HARVEST HOUSE PUBLISHERS

EUGENE, OREGON

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture verses are taken are taken from the New American Standard Bible®, © 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission. (www.Lockman.org) Verses marked KJV are taken from the King James Version of the Bible.

Verses marked TLB are taken from The Living Bible, Copyright © 1971. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Wheaton, IL 60189 USA. All rights reserved.

Cover by Koechel Peterson & Associates, Inc., Minneapolis, Minnesota Cover photo © iStockphoto / kokophoto LIFETIME GUARANTEE

Copyright © 1993 by Bill Gillham Published by Harvest House Publishers Eugene, Oregon 97402

www.harvesthousepublishers.com

ISBN 978-0-7369-4786-2 (pbk.)

ISBN 978-0-7369-4787-9 (eBook) The Library of Congress has cataloged the edition as follows: Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gillham, Bill.

Lifetime guarantee/Bill Gillham.

p.cm.

Originally published: Bretwood, Tenn.: Wolgemuth & Hyatt, 1987.

ISBN 978-1-56507-075-2

1. Christian life—1960-I. Title

[BV4501.2.G51124

1993]

248.4—dc20

92-27374

CIP

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, digital, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.

To my beloved wife, Anabel

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I gratefully acknowledge the Holy Spirit, who worked through the Word and members of the body to teach me the truths contained in this book.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Preface by Preston Gillham

Your Lifetime Guarantee

1. Why You Struggle

2. How You Got into Your Fix

3. How Anabel and I Got into Our Fix

4. An “Old Man” in a New Earthsuit

5. A “New Man” in an Old Earthsuit

6. You Can Keep a Good Man Down

7. Living Like a New Creation

8. Handling Your Emotions

9. Making Your Behavior Match Your Identity

10. “Leftly” Dividing the Word of Truth

11. Is God Trying to Tell You Something?

12. God’s Ultimate Purpose for You

Appendixes

Appendix A

Appendix B

Appendix C

Appendix D

Appendix E

Appendix F

Appendix G

Appendix H

Appendix I

Appendix J

Answers to Questions for Further Study

Preston H. Gillham, M.S.

Flesh Inventory

One Last Note

Bibliography

Lifetime Guarantee

Preface

Bill and I were business and ministry partners for more than 30 years. We were also family for more than 55 years: he as the father, me as the son. When I came into the world, Dad held me. When he exited this world on June 23, 2011, I held him.

So, what’s left? Of course, there are memories galore, things I will treasure throughout the duration of my days. But what about you? What is there for you from Bill’s life?

In large part, you hold it in your hands: Lifetime Guarantee.

Dad was a brilliant man, versed in any number of subjects. When I was in graduate school, I was required to take a course on the subject of testing, including intelligence testing. Part of the class requirement was to administer what seemed like a million tests, so I tested anyone with a heartbeat, including Dad. He missed one question on the entire Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale.

But in spite of Dad’s breadth and depth intellectually, in his heart he was called to one thing: communicating to followers of Christ what it means to live in Christ—victoriously!—in the Spirit, not after the flesh.

As a doctor of education, a university professor by profession, a brilliant man, and a man specifically commissioned by God, Dad brought all to bear in creating the collection of words and diagrams you are holding.

In the early days, when Dad and I were in private practice together, several times a week we would sit over lunch and review the definition of “flesh” in Scripture. It was uncanny how elusive the definition proved to be—lunch after lunch. After a while it became clear: The definition of the flesh is elusive because it is an essential component to practical victory in Christ. The last thing in the world God’s adversary wants believers to grasp is just that: an understanding of what they have been delivered from and no longer have to yield to as new people. In Christ, there is a divine alternative to life as usual, and the alternative is remarkable!

Through the furnace of counseling and the public forum of teaching, Dad honed his ability to communicate with simplicity and personal transparency the lifetime guarantee recorded for our consideration in Romans 5–8. After accepting Christ’s invitation of life while watching Billy Graham on TV in 1958 and then attempting to live, understand, and convey the Christian life in the intervening years, in 1987 Dad sat down and penned Lifetime Guarantee. It is his life’s work.

Perhaps I am biased about Dad and this book. It’s a fair criticism, and one I have carefully considered but reject. I’m certain my opinion of Dad is skewed, like any son’s, but Lifetime Guarantee is not a book written by my dad, per se. It is a book written by my partner. The theology in this book is profound. In fact, my name appears in the flyleaf as well, and I have had to defend the book on occasion. If anything, I was the hardest critic of both Dad and Lifetime Guarantee.

The book is rock solid! But as Dad would tell you, don’t take my word for it. Read the book. Then read The Book. Judge Dad’s pen against the divine pen. If Lifetime Guarantee is found lacking, find something else to read. But if you find it to be complimentary to the divine work, as many before you have, then I encourage you to embrace the pages that follow with heart, soul, and resolute volition as transformational, life-altering, and representative of Dad’s heart for you, his reader.

If you would like to read more about Dad, he has other books and resources readily available. If you would like to read more of the relationship Dad and I shared, you might start at www.PrestonGillham.com/Bill.

Dad signed any number of copies of Lifetime Guarantee. Many of those books, handed to him with trembling hands, were heavily marked, dated, tear-stained, dog-eared, notated, and held together with tape from repeated reference. May you find Dad’s work equally compelling, and may the message of Lifetime Guarantee and my father’s words speak life deep into the recesses of your soul.

Preston Gillham

Fort Worth, TX

November 2011

It’s important that you read this…

Your Lifetime Guarantee

This book is written to the Christian who is struggling in his attempt to live the life of victory in Jesus. It is not a mere glimmer of light at the end of a dark tunnel. Rather, I trust you will discover, as I have, that these truths open wide the door to “the life [that] is hidden with Christ in God” (Colossians 3:3).

People usually buy a book on marriage if they’ve got a problem in their marriage, or they order a book on self-esteem if they have a low one. But the problem they’re actually experiencing is the basic question of how to make the Christian life work. We all have the same problem when you get right down to it.

As I’ve interacted with thousands of people over my years as a Christian counselor, the hurting person would typically tell me about what counselors refer to as “the presenting problem.” I got to where I would sit there with a sort of “hidden agenda,” knowing what the real problem was but, of course, listening intently and empathetically anyway. I began to see that what they were seeing as their problem was in reality but a symptom of the problem. They were looking for a way to eliminate the symptom, which in their view would solve the problem.

That simply won’t work. We all agree that a person with a physical illness who concentrates on eliminating symptoms will have a similar experience to that of the person trying to hold a couple of dozen table tennis balls under water. Think of how absurd it would be to treat your child’s fever, which is a symptom of the presence of infection, by packing him in ice! That would lower his temperature, all right, but it would lower the kid, too, by six feet! The fever is not the problem; it is merely a symptom of the underlying trouble.

Doctors are trained to treat problems, not symptoms. The symptoms indicate to them the nature of the problem. Once this has been determined, they attack the problem, the source of the symptom. Once you correct the problem, many of the symptoms will improve or even disappear.

I’ve forgotten who said it, but I once heard a preacher say something like this: “Your problem is that you don’t know what your problem is. You think your problem is your problem, but that’s not the problem at all. Your problem is not your problem, and that’s your main problem.”

What is the problem? Are you ready for this? Here it is. The problem is that you have yet to discover that the Christian life is not difficult to live—it’s impossible to live! There it is in a nutshell. God never intended that you be able to live the Christian life at all. The harder you try to live your life for God, the more frustrated you’ll become. But hold the phone! That is precisely the position of weakness and desperation from which the Holy Spirit wants to teach you the reason Jesus came into you. Have you ever questioned why He didn’t come under you, over you, behind you, alongside you, or in front of you? Jesus is the only one who ever has lived the Christian life, and He’s the only one who can live it today—through you! That’s why God can offer a lifetime guarantee of abundant living—and why most believers have yet to experience it.

It’s no easier for an ordinary person to live the Christian life today than it ever was. That’s the reason you’re equipped differently from the average, run-of-the-mill individual. Christ now indwells you, Christian, to enable you to cooperate with Him to express His life through you moment by moment, not just when you encounter the situations you can’t handle by yourself. That’s the mistake I made. I tried to handle all the “small stuff” by myself and not trouble Him with it. The straw kept piling up on my back day by day until it inundated me. It took me so long to wake up and smell the coffee! But I think I’m not much different from most people. We’re all slow to learn.

What are your symptoms? Troubles in your marriage? You just can’t hack it anymore? You’re just worn out from trying? You’ve given and given until you feel as if you just can’t give anything else? You’re considering bailing out?

Maybe you just can’t handle the problems on the job. You’re trying to keep all the balls in the air, but you don’t have enough hands or time, and they’re falling all around your head and shoulders. Your boss doesn’t seem to be sympathetic, either. Further, you can’t quit because you couldn’t get a better job. And once you found out that Maranatha means “Come quickly, Lord,” you’ve been closing your prayers with it ever since.

Perhaps you go off to the convention and you wind up in the massage parlor or renting a porno movie in your hotel room—or something worse. You’ve promised God you’ll never do it again, but you have. You’ve rededicated until your rededicator’s worn out, and nothing helps. And you’re a teacher or a deacon—or a pastor.

Maybe your attitude about yourself is, “If I could just become a different person. Someone I could learn to like and respect. But [sigh] what’s the use? It’s all so hopeless! I’ve tried the self-improvement books and tapes. They just don’t work for me. I’m just different. I’d be better off dead. Everyone would be better off if I were gone. I can’t stand myself!” And maybe you’ve even toyed with the notion of ending it all.

Dear one, it is no accident that you’ve picked up this book. This is your time! Our precious Lord wants to offer some beautiful, healing words to you from these pages. All that garbage listed above is one deep pile of (you guessed it) symptoms. Your problem is twofold: Number 1, you are trying to live the Christian life instead of understanding how to collaborate with Christ to live the Christian life for you and through you. Number 2, you are not comprehending how to appropriate your true identity as the new creation you already are in Christ. You are still attempting to face each day using your old ID pass.

I hear you say, “But I don’t understand that.” I didn’t, either, when I was in my fix. But, I’m free from my fix now. He took me through it, and I’m here to tell you it was a big one. God spells relief J-e-s-u-s. Wouldn’t you know that appropriating some facet of Christ is somehow the root of the solution for every problem that any person can experience? The key to experiencing victory in Christ lies in learning how to literally “walk in newness of life” as described in the Word.

God has graciously shown me how to appropriate the life that is hidden with Christ and to explain it in very simple, biblical terms. I guess my strong suit is simple communication through practical life experiences, the nuts and bolts kind, to teach you how to see Christ glorify Himself through you.

Let me draw you a verbal road map to acquaint you with this book. It is designed to teach you how to appropriate consistent, rather than just sporadic, victory in Christ.

In Chapter 1, we’ll look at how you have programmed your brain with earthly techniques for satisfying your needs for love and self-esteem—the greatest needs in life—rather than seeking these through Christ. These techniques are called “flesh” by God (see Philippians 3:3-6).

In Chapter 2, we’ll see that the measure of success or failure you attain in satisfying your needs through earthly techniques determines your unique version of the flesh. Those who are successful cling to these; those who are not feel hopelessly unlovely. Both are flesh. In Chapter 3, I describe my own struggle for love and self-esteem to help you identify your flesh.

In Chapters 4 and 5, we’ll deal with the fact that you were born a self-centered rebel, dead to God, but alive to Satan and the world. Your major goal was to get all your needs supplied your way. God had no plan to make something beautiful of your self-centered life, but to crucify it in Christ and spawn a new creature in Him who is now totally acceptable to Him.

In Chapter 6, we’ll examine how Satan tries to deceive you. His goal is to trick you into using your flesh to get your God-given needs satisfied. He accomplishes this goal through your thought life, masquerading as the now defunct “old man.”

In Chapter 7, we’ll emphasize the reality of who you are as a Christian. When you were born, your parents didn’t say, “Oh, I hope he matures into a human being.” Birth determined your identity. You are human. Likewise, when God caused you to be born brand-new in Christ, He didn’t say, “Oh, I hope he turns out to be a new creature in Christ.” Your second birth determines your present spiritual identity.

In Chapter 8, we’ll consider the role of feelings. Feelings are wonderful when they line up with God’s reality. The problem is that they also react to earthly circumstances. This is when you are most highly motivated to “walk after the flesh” rather than to walk in the finished work of Christ for you in the circumstance.

In Chapter 9, we’ll see how Christ living through you is supposed to be the typical Christian experience. Many believers are deceived into thinking that trusting Christ as your life is an idealistic fantasy for them, something attained only by the spiritual elite. Quite the contrary is true. Such a life isn’t only attainable; it is God’s provision for every Christian.

In Chapter 10, we’ll examine Bible verses that seem to refute this teaching. The Bible can be interpreted as teaching that salvation, security, and sanctification must be earned. But it can also be interpreted that these are bestowed upon the believer solely by grace through faith in the finished work of Christ. The correct interpretation is critical to your victory over the flesh. This chapter reveals what I believe is the key to “rightly dividing the word of truth” (2 Timothy 2:15).

In Chapter 11, we’ll discuss the need for “brokenness.” Most of us have only a hazy understanding of what we’re to be broken from. We must be broken from trusting in our fleshly ways. Often they have been so productive that God must allow suffering to come into our lives that our flesh can’t handle.

Finally, in Chapter 12, we’ll see that God’s ultimate goal is to conform you to Christ’s image, and we’ll review how He does that. Snuffing Satan out will be easy for God when the time comes. But right now, God is using him by allowing him to attack your flesh. God’s goal is that you be motivated to abandon your fleshly ways and turn to Him, learning to enjoy His lifetime guarantee.

I’m not a trained theologian, although that would be nice. I’m just pretty much a plain vanilla guy who mows the lawn, marvels at how airplanes fly, feels he’s gathering precious treasure when his pecan tree bears in the fall, watches football games, adores his wife and kids, and loves Jesus with all his heart.

God has freed me from a life of hostility and criticism toward my wife and sons; from lusting after anything in a skirt; from demanding that my sons be macho; from being torn by passions within, doubting my self-worth and at times my salvation, and yet simultaneously working like crazy trying to live a life of victory in Christ. After twelve years of struggling, I finally crashed and burned.

