Thu 6.4 – Self Illustrated

Today’s Readings: Colossians 3.5-9; Judges 1-2

I want to take up our Devotions today right where we left off last night. We were crunched for time, so I just want to take time to expound on what God was teaching us in the ILLUSTRATION about the Flesh from the story of the Children of Israel in Judges. (guys, I can’t encourage you strongly enough to check out the verse references to understand the strength of these passages of scripture as we spend time in the Word today.)

A COUPLE THINGS YOU NEED TO KEEP IN MIND FOR THIS…

• Don’t forget that the land of Cannan (the promised land) is a picture of the Abundant Christian Life. We see that by comparing Exo 3.8 & John 10.10 – God did not bring the children of Israel out of Egypt just to bring them out…it was to bring then INTO the promised land, where He was going to dwell with them! In the same way God didn’t bring us out of the bondage of Sin and the World (Egypt) just to save us, but to bring us INTO an ABUNDANT LIFE in the place where He wants to DWELL WITH US!
• Don’t forget that the ENEMY OF GOD in this situation is the inhabitants of the land, those who currently control the ground where God wants to dwell with His people. This is a picture of how our FLESH is currently on the throne of our lives (Eph 4.22) and is thus the enemy of God (Gal 5.17), and the earthly ways of the flesh are what we will have to battle as the Israelites had to battle those who were already dwelling in the land of God.

NOW FOR THE BACKGROUND OF THE ILLUSTRATION…

• We noticed last night in Exo 23.27-32 that God said NOT to allow anyone to remain alive when they come into the promised land. He said for the children of God to DESTROY everyone when they get in there.
  • The same principal is true as we conquer this ground (our bodies – 2 Cor 5.1 & Gen 2.7), we must COMPLETELY DESTROY all of it’s NATURAL inhabitants – that is LUSTS! (Eph 2.3)
• Then, we saw that in Deut 7.1-10, God specifically repeats the instruction RIGHT BEFORE THEY BEGIN TO TAKE OVER THE PROMISED LAND, and in this passage He specifically says to SHOW NO MERCY to the inhabitants. People would surely be begging for their lives, trying to make deals with the Israelites and bargaining with them for survival.
  • Again, the principal repeats itself with the life of the believer – as we begin to realize and live in the PUTTING OFF of our flesh, and we begin to KILL it (MORTIFY OUR MEMBERS)what is going to happen is that our members are going to BEG, PLEAD, BARGAIN, and try to make DEALS with our Spiritual self in order to SURVIVE! And THAT is NOT what God said to do with the inhabitants of the LAND! This is where we run the risk of becoming PARTIALLY OBEDIENT, and thus DISOBEDIENT.
• And Lastly we saw from Psalm 106.34-40 that God said He ABHORRED the people who disobeyed His command, and did not completely wipe out the inhabitants of the land (our flesh).
  • Now, the reason for such strong language is because when they allowed the inhabitants of the land to remain, those inhabitants kept their false Gods with them…then they eventually bled those false systems of worship into the TRUE WORSHIP of THE TRUE GOD and thus led God’s people AWAY from HIM – Those inhabitants used DIECETFUL LUSTS to draw God’s people away from HIM, the very One who SAVED them out of EGYPT (SIN) to BE WITH HIM!!! No wonder he ABHORRED it. (I encourage you to look that word up on dictionary.com if you are not familiar with it’s meaning…and remember this is GOD who feels this way!!! WOW – so humbling.)

Spend some time dwelling on that today…then tomorrow we will pick up right here and keep going. So, tomorrow you will need to reference back to today’s devotion so that some of the things will make sense…

Pray that God will open your eyes to see wondrous things today from His Word (Ps 119.18), that He will give you strength and power to completely mortify your flesh as you go throughout this day! And I’ll see you here, tomorrow.

Mon 5.1 – To kill a mocking flesh

Today’s Readings: Colossians 3.1-7; Romans 6

Hey everyone! Man, I had a blast at the camping trip this weekend. Okay, so I was only 2 for 10 with the skeet shooting, but I still had a blast! We had a few close calls with the weather but God was protecting us, and we thankfully praise Him for that! I want to note that there was no devotion from Saturday because we didn’t have any internet access at the property where we were camping. As a matter of fact, we didn’t have access to anything but woods and dirt there J . So, since I couldn’t access the internet to post Saturday’s devotion, there wasn’t one. I appreciate your faithfulness for checking in to see it, it really encourages me to know that you guys are getting so faithful with these devotions. We are averaging like 35 people doing them a day. That’s almost half of our youth group, which means we are getting more and more people on board.

Today, I want to simply answer a question. We’ve been talking about mortifying the flesh, which is something we all know that we should do. However, it can also seem to be a pretty complicated thing to explain. Therefore, today I just want us to look at some scriptures that explain the process of making that REALITY in our lives. If you would, start today by reading Colossians 3.1-7 to remind yourself of God’s commission for the one who is RISEN with Christ. We are to live our life here like the life we have with Him in heaven. We are to SEEK and SET OUR AFFECTION on things above where God is, not things of earth where we are. We saw the things of earth are mainly things of our BODIES and that’s why God mentions in Colossians 3.3-4 that one day our bodies will be redeemed, but in the mean time we need MORTIFY our MEMBERS which are UPON THE EARTH.

Now, right there is where we pick up for today. If we are to mortify our members on this earth, how do we do that? That’s a fair question, and a good one at that. Well, I think one of the best portions of scripture for us to examine is a simple one found in Romans 6. Paul is talking about this very idea of MORTIFYING or making DEAD our flesh on this earth that we may LIVE UNTO GOD and not unto ourselves. Paul gives a little formula for this process, he says we have to (1) Know, (2) Reckon, and (3) Yield to the truth that we are dead.

