Do you know what happens when we make the flesh top dog in our lives? One word, chaos!
Nothing gets it quite so wrong than our fleshly man or woman!
It's like handing the keys of your brand new Maserati, to your teenager who's one aim is to drive it as fast as he can, even though he can't drive.
Chaos! Our flesh, Paul said, wars against our spirit man, and our spirit man wars against our fleshly man! That's when we're saved I'm talking here!
Just because we've received Christ, doesn't mean all our trouble is over! We battle to constantly subdue the flesh, that part of us that is just plain human and just plain stupid as far as spiritual life's concerned.
Our flesh, your flesh, my flesh, only wants what satisfies it. It's the curse of the fallen nature of mankind which is always prone to going off the Bally old rails. The curse of the boy who knew too much, having been handed down from Adams sin, the knowledge of good and evil.
You want to serve God and obey what the good book says but your flesh is always getting in the road and messing up that plan. Paul said “The good that I would do, I don't do!”
Read Romans 7:14. Here’s a man frustrated at his own self if anyone was!
V14: He starts with saying the law is spiritual and he is a creature of the flesh. Carnal and was sold, before Christ, to the slavery of sin.
V15: Then he announces “I do not understand my own actions! Frankly I'm baffled by them in the extreme!” Chiefly because he fails to accomplish and practice the things that are good, and ends up doing the very things that he hates. i.e. stuff that God would rather he didn't do!
V16,17: Paul comes to realise that if he's habitually doing stuff that he'd rather not do, then, knowing that the law is good, something else is at work in his life! Sin! That ugly dread word which brings death as its result!
V18: Paul's assessment of himself in looking at his own actions, is that nothing good dwells within him, that is in his fleshly side. He can try at times with all his will to do what is right and still can't perform it!
V19: Reads quite stunningly when you remember that your talking here about Paul! Paul the great apostle to the gentile church. Paul who encountered Jesus on the Damascus road and here the same Paul says this. “for I fail to practice the good deeds I desire to do, but the evil deeds that I do not desire to do, are what I find myself doing!”
Paul was subject to the same struggles that we all face! The war between our flesh and the Spirit! Yet living, trying to obey the letter of the law, Paul also found to be impossible, hence his despair at himself. Because the law brought condemnation and judgement every time a man failed to walk perfectly.
But! And this is the best bit here. Romans 8:1 says this:
“There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus. Who walk not after the flesh but after the Spirit!”
For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has made me free from the law of sin and death.
For what the law could not do (make any of us perfect), being weekend by reason of our flesh, God sent his own son in the form of sinful flesh, and for sin condemned sin in the flesh, that the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in us who walk NOT after the flesh but after the SPIRIT!!
And so you and I are not debtors to the flesh, bound by it to fulfil its demands and wants, but our aim is to walk Spiritually minded! Our thoughts and intent on and towards pleasing God Our father, by the power of the Holy Ghost in us, and it becomes not about how many times we fail, but about the grace of God at work in our lives!