That was the best thing the Lord could have ever let happen to me. It was through my painful failure after giving the Christian life my best shot that God began to teach me the liberating truths recorded in this book. I know of no other book quite like it. If I did, I wouldn’t have undertaken this project. I do not intend to toot my own whistle or claim to have the market cornered on truth. God has dealt with that. “I will not presume to speak of anything except what Christ has accomplished through me” (Romans 15:18, emphasis added). This book and the freedom I now enjoy through the truths it contains, I respectfully dedicate to my hero, Jesus.

I am also indebted to my son and partner in the ministry, Pres, for his technical expertise and wisdom in writing this book. He has also developed study questions following each chapter. If you want the contents of this book to become more than simply information, I urge you to work through these study helps as an aid to personal appropriation.

I love you.

Bill Gillham

CHAPTER 1

Why You Struggle

The following suicide note came to me in January 1986:

I can’t stand living anymore. For an eternity, it seems, I have done little but exist. I am of no use to anyone, especially God. There is so much in my head that I know He wants me to do for myself, but I just seem incapable of willing myself to do anything—especially about my mental state. Suicide seems to be the only solution left.

I’m sure people will not understand. They will think that it was senseless to waste such a young life. That is exactly how I feel: It is senseless. But, since I am wasting my life anyway, I might as well do something! I will do the only thing I believe I can do—stop existing.

There is no way to explain this to people. No one can understand the torment a person goes through day after day unless they themselves have been mentally ill. No matter how much people say they love me and no matter how much they encourage me to pull myself out of this, it still doesn’t help. I simply don’t know how to help myself. I’ve tried other people’s suggestions—including committing myself to a psych ward—and nothing helps. Over and over again the message is the same: “You have to help yourself.” But no one can tell me how to help myself.

Do you see why suicide is my only alternative? What would you do? Where would you go if you didn’t know how to help yourself? What would you do to stop feeling so helpless, to stop feeling like such a failure for not being the Christian you know Christ wants you to be? What would you do?

What would you do if year after miserable year you only seemed to take up space—space no one seemed to care about or notice anyway. I could commit suicide and literally not be discovered for weeks, maybe even months!

Christ said that I am to be the salt of the earth. I can hardly stand to do the bare minimum each day to exist, let alone care for anyone else. There was a time in my life when this was so different. A time when I exhausted myself with labor for others. But as time went by, I began to see that Christ wasn’t enough in my life. I needed and wanted something more. I tried to keep working toward the goal of helping others, but I just got more and more drained until now I am mentally ill.

Christ said that I was to be the light of the world. My light has been reduced to a flicker. In fact, it is worse than flickering; it is now smoking from having just been blown out.

What a waste. Is there any hope? Christians would say, “Yes.” They would point to a relationship with Christ, and I would agree if I could only see it again. If I could only feel it again.

What would you say to this young woman? Would you say she needs professional help? Some years ago that’s what I would have said—before I began to comprehend the truths set forth in this book.

Exactly one year later, I met this dear lady at a seminar my wife Anabel and I were leading in Washington, D.C. The woman is now a happy, productive, relaxed Christian who praises Christ daily. In the postscript of a more recent letter from her, she said, “Just today I brought a woman into my home the doctors feel should enter the psych ward. Who would have thought a year ago when I was planning my death that God would be using me to help someone who is so desperate?” And she signed off with a smiley face.

The Flesh

The truths contained in this book are precious, fine gold. I can say that without feeling I’m bragging because they aren’t mine. I have merely been entrusted with them to pass them on to others. For you to understand them, we must proceed step by step, the first of which is to give you an extensive understanding of what the Bible means when it speaks of “flesh” or “walking after the flesh” (e.g., Romans 8:4). The suicidal woman’s lack of understanding of this concept almost destroyed her.

In these first two chapters, then, I’ll show how you have programmed your brain with earthly techniques for satisfying your needs for love and self-esteem—again, the greatest needs in life—or for believing yourself to be unworthy of either and thus living your life to keep love away because it makes you uncomfortable. Both of these techniques are do-it-yourself projects that God calls “flesh.” I’ll document this later from Philippians 3:3-9.

The term “flesh” has many meanings in the Bible, but our primary definition here is this: Flesh refers to the old ways or patterns by which you have attempted to get all your needs supplied instead of seeking Christ first and trusting Him to meet your needs. These patterns develop as you are growing up in your parents’ home. And when the Holy Spirit begins the work of tearing them down, most Christians panic at the idea of losing them.

We can lump all Christians into three broad flesh categories: Yukky Flesh, Plain Vanilla Flesh, and USDA Choice Flesh. The person with the Yukky Flesh has been reared in an environment where, no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t get his love supply out of it by his do-it-yourself tactics. The suicidal woman at the beginning of this chapter has Yukky Flesh. She was nearly deceived into suicide to escape her feelings of low self-esteem. The Plain Vanilla, or average, Flesh person has been moderately successful, neither a roaring success nor a total failure at getting his need for self-esteem met. The USDA Choice Flesh person is everyone’s candidate for Mr. Christian. His high self-esteem is a result of his skill at milking love out of the world.

We’re going to look at how all three flesh types get programmed into Christians. For economy’s sake, however, I’ll only describe in greater detail the structuring of Yukky Flesh. You can then apply how that happens to the development of the other two.

How Does God Spell “Relief”? (Step 1)

The Word teaches that God is love and that He loves us (see 1 John 4:9,10). God created humanity with a burning need for love. That’s why you’re sitting there needing love. If you didn’t need love, you wouldn’t need God. In fact, that’s why you were created with needs, period. God is the supreme authority figure who has the market cornered on being able to supply all our needs. Thus, He created a bunch of people who have a ton of needs. This way, some of us would recognize our need and turn to Him through Jesus to get our needs supplied His way. God spells relief J-e-s-u-s. Fleshly people spell it s-e-l-f (“I’ll do it my way”).

The Problem: Lord of the Ring (Step 2)

When you showed up on planet earth in a little earthsuit two feet long, you drew a circle around yourself and declared, “I am Lord of this Ring!” Oh, you were willing to let God run the universe, but your attitude was, “I am god of all the turf inside this circle. I will control this area.” Playing Lord of the Ring is what original sin is all about. Adam saw to it that you’d be a “born” loser, and you immediately began to demonstrate it. You knew nothing about God and His provision for supplying all your needs, so you took over His role. Since most of your other needs were being met pretty well, you looked to mom, dad, siblings, relatives, and later to peers to satisfy your need for love. That cut God out of His own picture.

How Little Children Learn About Themselves (Step 3)

A preschool child is the most self-centered creature God ever made; he thinks only of himself and his needs. This being true, he learns only of himself as he interacts with others. When the dad of a nine-month-old baby points to his own nose and then to that of his teensy offspring and says, “Nose,” the little one doesn’t reason, How interesting! Dad and I both have noses! Oh, no. He thinks, I’ve got a nose and it looks like that. Totally self-centered thinking.

Who Am I?

Let’s consider what a little child learns who is born to a couple who had to get married due to his unexpected arrival. Let’s name him Charlie. His mom and dad were only sixteen when they were forced into marriage by both sets of parents. Charlie’s imminent arrival caused the newlyweds to drop out of high school in their junior year, which “ruined their lives.”

The little daddy had his heart set on being a college athlete and someday a football coach, but Charlie shattered that dream. It’s now three years later, and dad works at the local Dairy Queen for seventy-five dollars a week. The onset of football season is always agony for him as he meditates on lost opportunities and a hopeless future. He broods a lot over the “life sentence” he’s serving with no hope of time off for good behavior. Color him hostile.

The little mom had always wanted to be a sorority girl at her mom’s alma mater. Mom and her mother before her were both members. In fact, they both still wear their pins at homecoming. This was a “big thing” for her in her childhood, but now, at nineteen, she works at the local Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant.

Her friends come home from the university on weekends in their fancy new clothes, but she still has to wear her old high school wardrobe, which is now outdated. She listens to their exciting stories of campus life, and she sees their manicured nails, expensive hairdos, polished toenails, and so on—all the result of their being able to invest hours per week on their earthsuits. She is bitter and resentful. She, too, sees herself serving a life sentence for having made one fatal mistake. And to make matters worse, it was his idea.

The romantic side of marriage for her has long since dissipated. Sex is more of an obligation than a romantic oasis—“Just one more thing I have to do for that louse who ruined my life!” It’s sort of like cooking another batch of chicken, only after closing hours! Color her despairing.

There are basically two sorts of folks on the earth: “ulcer-givers” and “ulcer-getters.” These two are ulcer-givers; they give them to other folks, mainly to each other. They keep a hot war going on constantly in their little three-room house. Right at the height of the battle (words, not fists), dad will unleash a verbal artillery salvo on Charlie: “It’s all your fault, you little bleepity bleep! If you hadn’t come along, I wouldn’t be married to this old bat! I wish you’d never been born!” And he storms out of the house in a rage, to the accompanying tune of his wife’s screaming that she hopes he’ll get lost and never be found.

The Results

Now, moment by moment, day by day, who is Charlie learning about? Is he learning, Now, wait a minute, dad! I didn’t ask to be born into this chicken outfit? No, he’s learning about himself, remember? He’s processing the situation like this: It’s all my fault that mom and dad are so miserable and unhappy! If I were gone, it’d be better for everybody! I am the problem! I really do need love, but I don’t blame mom and dad for not loving me. If I were in their shoes, I wouldn’t love me either! Sorry, no-good bum! Anybody that would cause the very ones he loves the most to be miserable ought to be shot! I hate myself! Obviously, he doesn’t verbalize it as I have done, but it’s all coming through to him at the gut level.

Charlie’s family environment represents the whole world to him because it’s the only world he knows. Therefore, he generalizes his attitude to this: The whole world would be better off if I had never been born.

The Plot Thickens (Step 4)

You have a mind and you have emotions, a “thinker” and a “feeler.” Your feeler responds to your thinker; whatever you set your thinker on, your feeler will react to it. For example, suppose there’s a rattlesnake on the floor coiled to strike you on the leg, and you see it poised. First, you will detect this stimulus with your mind, which responds, I believe I’m in great danger! Let’s quantify this on a 1 to 10 scale, where 10 is the greatest. I believe I’m in great danger, and that’s a 10! Now, feeler responds to mind’s belief like this: I feel terrified, and that’s a 10!

Then suppose that on closer examination you detect that the snake is made of rubber. Mind says, Why, there’s no danger here; I believe I’m safe. And mind immediately goes back down to level 1. But what about feeler? Does it go immediately back to 1? No way! Oh, it’ll eventually go down all right, but it’ll take thirty minutes to do so. It’ll go down like a BB sinking in oil.

Now let’s say that your mind’s gone down to 1, and in ten minutes your feeler is down to about a 7. Then you open a drawer that’s got a spider in it, and the spider scoots up your sleeve! Your mind goes from 1 to 10 instantly, and feeler covers the three points back to the top in one leap.

Generalizing from this illustration, let me pose a question. What if you are reared in a home where your dad is a rattlesnake and your mom is a spider? Or maybe it’s your brother or an aunt or a surrogate, like grandma. They keep your mind and your feeler at level 10 most of the time. When they back off for a few minutes, your mind will go down to 1 and think, Whew, relief at last! But feeler only gets down to about a 7 when one of them does it to you again. Wham! Bam! Ten and 10! Due to this process, do you see that by the time you are five years old, it’s been so long since your feeler’s been below a 7 that it sort of bottoms out on 7? Seven becomes the door, or threshold, below which your feeler does not go. This is what happens to a child like Charlie.

Psychologists teach that by the time a child reaches age five, 85 percent of his personality is established and is irreversible. Unfortunately, those psychologists never heard of 2 Corinthians 5:17, which says that any person in Christ is a new creation, that old things have passed away, and that all things are new. What psychologists are observing is that kids’ feelers get programmed, and this controls the person throughout his entire life. But praise God, we walk by faith, not by feel. There is a way out.

Does Your Elevator Go Clear Down to the Lobby?

Now suppose Charlie grows up and gets saved by accepting Christ as his personal Lord and Savior. God may do many glorious works to erase some of his hang-ups, but He doesn’t erase them all, and I find that in the vast majority of cases the adult who has had childhood experiences such as I have described has his feeler stuck on about a 7 or even a 9.5. It’s been so long since the points below 7 on his emotional Richter scale have been exercised that they’ve atrophied away like arm muscles in a cast. After many years, they aren’t even operative any longer. They’re like a 1935 Buick that’s been sitting in a little old lady’s garage since World War II. It has all the standard equipment, but it sure won’t run! Its parts are stuck. It needs to be freed up. And the Holy Spirit is the oil who can deal with the problem I’m describing.

The Beat Goes On (Step 5)

God has designed the human brain with memory banks. They’re just like the First National Bank, only instead of being a depository for money, they are depositories for memories. Your memory banks have memory traces burned across them. These are habit patterns of how you act, how you feel, and how you think. The more you repeat these patterns, the more deeply entrenched they become. This is the usual method for their development, although a memory trace may become deeply imprinted in just one (often traumatic) episode.

Some of these memory traces are fine, such as your particular language pattern. These patterns were etched into your memory banks through your experiences, and your speech is now “controlled” by this. And the Lord doesn’t get concerned about whether you sound as if you were reared in California or New York.

Memory traces are like highways, and the more you drive on them, the wider they become. Traffic flow is the key to development and maintenance. The more you spend your time in the pattern, the stronger it becomes. I suppose you’re sitting there with several thousand memory traces ranging from eight-laners to cow trails. Some of them are okay, but some of them are sheer garbage in God’s ecology. Let’s color these green for garbage. These green highways were generated by the “old man” as he sought to get his needs supplied on planet earth using his resources and cutting God out of the picture. He (the old man) was his own god. He declared himself Lord of the Ring.

