The Flesh

Defense against the devil – Part 1

INTRODUCTION: We first meet the devil in Genesis 3. There, “the prince of the power of the air” (Ephesians 2:2) and the father of lies (John 8:44) appears to our first parents as a talking serpent, creating doubt about the goodness of God and about the truth of His word, and eventually tempting Adam and Eve to disobey the LORD and to eat the forbidden fruit.

But even though he was cursed because of his wickedness in Eden (Gen. 3:14-15), the devil has continued to tempt people to sin throughout human history, even down to our day. The devil hates God and hates His Christ and so hates the followers of Christ. The devil hates believers and he hates the church, and his ambition is to steal and kill and destroy (John 10:10).

As God’s word to His people, the Bible is clear to reveal the devil and to talk about his schemes. In fact, the believer would be wise to become familiar with how the devil operates so that we are not ignorant of his schemes (2 Cor. 2:11).

In the next couple of posts, I will be talking about practical ways that the believer can defend themselves from the ploys and schemes of the devil.

8 Be of sober spirit, be on the alert. Your adversary, the devil, prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour. – 1 Peter 5:8

Here in Peter’s first epistle is one of the classic biblical texts describing the devil’s activity. First, the apostle makes a clarion call for the disciple to be alert. There is no excuse for slackness in your walk with Christ. The disciple is to be alert for the enemy’s attacks at all times. We are in enemy territory, and we must expect the enemy to attack. So, “be sober, be on the alert.”

Now, what is the enemy’s goal in his prowling? What is the devil hoping to achieve? The devil is seeking to render you useless for the Kingdom. Make no mistake about it. The devil seeks to ruin your life and to make a shipwreck of your testimony for Jesus. Therefore, make it a matter of spiritual discipline to always be on the alert for enemy attack.

Also, know this, that the devil will continue with his ambition of ruining your life until you are called home or are quickly changed. So, your alertness must be lifelong.

And the more useful you are to Christ and His kingdom, the more eager the devil will be for your shipwreck. So, if you sense that the spiritual attacks on you are frequent and intense, know that this may be because you are perceived as a threat to the devil’s plans. The devil does not waste his artillery on harmless targets.

THE DEVIL USES MEANS TO ACHIEVE HIS ENDS

Even though the devil can attack directly, he almost always works through means. Most commonly he issues his temptations though the “world” and the “flesh.” Our purpose here is not to give a complete theological description of these two areas, but to describe them briefly so that the disciple can be alert to their working in your life.

The “world” (“kosmos” in the Greek) is a label for the godless world systems that have been constructed by fallen man at the supervision of the devil that are anti-God and that appeal to sinful behaviors. These include economic and political systems, and cultures that operate without any reference to the living God and breed godlessness. The “world” creates the visible playground for pride and lust and greed and hatred and jealousy and envy and revenge and so on. The devil has planned and constructed these “world” systems to ensure the ongoing sin of the unrighteous and to tempt the righteous to give in to sin. Thus, the devil uses the means of the world to cause the shipwreck of believers.

The devil also works through the means of the “flesh.” The flesh is not the same thing as the human body. The LORD created the human body as the ideal vehicle for carrying a man or a woman from birth to death. Rather, the flesh is the indwelling desire lurking deep within every human that craves and delights in sin. The flesh loves sin. The flesh dwells in the human heart and constantly suggests sin to the subconscious so that the person will indulge in sinful thoughts and words and behaviors. Think of the flesh as the enemy inside the gates, tempting the disciple who loves righteousness to continue in wickedness and ungodliness. Paul talks about the war with the flesh in Romans 7:14-25 and in Galatians 5:13-24. The message here is that the devil uses the flesh in his efforts to shipwreck believers.

SUMMARY

Let’s review what we have covered today.

  • The disciple of Jesus needs to be on the alert for the attacks of the devil.
  • The devil’s attacks against the disciple are lifelong.
  • The more useful the disciple is, the more the devil seeks to derail them.
  • The devil’s goal is to shipwreck the disciple’s life by ruining their usefulness to the Kingdom and their testimony for Jesus.
  • The devil most typically works through the means of the “world” and the “flesh.”

In the next post we will talk about when we are most vulnerable to the devil’s schemes and what the devil can and cannot do to the disciple of Christ.            

SDG                 rmb                 11/23/2021                 #458

An active repentance

When a person first comes to faith in Jesus, there will probably be a period of time before that new disciple realizes the nature of their conversion. The person has been made entirely new in their inner person, and so there will be new ambitions and new affections, and there will be the strange experience of beginning to detest the sin that formerly was so pleasant and to yearn for holiness and righteousness that once seemed so strange and unappealing. You have been born again. New creature in Christ. A child of God with a ticket to heaven. And you have instantly become an enemy to all the ungodly and a target of temptation for all manner of sin. You have passed from death to life (John 5:24).

One of the activities you must learn quickly is the practice of repentance. This is to be an active repentance that is not in word only but plays out as martial combat, a soldier’s resolve against sin, with the attitude that “Only one of us is coming out of this alive.” Sin must be killed, and repentance is the most lethal spiritual weapon to accomplish the execution.

Repentance is the disciple’s most powerful means of holiness, but it is a weapon that requires skill in its use. And where does the new disciple learn to wield this weapon well? My advice to the new believer (or the “old” believer who was never taught about repentance) is to begin becoming familiar with this tool today! Wielded well, this weapon of repentance will yield a harvest of sanctification but left in the scabbard it poses no threat to iniquity. A hunger for holiness with a hatred of sin is the hand that draws the sword of repentance out of its sheath.

