherishes understanding will soon prosper.
Proverbs 19:8 (NIV)
Part of the Hebrew understanding of love makes it not only emotional but actionable. You can use the word love in relation to God’s love for you to shape your perception of yourself, to guide your self-care, and to frame your view of life, including how you fit into the world and what’s really important about your life.
God wants you to love His people, and He certainly wants you to love Him. He wants you to love His church and His creation. But God also wants you to love yourself, and He wants you to love yourself as He loves you, which means you have a right to make loving yourself a priority. You are honoring God when you love yourself because it affirms your gratitude for the way God decided to express His creative, sovereign, divine imagination through your life.
If you carry God’s wisdom, you are receiving what helps you to love yourself, and therefore, you don’t need to depend on or become addicted to whether other people are handling you with a healthy love. When you love yourself, you don’t mind demanding from others how you expect to be handled as you grow and mature and change.
They need to handle you based on the you that you’ve become and not the you that you used to be, still timid and afraid and uncertain and unaware. In Christ, there is no stagnation. He’s always growing us and maturing us and shaping us and filling us and blessing us and elevating us and progressing us. So that means you are always growing, and you have to give yourself permission to love yourself enough to move forward.
Do you know how many of us won’t accept God’s blessings because we’re still beating ourselves up over who we used to be? Perhaps guilt is suppressing you so much that you don’t think you deserve it. Know that the devil is a liar. He who the son sets free is free indeed. And if you are free, that means every opportunity God has in your future is given with full knowledge of your past, and He’s telling you to forget those days that are behind you.
Called to Steward
But the angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary; you have found favor with God. You will conceive and give birth to a son, and you are to call him Jesus.”
Luke 1:30-31 (NIV)
God has dispensed special graces to you that show up in ways that make it unmistakably clear that you have to walk your journey according to God’s speed. He dispenses graces to each one of us, which make us able to honor Him in spaces and with assignments in life that others would never be able to steward in the same way.
For Mary, it was her womb. For some, it’s teaching. For some, it’s their parenting. For others, it’s their hands. For others, it’s their strength, their courage, their compassion, or their grit. For some, it’s their suffering.
Mary is told that God’s favor requires her to stand as an anomaly in her whole community’s customs and practices, their spiritual considerations, their ideas about what a miracle is, and how they understand God to work in human affairs. God was saying through His angel: Mary, I’m getting ready to use you to confuse a whole lot of people. It is going to cause community questions and speculations. You’re going to be the brunt of a whole lot of rumors, and it’s going to cause a lot of confusion, because I dispense grace for you to birth redemption. You will give birth to a son without having sex with a man.
That’s awe-striking in itself! But then the angel also tells her what she is to call the baby. In a society where every child is culturally and customarily named by the Father, Mary was dispensed the special grace to name him Jesus because He would save people from their sins.
The favor you find with God requires faith, courage, and a surrender to the path that God constructs in your life.
If you want to know what you’re called to do, you have to ask yourself, where is God releasing graces to you? Because that’s how you have found favor with God. Connected to it is the call that God has for your life. Here’s the frustration for some of us: we are trying to traffic where we have not been graced. That’s going to create frustration. You have to find out where God has dispensed grace, and that doesn’t always mean an easy path.
You need Jesus to help you identify where graces have been released into your life because sometimes His graces may have been dispensed in your pain and in your pressure as much as it could be in your pleasure and in your prosperity. You need this because the assignment might require you to be different, change, and grow. If you want your life to count in ways that God has imagined for you, then you have to strengthen your faith in Jesus because that creates a road from your divine calling to your divine destiny.