…And On (Step 6)

With that understanding, we can see that little Charlie, having been reared with rejection, learned that he was yukky. He was trained like a bird dog to accept as “truth” that he really is yukky. And now his feeler is stuck on a threshold of 8, having not been below an 8 in years. Digits 1 through 7 are nonexistent. They have atrophied away. As he becomes more and more aware of “who he is” (yukky), his feeler will become more and more programmed. This has become a monstrous, green highway for him. He feels yukky most of the time.

The “New Math”

As Charlie matures, he becomes more astute in his observations of the world, better able to objectively assess truth. The only trouble is that since his feeler is stuck on 8 and always has been so far as he’s able to recall, he now has renumbered his emotional Richter scale. Since 8 is as low as he’s ever experienced, he now calls 8 a 1.

Do you see, then, that Charlie can go from his 1 up to 10 five times faster than someone who’s playing with a full deck? He’s got only two points on his Richter scale. But he doesn’t know that. He just knows that he reacts internally (or externally) five times as rapidly as other kids do, and then he “objectively” concludes that he’s weird. I use quotation marks around the word objectively because Charlie will assure you that he knows he’s weird. He believes he has arrived at this conclusion objectively when, in fact, he has arrived at it by virtue of how he feels. This is his normal experience. He typically hates himself and wishes he were someone different, someone he could love.

The Noose Tightens (Step 7)

If you identify with this category I’ve been discussing, I’m not making light of you. I know it may be painful to have me dredging up all this trauma from your past, but trust me that the Lord has shown me some solid answers.

Now let’s grow Charlie up to adulthood. His feeler has been stuck for so long that its programming is as deep as the Grand Canyon. He has built his life around rejection. He rejects himself and others, being unable to trust them. He believes that if he gets too close to them, they will hurt him or discover how yukky he really is and turn away from him. Thus, he has learned that it’s safer to just keep everyone away. If anyone earnestly tries to show love to him, even his wife or kids, he will be skeptical of it. Since he hates himself, anyone who tries to love him must be either pretty dumb or else a phony.

What does Charlie do then? He runs tests on the love others offer to see if it will break down. When it does (and it usually will due to techniques he has learned to employ), something inside him seems to “fall into place.” I knew it! I knew it! he thinks. I knew she didn’t love me! I just had this feeling. She fooled me for fourteen years, but her true colors finally showed! Or if the lover’s love does not break down, Charlie may actually drive the lover away, being unable to tolerate the love. He wants it, but he can’t handle it. He’s like a dog chasing a car and finally catching it: “What do I do with this?” He has never experienced a love environment before and he can’t handle it.

At the other extreme, if Charlie ever tastes love, he may latch onto it like white on rice. I’ve seen more than one Yukky Flesh mother who smothers her kids, often producing lots of them “because I love kids.” She then strives to keep them dependent on her so she can extract her love supply out of them, while simultaneously alienating them with her counterproductive methods. Thus she winds up rejected again and “proves” that she really is yukky.

If you try to be kind to such a person at Sunday school, she shows up on your front porch after lunch “just to visit with such a nice person.” She leaves at 10:30 p.m., but not before learning how many days you have free this week so she can come over and “enjoy good Christian fellowship.” Now she’s sucking her love supply out of you. It will begin to drive you up the wall. Then Satan will work the false guilt number on you as you begin to resent her taking up so much of your time.

I’ve also seen some folks with the rejection patterning who are all peaches and cream one day and who will give you the cold shoulder for no reason the next. They are the vacillators; they jump from one of these polarities to the other without predictability. Once you see what’s happening to these dear people, it will become easier for you to discern the cause of these symptoms.

The Finishing Touch (Step 8)

Let’s return to Charlie’s childhood and use the rattlesnake illustration again to add the finishing touch to his emotions. If little Charlie believes in his mind that he is worthless to his parents, how will he feel? Worthless. When he matures, his feeler will be stuck, feeling worthless at, say, level 9. If he believes he’s inadequate, how will his emotions get programmed? He will feel inadequate (say, at level 7). If he believes he’s ugly, he will feel ugly. If he believes he’s a loser, he will feel he’s a loser. If he believes he’s responsible for all the misery in his house (which is his world), how will he feel? He’ll feel guilty.

Is Charlie guilty? No! He’s not guilty of anything. His parents are doing him a great disservice. They are being used by Satan to strap unmerited guilt on their son. That’s false guilt.

Emotions Lie

Here’s a crucial point, so underline it: False guilt feels exactly like valid guilt (a conviction from the Holy Spirit). You can’t tell the difference by how they feel. Your feeler will return the same verdict for both. Guilty! The jury is fixed as far as the feeler is concerned.

Because this is true, you have to look to the Word of God for discernment to determine whether any guilt is valid or false. The Word is the path to truth, not your emotions. Emotions are fine things, but emotions will lie to you at times; the Word of God never will. You’ve got to know whether you are guilty or not from the Bible. False guilt comes from the Evil One, working through the flesh (old patterns in the brain). Valid guilt comes from the Holy Spirit working through your spirit (see Figure 1.1).

You can confess false guilt through the night until sunrise and it’ll never get better. In fact, it’ll get worse! You will greet the dawn after your night of confession feeling guiltier because you still feel guilty.

You must never confess false guilt to God as if it were valid. You must agree with God’s Word that you are not guilty and deny that the guilt is valid. You don’t deny that you feel guilty, but you deny that you are guilty. You confess, “Praise God! I am not guilty! Even though it is true that I have committed sins against the Lord, I have repented and confessed these to You, Sir, and I am forgiven! Praise God I am forgiven! I am not guilty! You said so, Lord! Hallelujah!” (Stage whisper: “Lord, I sure do feel guilty, though.”)

(Stage whisper in reply: “Yes, your feeler’s stuck, but you keep hanging in there on what I said about whether you’re guilty or not. I’ll begin to unstick it for you as you ‘set your mind on things above.’ I’ll give you more points to play with on your Richter scale. You’re going to grow to where you can tolerate this false guilt number and slough it off with truth.”)

Yukky Flesh (Step 9)

Obviously, adult Charlie has a problem. He set out as an infant to get all his needs supplied by himself, doing it his way. But the deck was stacked against him as far as getting love was concerned. There was no way he was going to make it. So, while on this self trip, he gets rejected, is trained to believe he’s a loser, and thus learns to reject himself. His feeler gets programmed for non-love, and he develops skills in how to live with rejection.

This becomes his “turf.” It’s where he functions best. He’ll gravitate to rejection or generate it, because it’s on this turf that he’s best able to function. However, since God created him to need love, he’s miserable! He can’t tolerate love or believe it’s real if he does get it. His Lord-of-theRing approach isn’t working for him. He’s a very unhappy person.

Plain Vanilla Flesh

Consider now the average person (who may be reading this book). We’ll call him Joe. He got a pretty fair share of love as a child. Oh, sure, he may have been rejected off and on by certain people during the course of his life, but all in all, he has experienced a pretty good measure of acceptance. Unbeknownst to him, however, the love he has received has not been received without his having paid for it.

People don’t usually love you with no strings attached; you must earn their love. A child must perform up to certain standards in order to be “loved.” Since he desperately needed love on a moment-by-moment basis, he was willing to pay whatever performance price was demanded in order to receive it. All things considered, he was pretty fair at playing Lord of the Ring. These techniques are very precious to him. He relies heavily on them to generate and maintain love from others and for self.

USDA Choice Flesh

Consider next a home where the dad is a moderately successful businessman, works fairly hard, has built his business by increasing its size, is rather perfectionistic in several areas, and has, on many occasions, philosophized on the merits of such a lifestyle to his son Sam. Dad’s system of reward (praise) and punishment has been predicated upon these standards that characterize his life.

Now dad would probably insist that his acceptance of his young son is not based on whether Sam can emulate his dad’s performance. But the youngster gets a different message. You see, he is living in a hostile world, peopled by peers who demand that he dance to their tune if they are to “pay him off” with acceptance for services rendered. He begins to take for granted the notion that acceptance is available on this planet, but that it comes with a price tag on it. That price tag is performance. And he’s able to pay for it. He has enough talent, intelligence, looks, and whatever else is needed to earn love from people.

What has he learned? How has he been trained on this planet? Why, he’s a winner! He plays Lord of the Ring very well. Oh, sure, he’s lost a few in his day, but nothing that has been so devastating that he couldn’t cope and ultimately land on his feet. And through it all, he has learned to accept (love) himself. He takes for granted that he can beat Joe. And he can’t identify with Charlie at all. He may even feel compassion for Charlie and wonder why he can’t get his act together.

Do you see that all these men have cut Christ out of their lives as the source? They’re as lost as a ball in high weeds! It’s just that one’s god-playing trip is unproductive, whereas the others’ god-playing is “working.”

Walking After the Flesh

Now, let’s have them each accept Jesus Christ as Savior. After salvation, they will each begin to demonstrate different versions of the same problem—walking after the flesh. I’ll explain briefly now how this works and discuss it more at length in later chapters.

Charlie hears all about how much God loves him, but he can’t seem to “feel” the way he “feels” other Christians “feel.” It would appear on the surface that Joe and Sam are relatively free from this problem, but not so. They feel good. They feel loved, and since the techniques they’ve used all their lives to generate acceptance from others as well as self are still productive, they continue to employ them. Only this time they apply them to the church environment. They simply tack a few appropriate Scriptures onto their existing good feelings about themselves and “feel” they’re now walking in the Spirit.

“My strength is made perfect in weakness,” the Lord told the apostle Paul (2 Corinthians 12:9 KJV). I love Ken Taylor’s paraphrase in the Living Bible: “My power shows up best in weak people.” Since Charlie is weak and knows without a doubt that he’s weak, he’s a super candidate for God’s strength to “show up best in.” But how about Joe and Sam? They thank God daily that they’re strong! They mean well, but they’re flying on flesh power and heading for a flameout.

Here’s the point to remember: Now that these three men are saved, the Evil One will try to control each of them by working through their old patterning. He’ll try to use Charlie’s flesh to block him from appropriating love and self-esteem through Christ’s finished work for him. This was happening to the young woman who wrote the suicide note that began this chapter. The Evil One was seeking to destroy her through her Yukky Flesh. On the other hand, he’ll try to deceive both the Plain Vanilla Flesh person and Mr. Wonderful into settling for a cheap imitation of the valid article, trusting in the same old fleshly techniques they have always used to generate acceptance from others and from self. They seek to satisfy their God-given need for love with the conditional (merited) love of people instead of the unconditional love of their Creator. In addition, they have built their own self-esteem on this same foundation. Now reread this paragraph, please. It’s that important.

Conclusion

Perhaps you have been able to identify with one of these types of flesh. If yours is the rejection pattern, you must see that by striving to adjust to the world’s demands so you can gain others’ acceptance and accept yourself, you are still caught in the flesh trap. If, on the other hand, you identify more with the people who managed to “make it” through techniques found in the “self-help” section of your local library, you are no different from the man who identifies with Charlie. You just feel better. Your flesh is paying off with the world’s (and, alas, the church’s) acceptance, where his is not. Both positions are sin positions, failing to trust God to supply all your needs in Christ Jesus.

There is no such thing as Spirit-filled flesh, although you see a lot of teachers who are trying to market and package this product. How are you attempting to get your love needs met? How does your method for getting acceptance differ from that of the lost man or woman? You programmed these patterns into yourself during your childhood as you sought to get all your needs supplied, primarily your need for love. This constitutes your unique version of the flesh. Do you still depend on it? The precious Holy Spirit wants to reveal to you what Christ has made available to you to liberate you from “walking after the flesh” to get your acceptance needs met in Him. Ask the Lord to reveal this truth to you from His Word as you study this book. We are totally accepted in Christ! It’s not necessarily a feeling; it’s a fact. It is to be primarily believed, not felt.

Questions for Further Study

1. God created you with a need for love. Why is this?

2. The ability to think abstractly begins to develop during the elementary school years. This means that children are basically concrete thinkers, primarily thinking only of themselves. Of what significance is this when trying to determine how your flesh was structured?

3. What kinds of things have you based your self-acceptance on, and through what means have you tried to get acceptance from others?

4. In what specific ways have you tried to play god and get your needs met your way?

Answers in “Answers to Questions for Further Study”.

CHAPTER 2

How You Got into Your Fix

One night some years ago, I was invited to dinner in the home of a member of the church in which I was speaking. The couple’s son, his wife, and their one-year-old flew in from out of state shortly after I arrived. It’s always neat to see people warmly greeting each other, but this visit took a sudden nosedive. It seems the baby’s diaper bag was missing, and mama began to let daddy know in no uncertain terms whose fault it was. The poor guy was calmly trying to reassure her that this was the termination of the flight, that it was probably still on the plane, that he’d call his friend who worked at the airport, and that they could pick it up the next day.

She lit into him like a tiger, however, and ordered him back into the car, telling him not to come back without that bag. That’s when he, feeling emasculated in front of his own folks and a stranger, retaliated. But brother, he made no headway. She was acting out the role of headship in that relationship, and she made no effort to conceal it.

This young woman is a Christian. Surprised? “How can a new creature in Christ act like Satan himself is controlling her?” you ask. It’s easy. We see it every day, don’t we? The Bible calls it “walking after the flesh,” and she was simply demonstrating her unique version of it for the whole world to see. It brings great dishonor to the name of Christ, but I could identify with her. I’ve done things even worse than that. As a result of learning the things I discuss in this book, however, I’ve seen Christ live through me to drastically reduce such episodes to a trickle of what they once were.

Have you ever pondered the question posed by Romans 7:15: “Why do I do what I do, when I really don’t want to do it?” I know exactly why. It’s because I sometimes walk after the flesh. But for a long time, I didn’t know what my flesh was. And how could I know I was free unless I got a handle on just what it was I needed to be free from? You likewise need to gain insight into your unique version of the flesh. That’s the purpose of this chapter.

On the surface, you might get the idea as you read along that this chapter deals with child-rearing; but I’m dealing with the structuring of your flesh. Since you began playing Lord of the Ring in infancy, that’s where it began getting choreographed, so I must deal with it there.

Caution: Make it your major purpose as you read this chapter to learn from the Holy Spirit what happened to you as a child; then let your secondary purpose be to see any mistakes you may be making with your own children. It’s primarily your flesh we’re interested in exposing.