DAILY PRACTICE

Daily practice of active repentance establishes skill and readiness in the use of the weapon. Spend the next year in daily active repentance. Identify the sins that remain and that threaten to disqualify you, that would gladly ruin your testimony, and would make a shipwreck of your life. A partial list of potential sins would be: anger, pride, greed, lust, selfishness, hatred, resentment, jealousy, drunkenness, stealing, wasting time, laziness, worry and anxiety, fear of man, judgmentalism, lying, failure to proclaim the gospel, and there are others. Begin with two or three of the sins that most acutely plague you and actively repent of these sins at least once a day

SEE SIN, WIELD WEAPON

As a soldier in active warfare is ever at the ready to shoulder his rifle, so the disciple employs repentance at the first appearance of sin. As a soldier fires a hundred rounds of ammunition at practice targets to be ready for one shot at an enemy, so the disciple constantly practices repentance to fend off the foe.

A NEW SLAVE OF RIGHTEOUSNESS

The believer, whether following Christ for one week or fifty years, has become a slave of righteousness (Romans 6:18). This is a doctrinal fact that is as true as the fact that the believer was formerly a slave of sin. But now that the disciple is enslaved to a new and righteous Master, who is there to teach him how to combat his former sins?

At conversion, the “flesh” is strong and healthy, and the new believer is clumsy with the means of spiritual combat. Truly, “the willing is present in him, but the doing of the good is not (Romans 7:18),” because there has been no training in the fight of righteousness. The new believer needs someone to come alongside to train them in the martial art of repentance.

Surely it is the elders of the church who are to teach the new (and not new, also!) disciple what weapons he now possesses, how to use those weapons effectively, and what tactics the enemy will employ to try to destroy him. The elders of the church should be skilled and practiced at using repentance in their own lives and should have experience teaching others to conquer indwelling sin.

THE ONE WHO DISCIPLES OTHERS

The one who disciples others must himself be skilled in the weapons of war, and the primary weapon for directly attacking sin is repentance. He who would walk in holiness should seek out one who is a master of repentance.

The disciple has begun a war with sin, and the flesh, which formerly served as your accomplice to wickedness, is now to be put to death so that the fleshly voice of temptation will be silenced.

SDG                 rmb                 6/1/2021                     #411

What is a wretched man to do? (Romans 7:24)

Do we as followers of the Lord Jesus lament our sin? And if we do, do we lament it in the way the Bible calls us to lament sin?

These are questions that come to mind as the disciple reads through Romans 7:14-25. In this passage, Paul teaches us that, regardless of spiritual maturity and sanctification, all believers are still indwelt by the “flesh,” that factory of indwelling sin that wages war against the Spirit and that attempts to lure the believer into sin. In this section of Romans, Paul teaches that the flesh persistently tempts and occasionally succeeds. The ongoing resistance to the flesh’s temptations is wearying and seeing ourselves falling into sin is distressing and humiliating. This leads Paul to cry out,

Wretched man that I am! Who will set me free from the body of this death? – Romans 7:24

This passage is well-known, and I think there are still strong lessons to be learned here.

On one hand, too few Christians dwell in Romans 7:14-25 because too few Christians are aware of the war against personal sin. Too few Christians take seriously the New Testament’s imperatives about the demand for personal holiness, and so they never lament their indwelling sin. As a result, Paul’s teaching in Romans 7 about the danger and persistence of the sins of the flesh receives scant attention and results in no lament. It goes without saying that the person who can read the Bible and not lament their own sin has at best a shallow experience of the gospel’s power. To them, we recommend a daily meditation on Romans 7.

But on the other hand, too many Christians remain trapped in Romans 7:14-25, excessively lamenting their sin instead of repenting of their sin and walking forward in greater holiness.

Do we lament, and there, cease? No! We repent, and thus increase!

There can be a very human tendency to think that if I lament loud and long such that others can see and maybe even feel my contrition, then the sin will somehow be diminished or even overlooked. Thus, the emphasis shifts to the lamentation and away from vanquishing the sin. While this may be a human tendency, this sort of lament is useless for the believer. It is like enlarging and hanging on the wall the PET scan that reveals your cancer while ignoring the treatment plan that will get rid of the disease. The goal is to kill the cancer, not admire the evidence. In the same way, the disciple laments the sin long enough to fan into flame a holy hatred of that sin, and then trains the cannons of sin-killing artillery on the target such that it never rises again. The goal is to kill the sin, not perform your lament.

So, having seen and lamented the sin, the disciple resolves to expose, to root out, and to destroy the hated sin. The disciple moves quickly and resolutely from lamentation to repentance because the calling is to holiness.

But what is the disciple to do about the sin they have committed? Sin has been exposed and the one who sinned has confessed the sin and is now walking more carefully and in repentance, but doesn’t the sin remain?

No! “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” – Romans 8:1

Jesus Christ died for that sin, too. Almost two thousand years ago, Christ died on Calvary’s cross to atone for all the sins of His people. Christ has been punished in my place, to bear the wrath of God for my sin so that I can walk free and without fear. So, I do not unduly lament the sin because Jesus has died for that sin, as well. My condemnation has been forever removed and now I am free to repent while I hunger for ever greater holiness.

SDG                 rmb                 6/1/2021                     #410