The Flesh

   If a man or woman does not know himself/herself or who he/she truly is, nine out of ten times, he will take the wrong decision. That is why spiritual knowledge is very crucial.

Who Are You?

   Do you know who you are? Do you know why you do the things that you do? Do you know why you respond to situations the way that you respond? Do you know why you get angry? Do you know why you don’t get angry? Do you know why you make the choices you make? Do you know what motivates your life?

 

If you don’t know who you are, nine out of ten times, you will take the wrong decisions. And if somebody keeps taking the wrong decision, his life can never make any progress.

    As a reminder,  man is - spirit - soul and body.  The body, which is known as the FLESH, is the outer part. Let us use an egg as an illustration; an egg is made up of three parts, the shell, albumen (the white matter) and the yoke. The real life is inside the yoke. But the shell is necessary as a house ,case container for the yoke and the albumen, once you break the shell, the egg is finished you don’t have an egg anymore. Once the shell is broken, the shell has finished its work, it is thrown away, it can’t be used again for the same purpose.

   That is the way the body of a human is once this flesh is destroyed, once it is broken, the spirit man and the soul goes out, and we say or hear,  a man is dead. But while the man is alive, his flesh has the capacity to suffocate the spirit-man and suffocate the soul. However, whatever God is going to do in any life, God is going to work through the spirit.

   Therefore, your flesh must be submissive; your flesh must be broken . The resistance and the sinfulness that is in the flesh must be destroyed. When people do terrible things, they smoke, they commit adultery, they tell lies, and they gamble, it is not the devil, it is the flesh. When people gossip, slander, harbour unforgiveness, or are malicious, it is not Satan, it is the flesh.

   There are people whose lives are controlled by the flesh. They never mind their own business, it is not the devil, it is the flesh. There are people who bear grudge, they are so stingy, so selfish, some are so self-centred, and yet some are so proud; for some they crave for recognition and unless you give them, there will be trouble. It is not Lucifer, it is the flesh. If the flesh is what is controlling a life; the person is going to have a hard life. You will be wondering why people don’t like you, you will wonder why wherever you go people seem to resist you, and you will wonder why you pray, and it never get answered. What some people do is that they transfer the responsibility of their personal weakness to a devil. Some transfer it to an invisible and imaginary enemy and some churches encourage them by teaching them to pray: “All the enemies of my life, all the enemies of my progress, all the enemies in the village, all the enemies in Lagos.”

   The bitter truth is, there is no enemy anywhere; you are the enemy of yourself

If you don’t know yourself, you will not face reality, you will keep blaming other peole. It is unfortunate, there are a lot of Christians who blame everybody under the sun but themselves, but in actual fact, they are the problem of themselves.

   Many claim ancestors who are supposed to be sleeping in peace inside the grave are responsible for their problem.  Some will say they are going to break ‘ancestral covenants’.  which they believe are the ones that keep troubling them every time.What has ancestral covenants got to do with you?

   “They say it is something in the village that the ancestors used to worship...  The scriptures say, “if any man be in Christ, he is a new creation, old things are passed away.” Whatever your ancestors worshipped, he has died with it. If you chose not to worship that thing, it cannot exercise dominion over you. It can’t.  It is what you surrender yourself to that can have dominion over you. So if you surrender yourself to anger, anger will have dominion over you, if submit yourself to unforgiveness, unforgiveness will have dominion over you. If you submit yourself to adultery, adultery will control your life, when you surrender yourself to drinking; drinking of alcohol will control your life. The bible says, “Whoever you yield your members to, the servant you are” if you submit to a man, then you become the servant of that person... (to be continued)

God bless you.

The Present-Day Christian and His Emotions

 In some Christian circles, repressing or disavowing authentic emotions is considered a virtue or perhaps even a gift of Spirit. Denying anger, ignoring pain, skipping over depression, running from loneliness, and avoiding doubt are not only considered normal but actually virtuous ways of living out one’s spiritual life.

But this is not the model we find in Jesus, who freely expressed his emotions without shame or embarrassment:

• He shed tears (Luke 19:41).
• He was filled with joy (Luke 10:21).
• He felt overwhelmed with grief (Mark 14:34).
• He was angry and distressed (Mark 3:5).
• He was sorrowful and troubled (Matthew 26:37).
• His heart was moved with compassion (Luke 7:13).
• He expressed amazement (Mark 6:6, Luke 7:9).

Jesus was anything but an emotionally frozen Messiah.