Righteousness

Let’s start by coming to a common understanding of the term “righteousness.” This understanding alone could revolutionize your life. You can consider the term “righteousness” from two viewpoints: 1. righteous works (behavior); or 2. righteous identity (state of being).

It’s my conviction that most Christians think only of righteous performance—holy behavior—when they think of righteousness. Of course, godly behavior is important. Biblically it refers to “righteous works.” But the Word is very clear that there is a righteousness that is absolutely unrelated to performance (see Galatians 3:6-9 and Romans 4:9-13). It is a declaration by God of a person’s identity. He says that He will declare a person righteous under one condition—if the person is hidden in Christ by faith.

Using this definition of righteousness, then, it means that God declares a person accepted, “right” with Him. The tragedy is that most people who have been declared “all right” by God continue to strive to generate their own declaration of being “all right.” The Bible refers to this as “dead works.”

Biblical Definition of Flesh

Next we need a biblical definition of “flesh.” In Philippians 3:3-9, we find a very clear explanation:

For we…put no confidence in the flesh, 4although I myself might have confidence even in the flesh. If anyone else has a mind to put confidence in the flesh, I far more: circumcised the eighth day, of the nation of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; as to the Law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to the righteousness which is in the Law, found blameless. But whatever things were gain to me, those things I have counted as loss for the sake of Christ. More than that, I count all things to be loss in view of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for Whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them to be but rubbish in order that I may gain Christ, and may be found in Him, not having a righteousness of my own derived from the Law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness which comes from God on the basis of faith (emphasis added).

This passage leaves no doubt that the term “flesh” in this context refers to the Christian’s “old ways.” Please don’t misunderstand me: The term “flesh” does not refer to the Christian’s body in this context. The body is not the “bad guy.” God made the whole man and redeems the whole man—spirit, soul, and body. In other biblical contexts, the term “flesh” is sometimes used to refer to the body, but here the term simply means the Christian’s old ways.

I wish to make ten points concerning this passage that will give us a better idea of what it means to “walk after the flesh.”

1. Verses 3-4 make it clear that Paul is challenging you to a flesh contest. Walking after the flesh doesn’t necessarily mean chasing women. Some flesh trips can be very productive. Paul claims he’s got “better” flesh than you. He can perform better than you can.

2. Since this is the inspired Word of God and Paul states that he has the best “old ways,” what he says is true. It means exactly what it says. This man was “Captain Israel!” (Remember, Jesus is not to be considered, as He had no “old ways.”)

3. Paul’s flesh was generated by Saul.

4. Saul’s motive for perfecting these patterns for living was to satisfy his need for love. He sought to get it from God, from others, and from self by measuring up to certain standards (performance).

5. When Saul got saved, the Bible teaches that he was “crucified with Christ” (Galatians 2:20; Romans 6:6).

6. Saul was “buried with Christ” (Romans 6:3,4).

7. Paul (not a resurrected Saul) was born—created fresh—as a brand-new creature in Christ (2 Corinthians 5:17).

8. Paul, the new spirit man, was born into Saul’s former earthsuit (body) after Saul was crucified with Christ.

9. The “old ways,” the old program for living, generated by Saul now became Paul’s “flesh.” It is my personal conviction that this remained in the brain of the earthsuit.

10. Paul states that he abandoned Saul’s former method (performance-based acceptance) for getting his need for self-esteem satisfied and opted for God’s method (Jesus-based acceptance).

In Philippians 3:9 we see Paul, the new man in Christ, stating that he has scrapped his “old ways” of generating righteousness for “a [different] righteousness not derived from law [Saul’s standard, which happened to correlate with Mosaic law due to the culture], but based upon the righteousness that is from above through faith in Christ” (author’s paraphrase). Make no mistake about it. Perfectionism has its roots in establishing a righteousness of your own based on law—your law.

It’s not carnal for a Christian to be perfectionistic, but Paul’s motive for developing it was. Was Paul perfectionistic in his approach to godly living? Yes! But he was liberated from using perfectionism as a means of generating self-acceptance. He generated his self-acceptance through setting his mind on who he now was in Christ—acceptable. He then allowed Christ to live His life through Paul, using Paul’s perfectionistic, goal-oriented traits to bring glory to His name on earth, living out His life of agape love.

Will the Real Enemy Please Stand Up?

“Our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against [the forces of evil]” (Ephesians 6:12). I want to caution you as we begin to look at how this all may have worked out in your life that when I point out mistakes made by your parents and peers, you should direct your hostility toward the biblically identified target, Satan, and not toward your folks. It isn’t them you ought to be angry with; it’s the Evil One who has worked through your parents to try to destroy you. You want to know why your folks did some of the things they did? Go take a look at what happened to them when they were kids. But let’s not get mad at grandma and grandpa, either. If you trace all the garbage back to its source, who do you finally wind up with? Satan! He is the one who first deceived, who hates and destroys families. Direct your anger at him—that’s biblical.

Covert Rejection

Anyone can see that little Charlie got overtly rejected by his parents. What most fail to see is that the rejected child’s self-image is shaped by his experience so he winds up feeling as if his folks are perfectly justified in rejecting him. He reasons he’d reject himself, too, if the shoe were on the other foot, because he sees himself as a no-good bum who doesn’t deserve to be loved.

But there is a much more subtle form of rejection that’s rampant on planet earth. Let’s call it “covert rejection.” (My friend Charles Solomon has written an excellent book on the subject of rejection. I highly recommend The Rejection Syndrome [Tyndale].)

In the case of the person who is being overtly rejected, all the cards are up on the table, and by the teen years most children see very well that they are being rejected. In the case of covert rejection, however, most kids never discern what’s happening to them. It simply seeps over their personalities like a slowly gathering fog they can’t identify, much less verbalize to someone else. The emotional results are the same for both types of rejection, though, so the covertly rejected child might say, “I feel as if they don’t love me,” whereas the overtly rejected child might say, “I know nobody loves me.”

Examples of Covert Rejection

Perfectionism

If a parent seems to drive himself to perform perfectly in most things he tackles, seems to have perfect performance standards for himself, and insists that his child also perform perfectly, he will unwittingly teach his child that he’s inadequate. The child will begin to accept as “fact” the notion, I can’t do anything right! No matter how hard I try, I always foul everything up. Then his feeler gets stuck, and he begins to feel this way about himself constantly.

The ones who are thirsty for their folks’ acceptance adopt the Avis Rent-A-Car posture, “We try harder,” and develop into perfectionists themselves. Those who are not, go 180 degrees in the opposite direction, becoming impulsive in their search for acceptance.

When the perfectionist gets saved he will typically become quickly bound by law, his law, the law of having to perform perfectly as a Christian in order to accept himself. It’s a standard that he’s trying to live up to in order to generate and maintain self-acceptance.

No Physical Love

A child who receives no physical love from her folks will not learn that It’s very difficult for my folks to demonstrate physical affection. She will learn I’m unlovely. She will then begin to feel unlovely. If dad avoids holding his little girl on his lap, snuggling her, holding hands while strolling, and so on (all in a healthy way), she will learn about herself in the process, not about dad. If overt affection from her dad is missing, she has a good chance of developing into an adult who has hang-ups about relating to males in a physical love relationship, either being sexually promiscuous or perhaps finding it difficult to relate easily to husband, sons, or male friends. When she becomes a born-again believer, this will become a part of her unique version of the flesh. The Evil One will try to control her through these patterns.

Ignore Your Child

Little kids spell love t-i-m-e. “Spend time with me,” their words and actions cry out. “If you don’t spend time with me,” they reason, “then whatever you do spend time with is worth more to you than I am. Therefore, I am worth less than that is. Therefore, I am worthless.” It matters not how you ignore the child. You can do it by working all the time, golfing all the time, soul-winning all the time, or you can be at home but just never interact with him. The emotional results will usually be the same. He’ll feel worthless.

The child doesn’t deduce this through a logical reasoning process, but it all comes into him at the gut level nevertheless. We hear it said that it’s not the quantity of time a parent spends with his child that counts, but the quality. (This statement is often heard from the lips of successful, busy men and women.) You don’t get quality time, however, unless you get it by traveling the road of quantity. The intimacy will evolve as a by-product of sharing many good times together. I know of no shortcuts.

How many Christian men and women have I counseled who are either spending their lives in a frantic search to maintain a sense of personal worth, or, at the other extreme, who cannot tolerate success or praise if they do receive it?

I’ve Got a Better Idea

Some parents are like the Ford Motor Company’s advertising slogan: They always have a better idea. No matter how well the child does, they have a habit of suggesting how he could have improved. They rarely praise him. The idea is to consistently give him a “better” way he could have done it after he has already chosen and carried out his own idea. This is an alternative way of producing the same emotional results described above. This communicates to him that he is stupid. If he believes it long enough, his feeler will get stuck. A commonly observed illustration of this is the parent who harps about the only C grade his child receives on his report card while virtually ignoring the As and Bs.

Ridicule

Verbalizing to a child that he is stupid, ugly, clumsy, uncoordinated, lazy, “just like my sorry brother-in-law,” and so on gives him solid evidence that he really is a loser. Pointing out to a daughter that she’d be “beautiful with a sack over her head” should fix her feeler up just dandy for relating to males later in life. The devil ought to be able to take that kind of garbage and make her either promiscuous or frigid—promiscuous to “prove” her femininity or to obtain male acceptance, or else frigid, convinced that she is totally unfeminine.

Nonverbal Ridicule

Nonverbal ridicule is accomplished by waiting until an appropriate moment, such as when the child hands dad the wrong screwdriver. The idea is to do things like sighing deeply, rolling the eyes toward the ceiling, slowly wagging the head as if the load is almost too heavy to bear. This produces the same results as overt ridicule and may be even more destructive since it’s more subtle. That way the child accepts the total blame for his “stupidity” rather than being able to discern that perhaps he is being mistreated.

No Teaching Time

The mother who never takes time to teach and train her daughter what it means to be a woman—baking, sewing, housekeeping, including the intimate tasks such as proper hygiene at the onset of menstruation—communicates to her daughter that she is worthless and stupid, that she is not worth her mother’s time. In effect, she fails to teach her daughter how to “female.” The girl can easily develop into a woman who doesn’t feel feminine.

This can also be accomplished by a dad who communicates to his little daughter that he’d wanted her to be a son and so has treated her like a boy. Such a girl often receives her initiation into the world by being given a masculine name at birth. She’s whipped before she starts by flunking the physical for acceptance. Often her only “acceptance” from dad comes by roughhousing with him “like a boy.”

The illustration of non-teaching, non-intimacy cited above with the mother-daughter relationship can, of course, be applied to the father-son relationship as well; and a boy who grows up in that situation often develops into a man who feels threatened in his male role.

Overprotection

My friend Chuck Solomon tells a story about an orphaned baby fox that a woman discovered in the country one frigid winter day. She took pity on it, carried it home, bottle-fed it, weaned it onto dog food, and taught it tricks such as pushing a button with its nose to fill its water bowl. She loved it almost as if it were a child.

Two years later, she had the most beautiful, full-grown fox in the county. But she began to realize that the time for her to set the fox free to enjoy the fringe benefits of adult fox life had arrived. So, she returned him to the site of their first meeting, and after kissing him good-bye put him out into the woods. As she drove away, her mind was churning, Oh, how this hurts, she thought. I’ve poured my life into that fox for two years. I hope he can somehow appreciate that without me he’d be dead.

But what became of the fox? It was January and getting down to 5 degrees at night. The fox curled up into a ball to try to keep warm. As the cold dawn would break, he could hardly get unballed, he was so stiff. He was hungry and frigid. Something little would scurry past his nose. It was normal fox food, but he didn’t know it; he was looking for his dog food. He was thirsty, but knew nothing of searching out the spring a mile away. He was looking for his button to push. In two weeks he was a dead fox!

That woman killed him just as surely as if she’d shot him in the head with a .22. She killed him with what she called “love,” but it wasn’t love. She didn’t really have his best interests at heart (agape). Her treatment of him kept him from learning how to fox!

People do the same kind of thing to their children. They make all the decisions for them, tell them what to wear, how to stand, how to smile, when they can accept Christ as Savior, and when they can’t. They handpick private schools with teachers who will continue the overprotection process.

When such a kid reaches age twenty-one, his folks say, “All right, Charlie, we’ve done the very best we could for you, at great personal sacrifice. But the expense was well worth it. Now go out there and face the world! Find yourself a spouse and live the victorious Christian life. We’re expecting great things from you.”

The young “adult” then creeps out into the world looking for his dog food bowl and a button to push. He crashes and burns! He doesn’t know how to people. He’s hooked on needing someone to make all his decisions for him because he’s never been allowed to make any. Physically he’s an adult; emotionally he’s in elementary school. His feeler’s stuck. Color him feeling guilty, impotent as a person, and stupid.

Indulgence

Indulgence is one of the most destructive things a parent can do to a child. Its end product is a person with an unbridled, unbroken will who lives with one goal in mind—to take care of Number One. If anything goes wrong, it’s never his fault. If there are bills to be paid but his church is planning a ski trip to Colorado, he never bats an eye. “Man, I hope there’s a new snow cover when we get there,” is all he says.

This problem of indulgence seems to be escalating, and I personally believe it’s because we have so many working mothers. Admittedly it’s sometimes necessary for a mother to work outside the home, but often the motive is TV sets and boats. The working parents arrive home at 5:30 with Johnny in tow from the day-care center. Everyone’s tired, and the child misbehaves. The folks don’t want to discipline him, so they let him get away with things too much. Through this process, he becomes the acting head of the house. He runs things his way. He is Lord of the Family Ring.

Being a Christian means among other things that I submit myself to God’s authority over me. I agree to let Him establish His Kingdom inside me. I let Him sit in my chair. But the indulged person often has great difficulty submitting to any authority, unless he agrees totally with that authority, in which case he still remains in control. Color him feeling rebellious.

Stonewalling

Parents will often bottle up their emotions and give their children few outward signs of how they’re feeling. It complicates matters all the more if a given parent is a quiet person who communicates only with “Yes,” “No,” “Maybe,” and similarly uninformative answers. The child of such a parent, because of his need for acceptance, will begin to try to read mom by Braille. He’ll crank out his feelings antenna and search for emotional evidence that he’s making it with her. He constantly checks his emotions as the barometer of truth that determines how his mom is reacting to him.

