To Kill or Embrace

Soooo there is this big struggle between your flesh and your spirit right? All through the Bible I see people that struggled with the exact same things and these people were amazing women and men of God…our flesh is our humanity and our spirit is the essence of God right? So how do these two survive each other?

A common practice is to constantly stay on the offensive, if your flesh gets out of line… smack it around and make it behave! The problem with beating yourself and beleiving that you can beat your flesh and make it behave?… well try it! just start really smacking yourself in the face! I dare you!!! most of us can’t even give ourselves a proper black eye! we have built in self preservation! so basically we will never go so far as to REALLY eliminate the problem.

so lets think about temptation… something comes up .. you are tempted…so you start beating yourself up and trying to force yourself to stop what you are thinking about doing. But you are not really going to bring the pain are you? NO! why? well its simple… you already want what you want… so the fighting and argument with yourself is pretty much a formality so you can say.. “I tried but you know the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak” so then you are off the hook right?

My method of preference is… plain and simple… temptation comes… I look at it and say.. “wow that is really tempting.. I really want to do that!” fortunately I have an ongoing conversation with Jesus and I have learned that temptation is a serious interuption! so being fully aware of my current status of “tempted” I just stop and think… “Jesus… I really want to do this.. I know that it is selfish of me and I am really wanting to be unselfish. Can you take this for me?

so what do we do with our humanity..

You could try to kill it dead… like so many people do… obsess yourself with tracking down every thing that you have a problem with and go all “shock and awe” on yourself… taking to heart Paul’s metaphor of “beating your body daily”just to keep things in check…

Or you could embrace your humanity every time it pops up and bring it to Jesus like a kid brings toads to his mommy.

Jason the bald guy
jasonthebaldguy.com