The War against the Flesh

Paul speaks of a state of humanity that he calls the flesh. And we’ve already noticed that Luther said that the great triad of enemies for the Christian growth contain the world, the flesh, and the devil. And when we’re talking about the flesh, I want us to understand that when the Bible talks about the struggle that we go through with the flesh it is not simply talking about the body. That the struggle between the flesh and the Spirit cannot be equated with a struggle between the body and the soul or the body and the mind. But rather what the New Testament is talking about when it talks about this fierce struggle that goes on in the Christian life between the flesh and the Spirit is the struggle between the power of sin in our natural fallen humanity against the influence of God the Holy Spirit in our lives. So that the whole struggle and process of sanctification involves what Paul calls warfare. There’s a war going on. And it’s a war between the flesh of man and the Spirit of God. Now I get so irritated when I hear preachers stand up and say, “Come to Jesus and all your problems will be over.” Because that is just simply a lie. My life didn’t get complicated until I became a Christian. Before I was a Christian, though I was not happy, I had a relative degree of peace. I knew that I was doing things that I ought not to be doing. I mean I had not totally annihilated my conscience, but I was on the way to it. By repeating certain actions, you can so sear the conscience and put callouses upon the soul that where you once perhaps felt a little twinge of guilt, now you can do these things through repetition that don’t bother you anymore and you experience what the Bible calls hard heartedness. But when I came to Christ, I found a new conscience. And so now things that I didn’t worry about before became matters of ethical concern. And life was complicated. And wouldn’t it have been nice if I would have said, “Well, what I did when I was converted was, I traded in the flesh, bought into the Spirit and lived happily ever after.” That’s the struggle of sanctification, though the power of the flesh is broken and the power of the flesh is now subordinate to the Spirit to a very real measure in regeneration, the flesh, ladies and gentlemen, is not totally annihilated at conversation. The war goes on.