In Gethsemane, we see a fully human Jesus—anguished, sorrowful, and spiritually overwhelmed. He is pushed to the extremes of his human limits: “and being in anguish, he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat was like drops of blood falling to the ground” (Luke 22:44).

So, we must ask ourselves: Where did we get the idea that acknowledging and expressing authentic emotion is somehow less than spiritual? And why do we believe that we can—or somehow should—grow in spiritual maturity without simultaneously growing in emotional maturity?

And then there’s the example of Job:

After this, Job opened his mouth and cursed the day of his

birth. He said:

“May the day of my birth perish,

and the night that said, ‘A boy is conceived!’

That day—may it turn to darkness;

may God above not care about it;

may no light shine on it.

May gloom and utter darkness claim it once more. . . .

If only my anguish could be weighed

and all my misery be placed on the scales!

It would surely outweigh the sand of the seas—no

wonder my words have been impetuous.

The arrows of the Almighty are in me,

my spirit drinks in their poison;

God’s terrors are marshaled against me.”

(Job 3:1—5a; 6:1—4)

Job was one of the richest men in the world in his day. In contemporary terms, his assets would have included a fleet of Rolls-Royces, private airplanes, yachts, thriving global companies, and significant real estate holdings. “He was the greatest man among all the people of the East” (Job 1:3). After a series of natural disasters, however, something unthinkable happens—Job is reduced to poverty and his ten children are killed in a terrible natural disaster. When he attempts to get on his feet, he is infected with “sore boils” from the soles of his feet to the top of his head. Physically, it looks like he is about to die at any moment. His wife’s compassionate counsel? “Curse God and die” (Job 2:9).

Job finds himself alone, isolated, and living outside the city walls in the garbage dump. As the text indicates, Job is very angry. But there is a lesson for us even in Job’s anger. Here is how author Philip Yancey describes it:

One bold message in the Book of Job is that you can say anything to God. Throw at him your grief, your anger, your doubt, your bitterness, your betrayal, your disappointment—he can absorb them all. As often as not, spiritual giants of the Bible are shown contendingwith God. They prefer to go away limping, like Jacob, rather than to shut God out. In this respect, the Bible prefigures a tenet of modern psychology: you can’t really deny your feelings or make them disappear, so you might as well express them. God can deal with every human response save one. He cannot abide the response I fall back on instinctively: an attempt to ignore him or treat him as though he does not exist. That response never once occurred to Job.”

In the same way, God invites us to feel our emotions, experiencing them without self-condemnation, and exploring them in his loving presence.

Question to Consider

In what ways do you tend to suppress or deny difficult emotions—anger, sadness, fear—rather than admit them to yourself and God?

Prayer

Father, the idea of being emotionally transparent with you—especially when my emotions are raw—is very difficult. In fact, it almost seems disrespectful. Thank you, Lord, that you love all of me—the good, the bad, and the ugly—and that your love is without conditions. In Jesus’ name, amen.

________

Adapted from Emotionally Healthy Relationships Day by Day: A 40-Day Journey to Deeply Change Your Relationships by Peter Scazzero. 

In this groundbreaking devotional book, Peter Scazzero reintroduces and expands upon the ancient spiritual discipline of the Daily Office. The basic premise is simple: Christians need to intentionally stop to be with God twice each day to create a continual and easy familiarity with God’s presence for the rest of the day.

Stray Blessed.

Manipulated by a Curse

   Different from the instance of Saul who was plotting to plant his daughter in the life of David, like a timed device, for future detonation with maximum devastation, the forces that manipulate into disaster do not always reside in a person; they sometimes reside in a curse. 

That is our next story, about an elderly priest who worked so hard all his life yet in the evening of his days was mis-‘led’ to join a promising but doomed political party; a step that became the irreparable mistake that suddenly cost him everything, according to a strange and ancient pattern that had followed his ancestors in the past 150 years.

26 And unto Abiathar the priest said the king, Get thee to Anathoth, unto thine own fields; for thou art worthy of death: but I will not at this time put thee to death, because thou barest the ark of the Lord GOD before David my father, and because thou hast been afflicted in all wherein my father was afflicted.

27 So Solomon thrust out Abiathar from being priest unto the LORD; that he might fulfil the word of the LORD, which he spake concerning the house of Eli in Shiloh (1 Kings 2:26-27).