Females are especially vulnerable to this, because the Lord has constructed them to be intuitive folks to begin with. The female has the ability to arrive at a conclusion via a mysterious inner “knowing” and be right on target—much more so than a male. Thus, girls can be deceived into working their intuition overtime, and it results in overly depending on their emotions as a valid indicator of “truth.”

Performance-Based Acceptance

I have attempted to describe briefly some of the major mistakes that may have been made by your parents that could have resulted in your growing into an adult Christian who has a lot of difficulty making the Christian life work. But I believe we have yet to hit upon the devil’s biggest weapon. His most effective technique, visible in epidemic proportions, is “performance-based love,” or “performance-based acceptance,” which I’ll sometimes refer to as PBA.

It works like this. If you perform (act) as I want you to, I’ll accept you; if you don’t, I’ll reject you. In other words, I realize that I possess something that you need—love. So I’m going to use my “supply” to control you.

The youngest of our four sons is named Wade. Suppose I caught him lying to me when he was eight. Watch me blow it as I interact with him. “All right, Wade, you lied to me!” This is okay, so far. I’m nailing his poor performance. “If there’s anything I can’t stand, it’s a liar.” Oh, oh; I’ve ceased to deal with performance and have switched to criticizing the performer. “And your mother can’t stand liars either! We promised each other thirty years ago that we’d never tolerate a liar in this house, but it looks like we’ve got our first liar! And God hates liars, too! ‘All liars shall have their place in the hell of fire!’ I’ll show you what we do to liars around here! We spank ’em! You get into that bedroom, you liar!” And I lay it on him.

Rear Wade this way for several years, and then interview him at age fifteen. If you could get him to open up to you, this is what he’d say: “I feel like dad can’t stand me because of the way I act. Neither can mom. She can’t stand to be around me. It’s just this feeling I’ve got. I know it’s true. And I feel like God is mad at me most of the time, too, because of the way I act. Oh, I see all those verses in the Bible about how much God loves me, but I just don’t feel that way about my relationship with Him. And you know, I don’t blame any of them, because I don’t like me, either! Fact is, if they did start to act like they loved me, I’d think they’d lost their marbles.”

See? His feeler is stuck on rejection. That’s the result of performance-based acceptance. I don’t want to do that to Wade, and neither did your folks want to reject their children that way. That’s the devil’s work. But I’ve got to deal with Wade’s lying. How do I accomplish this without destroying his personhood?

Reject Performance, Not Performer

It’s really pretty simple once you see it. You deal with the performance, not with the performer. Here’s how I should handle the lying: “All right, Wade Gillham, you lied to me.” I’m rejecting performance. “And if there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s lying.” I’m still rejecting performance. “And your mother can’t stand it either. Thirty years ago, we swore that there was one thing we would never allow in our house, and that’s lying. We never have, and we don’t intend to begin with you. And God can’t stand lying, either. He hates it! Christ died because of stuff like that!” Now, have I said anything about Wade? No, I’m talking about what he did, not about him. I’m dealing with his performance, not his person.

Now Deal with Person, Not Performance

I could continue: “Now, Wade, if I didn’t love you, I’d let you go ahead and lie. I’d indulge you and let you generate a big, green highway for lying to people to get your needs met. But I won’t fail you like that. I love you too much. So, I’m going to help you with your problem. You get into that bedroom. I’m going to spank you for lying to me.” Can you see that the very act of disciplining Wade will now be a demonstration of my commitment to him and my love for him? “Those whom the Lord loves He disciplines” (Hebrews 12:6).

If we interview Wade at age fifteen after having been reared under this system, he’d say, “Dad can’t stand the way I act sometimes, but he sure does love me. Mom’s the same way. Sometimes the things I do really bug her, but there’s no doubt in my mind that she loves me. And God is displeased with some of my behavior, too, but this one thing I know. He loves me. Hey, I don’t always like the way I act, either. I’m working on that, but I accept myself. I like me.” Do you see the difference?

PBA—Satan’s Chief Tool on Earth

Every religion from Mormonism to voodoo is based on PBA, humanity’s seeking acceptance from God by earning it. Christianity, however, is relationship, not religion. God reaches out to us with grace (unmerited favor) through Jesus Christ’s finished work. This relationship is not for sale. Jesus bought it with His life. It cannot be earned through PBA. You don’t earn a gift, you gratefully accept it.

The world system, on the other hand, is based totally on PBA, whether you’re trying to get the acceptance of peers in the jungles of the Amazon or the jungles of Harlem; whether you’re reared in a Mafia member’s home or a pastor’s home. Performance is the name of the game. Perform well enough and you can earn your love supply out of your environment, even in your church.

One of the best examples I can offer in our culture is the school system. Now, I’m not setting out to condemn the schools, but let’s face it, they weren’t handed down from Mount Sinai. They are part of the world. Even the Christian schools are not exempt from PBA.

PBA in the Classroom

I’m going to use Bill, my number three son, as “Exhibit A.” I saved some of his first-grade papers to illustrate my point about PBA in our schools. He’s a grown man now, a delightful brother in the Lord who’s an editor and a musician. Illustration 2.1 depicts one of his spelling papers.

Now, let’s say that I decide I need to go up to the school to discuss Bill’s progress (or lack of it) with his teacher. I say, “Ma’am, I see here that Bill’s given it six shots, and he’s got three right and three wrong, which got him a grade of U. But what about this word nine? He got that one right, but you didn’t say anything about that one. How come?”

She might say, “Now, Dr. Gillham, you’ve got to understand something. It’s not Bill’s handling of the word nine that we’re concerned with this year. He’s already got that one whipped. It’s the word ten he’s having trouble with ’cause he’s from Oklahoma. He calls it tan. Now that’s a problem.” Her whole focus is on drawing attention to errors, not on encouraging small signs of progress.

Here’s another paper that’s not Bill’s. It was given to me by the mother of a seven-year-old boy. He produced it for a creative writing assignment (see Illustration 2.2).

I don’t know how extensively you’ve studied human intelligence, but this is a smart cookie! We want to do what we can to encourage a kid like this. Did you see what his teacher put on his paper, however? “This is very hard to read!” Thud. Instead of encouraging his talent, she put him down. She passed up an opportunity to edify and build up, and he’s going to take it as a personal inadequacy.

Now back to my Bill for one more example. In the paper below, you can see that the teacher has discovered a severe case of the short lower case e’s. She marked every one of them wrong (see Illustration 2.3)!

Let’s say that I decide it’s time to go back up to see the teacher again, and I take Bill’s paper along. I say, “Now, Ma’am, I see you’ve given Bill a B because he’s blown it with his little e’s there, but what about this o in the word grasshopper? That’s a pretty good looking o. And how about that l in lay? That’s nice and straight, and you didn’t say anything about that.”

And she’d say something like this to me, “Now after visiting with you twice on this same matter, I’m beginning to gain some insight into your son’s problem. Let’s take it from the top again. We’re not interested in your boy’s o’s and l’s. He’s got those down pat. But if we’re ever going to stamp the ignorance out of him, we’ve got to get him straightened out on his e’s.” You see, her mentality is that in order to help him, she’s got to find something that he’s doing wrong and then straighten him out.

Now, to show you I’ve got this teacher pegged right, look at this one. She’s scored it 100, but messy. She can’t get him on math today, so she’s going to nail him on cleanliness (see Illustration 2.4.)!

Now I don’t mean to pick on this teacher. And I’m not hammering the school system but the world system. It’s designed to destroy, especially the weak ones, the very ones upon whom the Lord Jesus has compassion. And we do it to them. We do it in our own homes, to our own spouses and kids! I managed my own family this way for years. Praise God, He turned me around (more about that later when I discuss my unique version of the flesh).

Encourage One Another

What’s the alternative to PBA in the classroom setting? Here’s another actual school paper (see Illustration 2.5).

This teacher simply discovers the best thing the child has done on the paper and comments on it. It’s not flattery. The Word teaches not to do that, that it’s hollow. She’s just trying to encourage, to find something she can do to edify the people around her.

Does that mean a teacher should never tell a student he’s doing something wrong? Of course not. But you have to earn the right to do it. Look at this paper (see Illustration 2.6):

You see, the teacher has encouraged the child with “good” and “beautiful.” Her positive attitude toward him has earned her the right to say, “Oh, by the way, George, your lowercase b’s are too short. Here’s a model for you to imitate next time.” How do you suppose he’s going to respond to that kind of encouragement? The same way you would!

That’s a picture of Jesus Christ. What if He had said to Peter at the first opportunity, “Get thee behind me, Satan!” Scratch one prospective disciple! The guy never would have joined up. It would have been “Jesus and the eleven.” But no, He loved him in obvious ways, thus earning the right to love him yet another way by punching him out. Sure, He got tough with people at times, but they needed it. That is the definition of agape.

Jesus-Based Acceptance

One of the best-kept secrets in Christianity is that God accepts us. True, He can’t stand our sinful acts, but He loves us. He doesn’t have us on performance-based acceptance; He has us on Jesus-based acceptance. If you have accepted Jesus as your Lord and Savior, the Father has accepted you completely. Performance has nothing whatever to do with it. Performance is important to God, yes, but it has to do with winning His approval, not His acceptance. It has to do with hearing Him say, “Well done, good and faithful servant” one day at the Judgment Seat of Christ, but it has nothing to do with hearing Him say, “I accept you as My beloved child” (John 1:12).

You can be the greatest performer on the block at keeping God’s standards, and you’ll still be totally rejected by God if you are unsaved. One of the major purposes of those standards (the Ten Commandments, the Sermon on the Mount, etc.) is to frustrate you to the point where you’ll see that there’s no way you’re ever going to earn His acceptance. You’ve got to change methods. You’ve got to come to the Father through Christ’s perfection, just as He said.

To demonstrate how deeply entrenched Satan has made the performance-based acceptance syndrome, consider this biblically based illustration. On a one-to-ten scale, where ten is the best, put a number on how well you accept yourself, your spouse, and your kids, assuming all are born again. Let’s suppose you selected a five for yourself. You’re saying that you still have five additional points to climb before you can accept yourself perfectly.

But God accepts you perfectly in Christ already. God doesn’t grade on a one-to-ten scale; He grades pass-fail. His acceptance of you and me is not contingent on our performance, but on what we have done with Jesus Christ’s performance for us. If you have surrendered to Jesus as Lord and Savior, then God has already accepted you completely. He couldn’t love or accept you more if you had never sinned. And He’ll never love or accept you less no matter how often you do sin.

Actually, any Christian who accepts himself or any other believer at less than ten has higher standards than God! He sees himself and his loved ones falling far short of the standard for acceptance. This person is using performance as the criterion for acceptance. God, however, uses Christ’s finished work for us as the criterion for acceptance. Thus, any Christian who is striving for acceptance is fighting a battle that’s already been won.

(For additional help in identifying your unique version of the flesh, see the “Flesh Inventory”.)

Questions for Further Study

1. In Philippians 3:3-9, Paul elaborates on his unique version of the flesh. How was his flesh developed?

2. What are some of the insights you have gained so far concerning the flesh, and what has God’s Spirit pointed out to you concerning your version of the flesh? Hint: Take special note of how you get your need for love and self-love met.

3. What is necessary to be accepted by God?

Answers in “Answers to Questions for Further Study”.

CHAPTER 3

How Anabel and I Got into Our Fix

Anabel, my precious wife who’s trusted God’s grace to take her through the deep water of being married to me, approached her wedding day with great anticipation. With a track record of twenty-two years of success at playing Lord of the Ring, she was confident of her ability to make it fly. Other women seemed to be able to perform well enough in their marriages. A lot of them seemed happy and content. If they could handle it, so could she. After all, hadn’t she always been able to handle life?

She could learn how to cook to please her husband. She could mend clothing. She could redecorate rooms and plan the grocery shopping. She could learn to meet her husband’s sexual needs. She could do it. She had self-confidence.

After the honeymoon was over, however, life settled into the routine of, “How can we plug my electric razor and your hair curler into one outlet?” “When are you going to be through in the lavatory? I’ve got to be to work by eight you know!” “Would you please not run the washer when I’m in the shower? I swear, the next time you do that, you’re going to regret it!”

Things weren’t going the way she’d planned. What could she do? Of course! That’s it! She’d regroup and try harder. Knowing that hot biscuits are one of my favorite dishes and wanting desperately to start the day off on the right foot so it would be a good day, Anabel was up bright and early making delectable aromas flow from the kitchen.

In came big daddy with his “red pencil” nicely sharpened to begin his day by checking his wife’s performance. “Biscuits for breakfast! I believe you let ’em get a little bit too brown this morning, sugar.” I ate half the platter and left for work.

Anabel was a bit disappointed by this. Not exactly the response or the gratitude she’d hoped for. But it was nothing she couldn’t shake off. And after all, she could try harder next time, right? She had learned through many years of success at playing Lord of the Ring that she could do better the next time. There’s always a next time, and she always does better the next time. She’d learned that. She was capable. She could do it.

So she tried again the next day, this time turning the timer down thirty seconds to be sure they didn’t get too brown.

“Biscuits again!” said big daddy, his fingers still red from sharpening his pencil.

“Yes! All for you this morning, dear, to show you how much I love you!”

“Uh, I believe you took ’em out of the oven a little early this morning, honey. They look a little too light.” I ate half the platter again and left for work.

And then I recall a time, very early in our marriage, when we were still living in our little honeymoon apartment. One Saturday morning I took Anabel by the hand and led her into our living room. I held her hand, sighed a bit at what I felt I had to do for her own good, looked her in the eye, and gently said, “Honey, I wish you would learn to do just one thing well.” Can you believe it? I ought to have been whipped with a wet rope!

Today, the pain being history, Anabel says, “Of course, things like that crushed me. But I’ll tell you one thing. It didn’t destroy me. I came out of it pulling myself up by my bootstraps, vowing that I would improve. Next time I’d do better! I can do better! I’ve learned that I can always do better!”