1.     Know it. Paul takes Romans 6.1-5 to remind us that we ARE DEAD with Christ. Then in verse 6 he says, “KNOWING THIS…” What is it that he says we are to KNOW? He says we are to KNOW that our OLD MAN (that is our old nature) is CRUCIFIED with him…and therefore because our OLD NATURE (that part of us that yielded itself to the body that we currently live in) is now dead, we no longer have to SERVE SIN. It is interesting to note how Paul describes our bodies in this verse. What does he call them? Bodies of …SIN. Wow, what a strong name.

Okay, so first things first – in order to mortify the flesh we have to KNOW that we no longer are bound to serve it because our OLD MAN is CRICIFIED with Christ, freeing us to live unto HIM and not this BODU OF SIN.

2.       Reckon it. In Romans 6.11, Paul says we are to RECKON ourselves to be DEAD UNTO SIN, but ALIVE UNTO GOD because of the truth we now KNOW from verse 6.This is a word you probably don’t understand unless you are related to country people. “I reckon so” was a common response to questions when I was growing up. What it meant was “My calculations would lead me to say yes.” And really, that’s not such a bad understanding of this word. It is actually a word that, in the days when the Bible was written, would have been used as an accounting term. Today I might say I have RECKONED, or balanced, my checkbook. It means to survey what you know about the situation, and calculate the truth. If I had $100 Monday, and I spent $20 on Wednesday, and deposited $10 on Friday, then Saturday I would RECKON that I have $90 available to me in my account.

So, in dealing with our flesh, we are to begin to account, or RECKON, the truth of our freedom from the bondage of sin in our bodies and realize the life we can now life unto Christ. Once we know something is truth, then we can begin to adjust our RECORDS to match what we know is truth. (when people’s personal RECORDS do not match the truth of the ACCOUNT they are recording, that is when people get into trouble and bounce checks. People get into trouble much the same way spiritually.)

3.     Yield to it. In verse 13, Paul says that once you KNOW it, and once you’ve moved your life to RECKON it, then you simply YIELD to what you already know is true. If you are DEAD with Christ to sin, and you have ACCOUNTED that truth to mean you no longer have to SERVE sin, then when the hunger for sin presents itself, you no longer have to YIELD YOUR MEMBERS to unrighteous acts, but you can YIELD THOSE MEMBERS as instruments of Christ. Those are the SAME MEMBERS that Paul talks about MORTIFYING in Col 3.5. When you kill them to the flesh, you can utilize them to the Spirit, as one ALIVE UNTO GOD.

So that’s the very simply progression God gives to help us with mortifying the flesh… (1) KNOW the truth of your freedom from sin and your DEATH with Christ. (2) RECKON the truth in your personal life, do not let this simply be something you know “is”, but make it something that “is true about YOU.” (3) YIELD to that truth in your life. When we realize we are dead unto sin, and alive unto God, then we can YIELD to the right master…the only Master! Amen.

4.2 – Lessons from a Seed

Today’s Readings: Colossians 3.5-7; I Corinthians 15.31-38; Romans 6.6, 13.14

In yesterday’s study, we talked about the way that God says to deal with our sinful flesh…we simply die to it. Of course that doesn’t mean that He wants us to physically harm our bodies, but rather to render our bodily desires (lusts, pride, covetousness, etc) as dead. That is why God chose to use the word “mortify” in Col 3.5. It is the same word we would use today to speak of one who deals with dead bodies, they are a “Mortician”. So, today let’s look at another passage of scripture to maybe help us understand God’s reasoning and purpose behind choosing to use those words. In the verses above from Romans, you will find a couple more examples of when God tells us to render our bodies and their ways DEAD. We will spend our time looking at the passage above from I Corinthians 15 today.

In 1 Corinthians, the context (or topic being discussed) is the resurrection from the dead. However, in the middle of talking about that, an AMAZING TRUTH is laid out for us. God says that whenever you sow a seed, that seed cannot be a plant until it dies as a seed(15.36). You catch that? For an apple tree to grow, the apple SEED has to die, and then take on the NEW LIFE of an apple TREE! WOW. Again, God is speaking about the resurrection and how our glorified bodies are going to be a new kind of body that we cannot inherit until our physical ones we have now die. But SPIRITUALLY, the same it true! We cannot fully reach our NEW LIFE in Jesus Christ, until we fully MORTIFY our fleshy (or earthly or bodily) desires and ways!

You’ll notice that in 15.31 Paul (a great Christian leader who realized the NEW LIFE that he was to have in Christ) said he DIED DAILY. He can’t mean physically, can he?!? What he means is the spiritual dying to our flesh that we are talking about from Colossians 3.5-7.

Maybe you are asking, “What are the things we mortify?” Sometimes when we talk about SPIRITUAL truths like that, it is hard for us to understand them in a practical way. If you notice in v.5, God says “Mortify therefore your members which are upon the earth…” And then He gives a list of some things. Do you see that? Those are the things that are CAUSED BY those MEMBERS we are to mortify. In other words, what bodily desires cause us to commit FORNICATION? Things like lust, uncontrolled desires that we allow to control us. So we are to mortify our LUSTFUL DESIRES. What things cause us to commit UNCLEANLINESS? Things that are done from an impure heart, with sinful motives, cause us to be UNCLEAN, unholy, unrighteous, and more!

Okay, do you see the pattern there? As you conclude your time with God today, look through that list and ask the Spirit of God to show you where things are going UN-DEAD in your life. Things that need to be MORTIFIED. What are the areas of your life where you know God is not pleased, yet you seem to struggle with those things anyway? Those are things of our flesh(bodies) that we must not allow to control us . Those are things we MORTIFY.