According to the passage, Abiathar’s sudden loss of his priestly office was the result of an ancient curse that was pronounced in Shiloh against his ancestors.  That story is told in 1 Samuel chapter 1 – chapter 5.  Abiathar’s great-great grandfather was the high priest Eli, who had two very irreverent sons that abused the worshippers that came to the house of God. They brazenly stole from the offerings of the men and mindlessly slept with the female parishioners, right in the sanctuary. Displeased by their conduct, God sent warnings, but those wicked associate-priests seemed too drunk to care, forcing God to declare that He would cast them out of the office, kill them all in one day, and  make the surviving other descendants to never see old age or enjoy the fruit of their labour (1 Samuel 2:29-36; 3:12-14).

Shortly after God had announced His verdict against that household, the first phase of the curse came into effect, and all sons plus father and daughter-in-law died in one day. It was the unforgettable inauguration of worrisome multiple deaths (1 Samuel 4:18-22).  About 80 years later, the next recorded phase occurred.  In their priests-village of Nob, they often received visitors.  One day, however, the active curse manipulated or ‘invited’ some wrong visitors.  David had been there to seek the Lord.  Coincidentally, another man was also at that sacred place on a ‘personal retreat,’ but apparently planted there by the curse that had ripened for another season of bloody harvest.  That other visitor, Mr Doeg the Edomite, a chief pastor of the king’s flock, witnessed the priests serve hollowed bread and protection to David.   Promptly, Doeg ingratiatingly and deviously reported their care to King Saul who had been seeking David’s head.  The consequence was the massacre of eighty-five priests with their wives and children, along with their livestock, on allegations of conspiracy with David to undermine the regime (1 Samuel 22:6-22).

We might blame the massacre on the bloodiness of the demonized King Saul; we might blame it on the restless lips of Doeg the gossip, but realising that the sad event was in continuing fulfilment of the pronouncement that had been made years earlier in Shiloh, we can only say that Doeg was planted there that day by the curse that had been seeking expression and merely found ready vessels in the duo of Doeg the gossip and Saul the demented sanguinary despot.

Now Doeg the Edomite, Saul's chief herdsman, was there that day, having been detained before the Lord (1 Samuel 21:7, NLT).

Did Doeg know that a Curse might have led him there that day; that he had merely been responding to a mystical impulse that found him in that place at that time to see those things that he was further ‘compelled’ to report?  Would he ever have agreed that the steps of a wicked man are ‘ordered’ by the devil (Psalms 37:23)?  Can a curse manipulate even the choices of a person?  Did an unseen hand coordinate the visit of David to coincide with the ‘retreat’ of Busybody Doeg, so as to bring about the subsequent disaster of over three hundred and fifty deaths?

The Bible states that Doeg at the tabernacle had been “DETAINED before the Lord.”  What does that mean?  Detained, held back, super-ordinarily restrained from departing, until David would be on the scene so that Doeg could see what to report?  Can a curse instigate a people against a person?  Can it also inspire the kind of rumours that are spread about someone?  Should we then entirely blame the impetuous lips or also diagnose the manipulating curse?

Several years after Abiathar as a little lad had escaped Saul’s massacre in Nob, that priest of God felt verily ‘led’ (or mis-‘led’) to join the new political party of Adonijah the surviving eldest son of David.  The reverend priest probably had a dream or some strong ‘ministration’ that urged him to take the step.  Only too late did he realize and regret the ‘lying spirit’ that had assumed the voice of Jehovah and urged him on in his fatal path.  He joined the masses to endorse Adonijah, only to discover that the incumbent king’s electoral-collegiate preference lay in Solomon.  Others paid with their life for the error; he escaped again with the skin of his teeth, but he lost all that he had spent years labouring with David to build up. 

The Scripture interprets Abiathar’s sudden political, social and religious disaster as a fulfilment of the word of God that had been spoken in Shiloh 150 years before.  In other words, all the events that lined up to that priest’s abrupt sack: his ‘righteous’ persuasions to endorse the wrong political candidate, the ‘friends’ and ‘worshippers’ who had ‘genuinely’ and ‘caringly’ persuaded him with the idea, the subsequent ‘ungrateful’ actions of the young and purportedly ‘wise’ Solomon, etc., had been remote-controlled by a slithering Curse that the respected priest never perceived.

Again, sometimes it is helpful to look beyond the hands that perform the act, as there might have been primary hands unseen, manipulating the secondary hands we see.

God helps us all to overcome in Jesus Name. Amen!

Stray Blessed.