In this chapter, I want to show you Anabel’s and my flesh patterns and how they came to be. You’ll also see how two very different kinds of flesh tried to coexist in one family. I trust that our example will give you insight into your own situation.

There was the time we were in the car heading for a square dance on Friday night. It was our big night out after a week’s work. Anabel was so excited. She’d tried hard to look pretty to please her husband. But by this time, I had developed new weapons. Whereas before I had been attacking her performance, I now began to attack her person. You may be able to try harder to improve your performance, but how can you try harder when your identity is being attacked?

I directed my attention over to my sweet, twenty-seven-year-old wife of six years and said, “I can’t imagine anyone wanting to square dance with you.” Right out of the blue! Why, if her dad had known what she was living with, he’d have rung my chimes, and I would have deserved it.

One night I found Jesus as I watched Billy Graham on television. It was his first nationwide telecast from Madison Square Garden in 1957. Many things changed about my life after my conversion, but that hostile, chip-on-my-shoulder attitude in my home didn’t change one whit. I call it being “wormy.” I went right on with the red pencil routine, only by this time we had some sons, and they came in for their share of it as well.

Here’s a typical episode. It’s grocery shopping time. Anabel parks in our drive and toots the horn for me to help carry in the bags. By this time in our marriage I had made a shoulder holster for my red pencil, so I could whip it out in a flash. Wyatt Earp had nothing on me. Oh, I was fast, real fast.

So now in the kitchen I’m helping unpack the grocery sacks, and I say, “Del Monte green beans? How come?”

“Well, they’re the best. I just hate to get one of those cheap brands and have it ruin a meal. I don’t mind paying a little extra for top quality.”

“Listen. Sure Fine green beans are good enough for this family, and they’re a nickel cheaper. Hey, we don’t drive a Cadillac! We’re Chevy people. It upsets me that you’re so careless with your spending. You’re getting to where you do things like this more and more. I wish you’d cut it out!”

Stung by such an unexpected outburst when she considered herself to be trying so hard to please, she begins to get a little down about the whole thing. But after a few hours of struggling with feelings of failure, she shakes it off and determines that she’ll do better the next time.

The next time she has green beans on her shopping list, then, she makes sure to get, you guessed it, a six-pack of Sure Fines. This will please Bill, she reasons. He wants me to get Sure Fines. But guys, she failed to notice a very important event that was taking place across town at Safeway. Del Montes were on sale for six cents off! So what should I do as we’re unpacking the sack and I become aware of this horrible case of poor stewardship?! She has just squandered an extra penny per can for beans of inferior quality! What should I do, men? “Lord,” I prayed, “the woman You gave me has blown it! I try and try to help her clean up her act, but she just can’t do anything right. I guess I’m going to have to tell her.”

I told her, and I told her, and I told her, and I took the finest thing outside of salvation that the Lord has ever given me—a person who loved me enough to give herself to me until death, a person who busted herself trying to be the best wife she could possibly be—and I almost destroyed her. I did it with this thing that lies between my teeth. I reduced her nearly to the point of suicide.

Why couldn’t I change? After all, I was born again. Anabel and I were trying our best to make Christ the center of our home. I was one of the leading soul-winners in my church; I worked like a Trojan, conducted jail services every Sunday afternoon, and attended church Sunday morning and night, and Wednesday night, too. I read my Bible and prayed. But when the door to my own house closed behind me, I was a destroyer, and I couldn’t stop.

What was the problem? I was “walking after the flesh,” my unique version of it. How did I get that way? What could have possibly happened to me during my formative years to turn me into such a tyrant? I know exactly what happened.

My Flesh

I dare not challenge you to come to the end of your flesh trip without first having come to the end of mine. That certainly is not to say that I never fall back and walk according to the flesh, but it certainly is to say that I experience 95 percent better victory than I did before I held a good funeral for that way of life.

As each Christian’s unique version of the flesh is heavily, although not totally, shaped by his formative years, I’m going to have to talk about my relationship with my mom and dad. They’re with the Lord now, but I want you to understand something at the start. I love mom and pop. I’m glad they were my folks. I wouldn’t trade my heritage for anyone’s. The way they interacted with me is a vitally important part of my pilgrimage with Jesus. Had it been different, I would not have traveled this route, and, thus, I would not have fit into the niche the Lord had in mind for me.

When I showed up on planet earth, the Lord put me into a male earthsuit. My dad was a Presbyterian pastor, and I was the eldest son. Now, ladies, I am about to make some statements that will come off as chauvinistic. Please don’t write me off as that. I readily confess that I used to be, but I’m not now. I am a new man in Christ, and I have overcome that portion of the flesh. So please hang in there with me.

According to the manufacturer’s instructions (the Bible), my folks’ marriage was upside down. Mom was “lifing out” more of the husband’s role in that she was definitely the stronger of the two personalities. When decisions were to be made, she made them. If I wanted to go play with the kid down the block, there was no point in asking my dad, because he would respond, “Go ask your mom.” This held true for major as well as minor decisions and mom often emphasized her position with a marked increase in decibels. We often said she was as “strong as an acre of garlic.”

Pop, meanwhile, was “lifing out” more of a wifely role in that he totally submitted to mom. When mom said, “Frog,” he jumped. Pop avoided decisions. If he ever got pinned down on an issue, he’d say, “I’m out of it,” and he’d split. We facetiously told him that we were going to put this epitaph on his tombstone: “I’m sure ’nuff out of it!” Although pop had many godly traits, in this one he gave me a nonbiblical male role model that blocked my ability to generate male self-esteem by playing Lord of the Ring.

Mom wanted to make me into a pansy-preacher’s-boy type. I had long hair until I was five years old, and only one other guy had long hair when I was a kid—he was the Prince of England. (I wrote him, but he never responded.) She also had me dressed out in knickers. I got my first long pants when I was nine years old. And since all the other boys wore overalls, I didn’t exactly fit into the culture.

Striving for Self-Acceptance

A little boy has many needs, one of which is to feel like a male—like he belongs as a male. It’s going to cause him problems if he begins to feel like a misfit. He’ll have trouble accepting himself (there’s that word again).

What do I mean when I say a boy needs to feel like a boy? Well, a five-year-old boy needs to believe he can throw a rock straighter than a five-year-old girl. He needs to feel he can handle lizards and toads. They wet on you, and you just slough it off. You might even eat lunch without washing your hands. And when the girls shriek, “You’ll get warts on your hands!” we boys love it! We’ll say, “Aw, rain on that. Let ’em give me warts clear up to my elbows. See if I care!”

That’s a boy for you, right? And you know, I still have a lot of that in me. I’m not into toads any more, but I like to feel that Anabel sees me as strong; that she feels she can depend on me; that I have wise counsel; that she doesn’t have to carry the load of making decisions alone concerning problems that arise in the family. In short, I guess I need to feel as though she sees me as her husband, not as a little boy.

Now, as a child, mom represented all femininity to me. She passed the physical. So, if I was ever to accept myself as male, I had to ultimately see myself as being stronger than mom! That looked like climbing Mount Everest! In addition to this intimidation, my male role model was demonstrating behavior contrary to God’s plan, so I had no help, no markers along the path of life to aid me in learning how to “male.” I couldn’t play Lord of the Ring effectively enough to bestow masculine acceptance upon myself. I doubted my masculinity.

Three Roads

The Holy Spirit has shown me through counseling with hundreds and hundreds of people that a boy in an environment such as I have described will respond in one of three ways, although he can combine them.

First, he may become homosexual. He may be so intimidated by his environment that he will come to see the normal male role that God intended him to walk in as impossible. He literally gives up on being male and does a 180-degree turn away from it. As Lord of his Ring, he opts to get his need for love met the “best” way he can (with a lot of help from the Evil One). This did not happen to me, although it surely could have. I have counseled many men who were born anew, but who had great struggles with homosexual temptation because they were products of an upside-down marriage.

Second, he may become passive. He just semi gives up on being male and begins to journey through life passively getting his need for love met by taking whatever acceptance crumbs the women and stronger males will sweep to him from their tables. His motto becomes, “I’m anybody’s dog who will hunt with me.” He’s afraid to have an opinion because he feels that people who disagree will reject him. He can’t stand this, so he defers to their power to get his need for love satisfied.

Tragically, this passes for godliness in some Christians’ perception when, in fact, it’s just chicken flesh. This man operates out of fear of men, and his motive is his quest for love. We’ve got to stop electing this type of man to positions of authority in the church until he gets victory over the flesh. His lifestyle of riding the fence on issues is not Christ in him; it’s the flesh.

I see some of this in me. I have struggled with this aspect of my flesh patterns, especially around strong males. I have victory over this now through understanding who I now am in Christ, but it’s still a temptation for me.

Third, he can go the macho route. He “sucks it up” and says to himself, “I will be male. I can do it. I desperately need to see myself as male. I’ve got to make it.”

This is the route I took. I rebelled against my mom’s dominance and my dad’s passivity. I tried awfully hard to “overcome” my past by proving to myself that I was male. Do you see that I was being driven by my need for love?

Self-Help City

What could a young boy do to help himself feel more like a male? Well, the tack I took was to be vulgar and profane. I took pride in being foul-mouthed, even as a small child. And it paid off. It was viewed as macho by my peers. It wouldn’t work now because women are equally vulgar and profane, but back in my youth it worked great.

Move Over, John Wayne!

Okay, let’s move me into the high school years. What could I do at this level to prove to myself that I was male? I had to keep adding more tools to my toolbox as I got older, see? My “ring” was getting more complex. For one thing, I could become an athlete.

In the little Oklahoma community where Anabel and I grew up (Poteau), we spelled athlete “football player.” So I went out for football. There was just one problem: my earthsuit. It was 5 feet 2 inches tall, and it weighed 110 pounds. It had a size 13 neck and no hair on its legs. If you live inside an earthsuit like that and you’ve got to make that thing play football, your soul is in trouble! But I was out there playing, scared to death. I had to play; I needed what I perceived it could do for me, which was to help me accept myself better.

I even went out for college football so I could say I played football in college. They nearly killed me!

Move Over, Clark Gable!

What else could a high school boy do to build up his masculine image? Well, he could seduce the women. But wait a minute. Back there in Chapter 1, we learned that a small child learns about himself from the feedback he gets from others. And in our house, nobody ever kissed anybody. So at age fifteen, the kid had virgin lips! Mom didn’t even let the dog lick me. So how did I feel about myself? Unkissy. Oh, man, how I longed to kiss the women, but somehow I couldn’t bring myself to even try. My feeler was stuck.

You can readily see that I was not into sex. While I was desiring to be sexually active at level 10, I was intimidated by the thoughts that I would be rejected or that I would fail, and that was a 10. Thus, all my sexual experiences took place at the fantasy level. When I ultimately got saved, these flesh patterns were going to haunt me as I tried to walk in a godly manner. I was going to pay a heavy price for striving for acceptance as a male.

“Vengeance Is Mine,” Saith the Threatened Male

Somewhere along the way, I discovered a tool that I added to my toolbox and that proved to be very effective in helping me accept myself. It was more a weapon than a tool. I directed it at the people who were the major threat to my self-acceptance as a male. Who were those people? Strong, aggressive, assertive females. They instantly triggered in me all the frustrations I had experienced since childhood. If I could just get them out of my life, if I could destroy them, that would give me a feeling of superiority, of conquest. I couldn’t do it sexually, as I have already explained, but there was another way. I could do it with my tongue.

As a male, God made me more of a logical thinker than your typical female. She tends to be more of an intuitive thinker, more of a sensitive person. If I came in contact with a strong gal in high school, I would use sarcasm and invective on her. I would catch her in a group setting, rarely one-on-one, and make fun of her—ridicule the way she looked, the way she sang, the way she acted, the new zit she was trying to hide on her neck, or whatever—until she broke from the stress. You see, she couldn’t fight that way. Her sensitivity would disarm her, whereas I was insulated with indifference to her hurt. I could laugh off her retorts and hurl double the insults back in her face. She would break and begin to cry or scream at me. At this point it was usually difficult for me to keep a straight face, because inside I was experiencing glee. I had won!

Sad, isn’t it? But look around you at the millions of marriages, both Christian and non-Christian, that fit this mold. A strong gal is married to a threatened guy, and open warfare is the order of the day.

I am not proud of what I just told you about myself. Quite the contrary. But do you see a picture of a seventeen-year-old boy struggling for self-esteem? Do you see that’s how he played Lord of the Ring in an effort to generate and maintain self-esteem? And when I got saved, all this garbage was going to become my “old ways,” my flesh that I would have to struggle against.

My “Completer”

As my flesh was being formed along the lines I’ve just described, Anabel, my sweet wife whom the Father gave to me, was also having her flesh shaped. I’ll let her tell the story in her own words.

Bill was having lunch recently with Harold, a friend who had been my classmate at dear old Poteau High. Harold was a very competent, aggressive student—an athlete. As they were discussing years gone by, Harold made this observation: “You know, Bill, Anabel and I were in the same class when we were growing up there in Poteau. I had one goal. That was to beat her in at least one common undertaking. I never did.”

I am one of two daughters of Marcus and Jean Hoyle. One of the most tender and intimate moments that I remember with my beloved daddy was sitting out on the back steps one evening. I was between his legs, and he had his arms around my neck. Mother had just undergone a hysterectomy. Dad, in a very gentle, poignant voice, said to me, “You know, honey, you’re the only little boy I’ll ever have.”

Now, I can’t remember trying to be a tomboy to please my daddy. But I was the ultimate in tomboys! There were a lot of boys in our neighborhood, and they would congregate in our yard to play. If we played cowboys and Indians, you can be very sure that Anabel was the chief. If we played cops and robbers, I was the sheriff. I even remember daddy tying ropes in the mulberry tree so that I could be Tarzan. And neither of them ever said anything like, “Anabel, when are you going to grow up and start acting like a little lady?”

I was playing Lord of the Ring, forming patterns for male-female interaction and relationships to get their acceptance (I thought) and generate self-esteem. My patterns were not very acceptable ones to the males.

