Letting Your Flesh Take You, Where Your Spirit Won’t Go…
2 Corinthians 10:18 (New Living Translation)
18 When people commend themselves, it doesn’t count for much. The important thing is for the Lord to commend them.
When I was growing up, the saying “don’t let your mouth write a check your behind can’t cash,” was used, quite freely. It was a metaphor for don’t let your words take you to a place that the rest of your can not live up to. It was not unusual to have people that would talk a whole lot and have nothing to substantiate the words that came from their mouth. Likewise, even today, as an adult I have found that often we will talk a good game, but there is nothing to back it up. I love to talk about the internet, because I am always surprised by people and the things that they will do on the internet, not excluding most things imaginable. But I think the irony that surfaces often is how often we see the status or title of “Christian” attached to some things that even by the world’s standards are outlandish. My pastor a few weeks ago was referencing another dynamic of our times, the fact the on many of the award shows that artist will perform or have a CD out and they use every profane word, degrade woman, and speak of killing and then they get up to accept an award and the first thing our their mouth is “I like to give honor to God who is my Lord and Savior” or they say, “for without God this would not have been possible.” How could God be in the mix of stuff that is contrary to His word and who He is?
For many of us we title ourselves Christian and we even have the flow of scriptures, we have the right phraseology and we can hold a sanctified conversation when we are called to do so, but we regularly want to set the rules by which we serve God. We want to allow anger to lead us into sin, and say well God knows my heart. We want to allow the lust of the eye and the flesh full reign in our lives and say that “God is still the head of our lives.” We want to allow pride, conceit and haughtiness dominion over us and say “God made me this way.” We want to post half naked or naked pictures on the internet and we try to justify by saying “well, God gave me this body, why should I be ashamed.” We have sexual relations outside of the confides of the marital bed and then we want to fall down and pray before or right after and say “well God knew I wanted to anyway.” We will let our flesh rise up and leads us into many situation and think that God’s sweet Holy Spirit is going too, but when we are allowing our flesh dominion, God’s stops at the door saying I will wait for you here, I can not and will not be apart of that.
I had someone I knew that was doing something that was contrary to will of God when they were asked did they pray about the situation, they turned and asked did you pray about your situation. They did not want God’s conviction and they did not want to be accountable to anything but the flesh. For they knew if they stopped and availed themselves the God, they would not be able to appease the flesh. God was not in control, but the flesh was…God sets before us each day a right to choose whether we serve our flesh or Him. For some of us the choice is simple there is no other way, for others of us there is always another way. Where will you be going today and who goes with you? Are we going the way of the cross or the way of our flesh? Will God be able to go everywhere we dare to go or will he have to sit portions of our day out?
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