At Howard Elementary School, of course, the most important subject of the day was recess. This particular time, we were running races down under the hill. I can remember telling mother and daddy at the supper table how I had beaten Mervin McConnell in races that day. I’m sure they responded favorably. But that was not the ultimate. The ultimate was the time when I told them that I had beaten Joe Harold West in races. Why? Well, Joe Harold was my boyfriend! Sigh. (Stage whisper from Bill: To put this in perspective, Joe Harold became an all-state running back at dear ol’ Poteau High.)

Eighth grade. Everyone anticipated the annual trek up Cavanal Mountain in the spring. I had a new boyfriend, Robert Henry Kendrick. Of course, he didn’t know it, and I had to impress him. How was I going to do that? Why, the same way that I had been impressing boys since the days in our backyard. I was going to do whatever he did as well as he did it or better! Robert Henry was definitely the “leader of the pack.” But guess who was by his warm side all the way up the mountain? Anabel. I still remember the two of us sitting on the big rocks that overlook Poteau Valley. I don’t remember verbatim what he said, but it was something to this effect: “You’re quite a mountain climber.” He had noticed me. My heart sang! But my joy was short-lived. He carried Joan Caldwell down the mountain because she had a blister on her poor little foot! (Stage whisper: Anabel could’ve carried both of ’em down the mountain.)

I began to see things in the movies about this time that made a definite impression on me. Names that you may not recognize—Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart—were my stars. I liked what I saw. One movie had a profound effect on my life, Mrs. Miniver, with Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon. Why? Well, I saw two people as man and wife who had fun together; they respected each other; they were tender and loving; they were kind and considerate. I wasn’t seeing this in my home. Mother and dad had a stormy relationship. I started thinking, Maybe this being a woman isn’t all that bad. I began to see that I was something very special, something very beautiful—a woman.

But the patterns I’d developed for interacting with males and that Bill had developed for interacting with females were going to lead us into a self-destructive marriage.

Self-Destructive Marriage

As you can see, Anabel and I developed very different kinds of flesh. During our courtship, however, I was careful to keep all my undesirable, critical-toward-women behavior under wraps, especially with Anabel. I treated her like a queen. You see, she is a beauty, and it fed my masculinity needs to be number one in her life. But after the marriage, when I got her into the castle with the drawbridge up, I began to show my true self. This loving, caring, tender, compassionate, attentive, young man became sarcastic, hateful, critical, indifferent, self-centered, self-indulgent, and downright mean at times. I began to pour all my years of pent-up frustration against strong women out onto one of the dearest women God ever created. I was a strong woman hater.

Someone may be wondering why I would be dumb enough to marry a strong woman. Why not choose one who would submit to my every wish?

Remember the rattlesnake illustration back in Chapter 1 that demonstrates how your emotions get stuck? Well, since I had spent twenty-three years doubting my masculinity and my ability to have it all together as a male, as a leader, how did I feel by now? Inadequate. Oh, I wanted to be the strong leader at home, but I didn’t feel I could do it. I felt more like a boy. I felt I needed a combination wife and mother. My feeler was stuck on about an 8. So I married a woman who would run the ship, discipline the kids, manage the money, make wise decisions, and so on.

I married according to my feeler, in other words. But bless her heart, Anabel had not married my dad. She had married someone who was out to destroy her. I didn’t know this. I didn’t lie in bed at night and plot it. I didn’t know what was driving me. All I knew was that I felt frustrated, threatened, and unhappy with myself. It all looked hopeless.

Here’s the way the cycle went. I stayed frustrated with myself, say, at level 5. Show me someone who’s frustrated, and I’ll show you someone who’s hostile. I had a deep need to ease that frustration. As a Christian, I knew it was not of God and wanted to overcome it, yet the hostility sat in there like a bomb waiting to detonate. (Some Christians have “implode” flesh, some have “explode.” I have explode flesh.)

Anabel, meanwhile, kept doing things that irritated me, and I cut her down to size with my tongue. She, laboring under the burden of performance-based acceptance, made like Avis and tried harder. Stung by her husband’s criticism of her performance, she felt rejected.

Remember, though, that Anabel also felt self-rejection. She couldn’t love herself as well as she could had she not received this negative feedback on her performance. What was her old, fleshly remedy for the situation? Try to improve! So she doubled her effort, and more often than not, she made improvements on her already yeoman production.

This in turn threatened me even more, as it was a continual reminder of my own inability to accept myself as male. Her competency increased my self-rejection since I was being “outdone” by a woman, and my hostility accelerated. What was my way of getting relief? Strike out at the “cause,” Anabel.

Being rejected again, she tried to do better (to get her need for love met), and the cycle began again. We were two people walking after their unique versions of the flesh.

Thorns in the Flesh

In 2 Corinthians 12, Paul speaks of having known a man who was lifted up into heaven. He then says that he, Paul, was given a thorn in the flesh to keep him humble. Most would agree that the man who was lifted to heaven was Paul, else why would he have been given a thorn to keep him humble?

It is irrelevant to our discussion to speculate on what the thorn was. The emphasis in the passage is not on the thorn, but on its purpose. It was to make Paul’s flesh trip (pride) unproductive.

The Lord has designed your marriage so that each of you completes the other. There have been many books written enumerating the positive ways spouses complement or complete one another. But I’ll bet that if you examine your situation honestly, you will discover that your spouse’s flesh in some way is a “thorn” in your flesh. There will be something about his or her flesh patterns that bugs yours or makes it unproductive for you to use them. God’s purpose is that you be broken from walking after the flesh, and He has lovingly given you a “thorn” to motivate you to abandon the flesh trip.

Take Anabel and me, for example. One of my eight-lane, green highways is that supercritical tongue. One of Anabel’s is a supersensitivity to any evaluative comments about her performance. Our omniscient God left those in there at our salvation for us to “work out our own salvation” (mature in Christ; see Philippians 2:12,13). He could have zapped them out, but He left them there for us to work on as a learning and maturing activity so Christ could be glorified through our victory.

What if God had married me to a leather-skinned woman whom I could bounce invective off of all day long and she’d keep dishing it right back at me? She’d finish with, “Okay, boy, it’s Cheerios for you until you get your act together!” Why, I’d redouble my efforts to come up with innovative ways to destroy her. My flesh trip would actually escalate under such conditions. But no. God married me to a gal who can’t even tolerate it if I suggest she buy a different brand of green beans. She’d go through a half day of down time over such things. Brother, that’ll motivate you to beg God to help you clean up your act.

And how about Anabel? What if she were married to a guy who would never say anything evaluative to her? She could just go through her Christian life sheltered from ever having to deal with her unique version of the flesh. If she got “hurt” at Sunday school, they’d just change churches.

Instead, however, the Lord gave Anabel and me to each other for keeps. Our toothbrushes are in the same glass. There’s no way we can run from one another. We have to stay hitched and “make no provision for the flesh” (Romans 13:14). We are learning how to let Christ live through us to overcome the flesh. And praise God, it’s working! We are making progress to His glory. How about you? Are you receiving the thorns you need for dealing with your flesh, or are you murmuring at God about them? All murmuring will get you is a season pass on the wilderness merry-go-round. You’ve got to hold a funeral for that kind of behavior.

Questions for Further Study

1. What do you see God doing in your life to motivate you toward dealing with the fleshly patterns you have recognized?

2. Why does God not erase all the old flesh patterns at salvation, total commitment, or some other significant single encounter with Him?

3. If you have USDA Choice Flesh, by and large, and find yourself running into one brick wall after the next, what is one of the potential reasons for this?

Answers in “Answers to Questions for Further Study”.

CHAPTER 4

An “Old Man” in a New Earthsuit

Earlier in the book, I pointed out that the perspective and thinking of small children is totally self-centered. All they care about is getting their own needs met and having their own way. And has it ever occurred to you that they don’t need to be taught to be that way? Nobody has to instruct a child to pursue his needs regardless of the consequences to others; we have to teach the opposite over and over. Likewise, nobody has to train a one-year-old to defy mommy and throw a tantrum when she wants him to take a nap; it just comes naturally.

As you continue to read, keep in mind that we are all self-centered. We are all lost people living our lives on planet earth and trying to milk acceptance out of people and the world. God was moved by His great love to do something to solve our dilemma, to make it possible for us to undergo a radical change in nature. He gives us the opportunity to get a heart transplant (“I will remove the heart of stone [hard]…and give you a heart of flesh [pliable]” [Ezekiel 36:26]). With this new heart, we can begin to look to Him to supply all our needs, which is as it should be.

God solved your problem in the lovely Jesus. Every answer to our dilemma is wrapped up in Him. It’s imperative, however, that we understand how Jesus is the solution to the problem if we’re to be able to appropriate Him as our answer.

In this chapter, we will consider phase one of God’s redemptive solution, the reason you and I needed redeeming. I urge you to read it in detail, even if you feel you already have a thorough understanding of the Fall.

Realizing that some of you may like a more detailed explanation of a tenet as I do, I have created several appendixes for this purpose. The ideas developed in each appendix are referenced in the text which follows.

Model of Man

Let’s start by developing a simple biblical model of man. The Lord used Charles Solomon and his book Handbook to Happiness (Tyndale) to help me in this area, and I’m very grateful for his insights. I have taken the basic idea and modified it.

We cannot take the most complicated being God ever created and adequately represent him with a two-dimensional diagram. But our understanding of the Word of God can be greatly helped if we employ diagraming as a communication vehicle.

Each individual is, of course, a whole, but the Word teaches that the whole person is composed of three integrated parts: spirit, soul, and body (Figure 4.1; also see 1 Thessalonians 5:23).

The Personality

Ask the typical Christian what his soul is and he’ll be hard-pressed to respond. “I don’t know,” he might say. “It’s like a puff of smoke or something.” The word soul and the word psychology come from the same root, meaning “personality.” The soul, then, is your personality—mind, will, and emotions—your unique version of them.

An Earthsuit, Not a Jupitersuit

Your body is the vehicle here on planet earth that houses your soul and spirit. Second Corinthians 5:1-8 refers to it as an earthly tent. Author C. S. Lovett has called it an “earthsuit,” which seems a good way to describe it. It really is an earthsuit. God never designed it to live in Jupiter’s environment. You might be able to take it there, but you’d have to encase it in an “earthy” environment or it would die.

The earthsuit is simply a vehicle through which my soul interacts with the earthly environment. As I write this, my soul is commanding the muscles in my earthsuit to make its fingers hit certain keys on a computer, and the earthsuit is trying its best to obey. You are commanding your earthsuit to make its eyes rove methodically across these rows of print, and as a result, my soul is communicating with yours. If we were face-to-face, we could command our lips to wiggle on our earthsuits and make noises cross over from one to another, which we’d then process and interpret. Again, we’d be using our earthsuits to communicate.

If my earthsuit should happen to fall over and die while we were talking, you might phone the police and tell them you had just seen a man die. That would be the human view, but not God’s. This man wouldn’t have died. My earthsuit would have died. I’d still be alive and well and wingin’ with Jesus.

The earthsuit is good. It’s not an evil thing, but it’s vulnerable to being used by the devil to get or keep us in a lot of trouble. There are some very neat things to be experienced on planet earth through the earthsuit. It feels good to feed it Mexican food when it’s hungry. It feels good to give it a hot shower when its muscles are tired. It feels good to sex it when it’s sexy. All these are good things. God made the earthsuit and designed it to enjoy these things, but they must be done according to the Manufacturer’s handbook or we’re creating trouble for ourselves.

God Doesn’t Have an Earthsuit

The Scriptures also teach that God is spirit and that humanity is made in His image. Therefore, we are spirit-beings. We are not physical creatures with spirits; we are spirit-creatures with bodies. God doesn’t have an earthsuit. He doesn’t need one. He’s using ours if we’re born again. He lives in here with me! However, for a few years He used an earthsuit that was exclusively His own. He called Himself “Jesus, Son of God.” Jesus is God. The Scriptures state, “God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself” (2 Corinthians 5:19); “He is the image of the invisible God” (Colossians 1:15); “He who has seen Me [Jesus] has seen the Father” (John 14:9).

While He was walking here on earth, Jesus made it clear that there was a way for us to get our problem solved with God the Father. He said first that a person has to be born a second time, literally “born from above” according to John 3. Nicodemus said, “You mean I’ve got to get back inside my mom?”

“No, Nick, you’ve got it all wrong,” Jesus said. “That would give you two earthsuits, and you don’t need two. One to the customer is adequate. But you don’t have a spirit-vehicle. Your spirit is dead to God. You’ve got to get a live spirit, and then you can commune with My Father through that vehicle” (“Those who worship Him must worship in spirit” [John 4:24]).

By being born from above through receiving Christ as Savior, a redeemed person acquires a second vehicle through which he can express himself in addition to his earthsuit. He can now fellowship with people through his earthsuit and with God through his spirit.

The unsaved person has a live earthsuit, but a spirit which is dead to God. The Bible says he is “dead in his sins” (see Ephesians 2:1-10) and thus is not alive to God now, nor will he be so in eternity unless he appropriates Christ’s provision by choosing to get spiritually born from above. Figure 4.2 illustrates this.

The Brain Is a Computer

Working with that overall model of man, let’s now break the soul down into its three component parts: mind, will, and emotions—your thinker, your chooser, and your feeler. Then let’s add a brain to our model. The brain must be a part of the body (see Figure 4.3). Logic will dictate that the brain and the mind cannot be the same, because the brain is made out of meat. It’s going to stay right here on earth when your earthsuit dies. If, therefore, your mind were your brain, your mind would stay here in your dead body. That would leave you nothing to think with after physical death, and that’s not the picture the Bible gives us (see Luke 16:22-31). Thus, your mind cannot be your brain. Your mind uses your brain here on earth, but the brain is simply a hunk of meat like a heart or a liver.

The brain does have a unique function, however. It’s a computer. The reason they call a computer a mechanical brain is that they got their inspiration for designing one by analyzing the way a human brain works. The brain is simply a data processing unit. It gathers information from the environment through the body’s sensory preceptors (eyes, ears, etc.) and organizes these data into structures we call “meaning.” “Printouts” would be the computer term.

Your brain generates 5,000 printouts per hour, I suppose, and it couldn’t care less what it processes. You let your eyes scan the covers of the sex magazines, and you’ll get printouts of naked women every time. Focus your ears on listening to the Word of God being taught in a church, and you’ll get printouts of that. Garbage in, garbage out; truth in, truth out. Your brain will process whatever is fed into it.

When you have a computer in operation, you must have some people available called computer analysts if you’re to benefit from it. Their job is to read the printouts, analyze them, and then make recommendations to the big boss. He then makes decisions based on their recommendations. As his decisions go, so goes company production (performance).

God has made human beings in a similar fashion. Your mind and your emotions are your computer analysts. They sort of sit in there and watch TV all day. As the printouts come flying through your computer, mind and emotions rapidly analyze them, react, and then quickly make recommendations to the big boss, the will. Now, the will has two polarities like a light switch: You either do or you don’t. You can’t sit in the middle, since that would be choosing not to choose, and that’s a don’t. You either do or you don’t.

Will Is the Big Boss

Christians have a free will that can override the recommendations of both mind and emotions. The mind could say to the will, “I don’t understand why the Lord is letting this happen to me,” and the will can answer, “Well, rain on whether I understand or not; I choose to believe it’ll all work to my ultimate good, because the Word says so.”

The emotions could say, “I feel excited about the prospect of asking my secretary out to lunch today.” And the will can say, “Oh no you don’t, Tiger! I choose to do the will of my Father!”

You see, Christian, we’re really on the hook to obey God. We now have a free will that can rule over and resist the “recommendations” of our emotions. The trick is to understand how, which we’ll explain in great detail in later chapters.

Long after I had become a new creation in Christ, I made a startling discovery. I had always thought that eternal life was an extension or a continuation of my life. My life began in 1927, and I assumed that when I accepted Christ as my personal Savior, God attached an extension onto my life that would last forever. That’s not true. Why would God want to take the Lord-of-theRing life that had separated me from His presence in the first place and extend it forever? His plan was to exterminate my old life and exchange it for new life. And that life is a person, Jesus Christ.

“What was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we beheld and our hands handled, concerning the Word of Life—and the life was manifested, and we have seen and bear witness and proclaim to you the eternal life…” (1 John 1:1,2, emphasis added). John claims he actually handled and saw eternal life! Eternal life is not an “it.” Eternal life is Jesus! Thus, a critical part of victorious living is comprehending how to let eternal life (Christ) be expressed through my personhood to do His will (see Appendix A).

A common objection the Evil One often serves up into the mind of a Christian is that this would rob us of our identity. We’d become a water pipe that Jesus flows through; we’d all be exactly the same. Let’s defuse that deception.

In my workshop I have a drill, a saw, and a grinder. All three serve different functions, yet all three are plugged into the same power source, the electric outlet. The electricity is their “life.” The “life” doesn’t make them all identical. It actually gives them their unique identity. So long as the “life” flows, each of these tools manifests its true identity. It’s the life that reveals their uniqueness and purpose for being. I’ll tell you when they’d lose their identity—if you unplug them. Without their life, they’d all be exactly the same…paperweights!

You were specifically recreated in Christ to offer your members to Him to express His life through you. It’s His Life that gives you your identity, that enables you to experience the true eternal you. Just think: You and the God of the universe cohabitating in the same earthsuit!

Time Out

Eternal life (Christ) is not time dimensional. “All things came into being by Him, and apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being” (John 1:3). Christ created all things. Therefore, there is no such thing as a “natural phenomenon.” If it exists in its natural state, He created it. This includes the time dimension; time was created by the Lord. Therefore, logically, He is not time dimensional. If He were, the created would be superior to the Creator. Thus, Christ is not time dimensional. He is supratime. And the time dimension as we see it in our finite existence is actually present tense in His perception.

Let’s suppose your earthwalk were represented by the Main Street of an Old West movie set. Every episode in your life is represented by a storefront on the street (see Figure 4.4).

The letter “B” stands for your physical birth, the “H” represents your first haircut, the “E” is your entry into elementary school, the “S” is the day you invited Jesus Christ to become your Savior and Lord, the “T” stands for today, and the “D” is for physical death. To you, the portion from T to the left represents the past, T represents the present, and everything to the right of T stands for the future. This is because you are a time-bound creature.

God is, however, like a person who is hovering over your Main Street in a helicopter. Since He is not time dimensional, He can see the whole street all at once (see Figure 4.5).

God is all-knowing (omniscient); that’s one of His attributes. This doesn’t make us robots who are not free to make choices. Quite the contrary, you are a free moral agent who may make fifty choices before you finish reading this chapter. But God, being all-knowing, sees the fifty buildings representing your choices as present-tense reality. Read Psalm 139. It says He knows your thoughts before you ever generate them! Now, I can’t figure this out completely; no one can. I just have to accept the Word of God, which says His ways are higher than mine. And time is a meaningless concept to His perception, where everything is present tense.

Since God is not time dimensional, He can see forever into the future. That’s how He dictated the Revelation to John. But consider also that He can see forever into the past as well. If He couldn’t, He’d be limited by time just as we are.

The Bible states that Jesus Christ is “the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world” (Revelation 13:8 KJV). Imagine this now! God solved the “problem” before the problem ever occurred in the time-dimensional setting by “seeing” the lovely, innocent Jesus crucified before the foundation of the world.

Snakebitten!

Now let’s bring Adam, the first man, into the picture. He produced a bunch of descendants, one of whom was you. But what would have happened to you if your grandfather had died before he ever got his wife pregnant (see Figure 4.5)? You would have died in his gene pool and never shown up on planet earth. That obviously didn’t happen, but Romans 5:12 says that in some manner it did happen to you in Adam. Somehow, when that first man died, all men died. How? What part of me died before I ever showed up? Let’s return to that garden scene. You, too, were there, in Adam’s loins (see Figure 4.6).

Thinking in terms of our model-of-man diagram again, the Lord and Adam fellowshipped with one another regularly because Adam was created with an innocent spirit that made him alive to God.

One day God said to him, “Adam, you may do anything in this garden you wish except one thing. You may not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.” You see, God gave Adam a choice. Adam could either let God be his God, determining what is right and wrong for Adam, or he could write out his own declaration of independence, stake his claim, carve out his own little kingdom, and declare himself “Lord of the Ring.” He would determine what he thought was right and wrong. He didn’t need God’s opinion.

Then God said, “The very day you eat from that tree, you will die.” Notice, He didn’t say Adam would die hundreds of years later. He said he would die by sundown.

God was not implying a physical death by the end of the day. Had that been the case, we would have died physically at sundown in Adam, and none of the rest of us would have ever been born. Well then, did Adam and Eve die “soulically”? Did their personalities die? No, in that case they would have become robots who could not think, feel, or choose. In this condition, they would have produced “after their kind,” and we’d all be robots today.

We’ve ruled out all but one part of man, his spirit. Their spirits died! That part of Adam and Eve that made them alive to God died, and after sundown they could no longer fellowship with Him (see Figure 4.7). They then began to produce spiritually dead offspring whose normal, natural state was to be dead to God and, by nature, to rebel against His authority over them, claiming their “right to live their own lives.” They became the first Lords of the Ring.

Sin

The Scriptures say in Romans 5:12 that simultaneous with man’s first act of rebellion against God’s right to authority over him, something entered into the world called “sin.” On the basis of its subsequent use in much of Romans 5–8, this cannot always have reference to just one sinful act, but rather to a power called sin entering into man’s experience. I do not claim to understand exactly what this is other than to say what the Word says. It is an “evil…present in me” (Romans 7:21, emphasis added), a “different law in…my body” (Romans 7:23, emphasis added). Terms such as “the power of sin,” “the law of sin,” “the principle of sin,” or simply “sin” are synonyms. A quick scan over Romans 7 will demonstrate that “sin” often refers to an evil power against which the Christian battles. We will describe this battle in detail later, but let me just plant a seed for you to consider.

The word sin is first introduced in Genesis 4:7. God addresses Cain, who is contemplating murder: “Sin is crouching at the door; and its desire is for you, but you must master it.” The King James Version more accurately translates the Hebrew: “He is crouching…you must master him.” God personifies this power which He calls sin. Understanding this truth as we discuss it later in the book is going to play a vital role in your battle against sin.

When Adam sinned against God’s authority, not only did his innocent spirit die to God so that he had no life toward God, but his spirit instantly became one with Satan. Adam’s dead spirit was instantly unified with Satan’s spirit, the power of sin. This power of sin entered into Adam and took control over him spirit, soul, and body. He became Satan’s spirit-offspring, born of the same rebellion as he, a dead spirit being in human form totally submissive to Satan (see Ephesians 2:1,2).

What a Difference You’ve Made in My Life!

Let’s briefly examine the disastrous change that took place in Adam’s life as a result of his having overthrown God’s theocracy on earth. Not only was his spirit now dead to God, but his soul and body were now dying by degrees as well. If he didn’t repent before he ejected from his dying earthsuit, he’d have to exist forever as a dead spirit-son of Satan in hell.

Mind

The Word describes a lost person as having a darkened mind, as having a veil over his mind (see Ephesians 4:17,18). This means that he cannot understand the things of God. He has no spiritual comprehension. The Bible will be meaningless to him in terms of being able to discern spiritual enlightenment from it. He may earn a Ph.D. in Bible but still not know anything about spiritual truth.

Will

The lost person also has a rebellious will. He will not, indeed he cannot, submit to God’s authority over him. He chafes at God’s ways, seeing them as burdensome. He sees God as an authoritarian party pooper. His theme song is, “I Did It My Way.” He fits perfectly into the “Me Generation” of the world today. He is his own god. He insists on ruling over his own personal kingdom.

Emotions

The emotions of a person like Adam are for worldly affection. He loves the world, the system of the world, the way it’s structured. He lives to satisfy his needs. He lives to feel good. He enjoys life separated from God. He’d like to be age twenty-one on earth forever.

Body

Adam’s body was dying. It was headed for the dirt. It was just a matter of time before its warranty ran out.

This is what Adam became with the Fall. His offspring now abound.

The Sin Nature

Just what is the sinful nature, anyway? First, it is not a biblical term in that it does not appear in the original Greek text of the New Testament, even though some translations such as the New International Version employ it.* No doubt theologians have generated this term to describe a condition in man. It describes any person who is dead to God, any person with a dead spirit. Synonyms are “old nature,” “Adamic nature,” “old man,” “old self,” “unregenerate nature,” “lower nature,” “natural man,” “sinner,” and “in Adam.”

The word sin has several definitions, one of which is “rebellion against God.” The word nature means the “natural characteristics” of anything. Birds have a flying nature. It is a hog’s nature to wallow in the mud. No one need teach him to do this; it is instinctive to him.

Thus, the term “sin nature” simply means a natural bent to rebel against God’s authority, to view God as a party pooper, unnecessary in one’s life, someone I can live quite well without, someone to whom I refuse to submit. In short, I refuse to acknowledge Him as my God. I am my god. I do things my way. I am Lord of my Ring. God is not real to me if I have no intention of obeying Him. I can believe Him till the cows come home, but it will do me no good because I do not acknowledge Him as my God. He is not real to me.

Thus, for example, since I have a sex drive that I enjoy satisfying, I will decide the best way to satisfy it. I reject God’s plan as too limited. I will feast from the sexual smorgasbord, sating myself, my way. Perhaps I will choose to satisfy my needs homosexually because I declare that God made me this way. But no, God doesn’t make a person that way. That is a person’s unique version of the flesh (old ways). The truths in this book contain the key to victory over it.

Note a very important fact, however. We must not observe a person’s behavior and, from that point of reference, infer his nature. It isn’t the flying that makes a bird a bird; it’s his birth that makes a bird a bird. Similarly, it’s not a man’s adulterous behavior that identifies him as having a dead spirit. We must use the Word of God to make that determination, and the Bible will make such a determination on the basis of the man’s birth, not his performance. If he is still a spirit-son of Satan in Adam’s lineage by his first birth, he has a dead-to-God spirit. If he has become a spirit-son of God by a second, spiritual birth in the second Adam, Jesus, he has a live spirit. In either case, it is his birth, not his performance, that determines his identity according to the Bible (see Ephesians 2:4-6).

There you have a brief description of our basic makeup and our fatal problem with sin just because we’re part of the human race. Next we’ll consider how God provided a way out of the dilemma.

Questions for Further Study

1. As a descendant of Adam, what significance did his spiritual death have for you?

2. What determines your basic nature?

3. What is your understanding of Christ as your life? Does this make you a hollow tube (i.e., no personality and individuality) that Jesus flows through?

4. Give your understanding of whether your bodily desires are sinful.

Answers in “Answers to Questions for Further Study”.

* As you study through Romans 5–8, which is quoted extensively in this book, I suggest you avoid using the New International Version. I believe the translators were incorrect in using the phrase “sinful nature” for the Greek word flesh.

CHAPTER 5

A “New Man” in an Old Earthsuit

One of actor Jimmy Stewart’s most famous films is It’s a Wonderful Life. In that picture, Stewart plays a despairing young banker who comes to a point in his life when he thinks he’d be better off dead. And through the rest of the movie, an angel shows him what the world would be like if he did indeed leave the scene.

In a sense, the lives of most people are like that of the Jimmy Stewart character. While they’re living and breathing physically, a vital part of them—the spirit—is dead. It was dead on arrival when they entered this world because of the choice made by Adam.

Even if you’re not a Christian you, too, were a spiritual stillbirth. You were born dead. You also inherited this condition from Adam. In this chapter, I’ll use the Word to show that God solved your problem of being cut off from His acceptance by crucifying your Adamic identity in Christ and causing a brand-new spirit-you to be born in Christ’s resurrection. Now, because of the finished work of Christ, God finds it delightfully easy to totally accept the new you (see Appendix B).

Christ in Me; I in Christ

Salvation is a two-sided coin. Side A represents Jesus’ coming into the believer; side B represents the believer’s coming into Jesus. He is in me, and I am in Him. This is a package deal; you can’t get one side at a time.

While studying this back in the ’70s, I discovered that for every verse you can find in the New Testament stating that the believer is indwelt by Christ, you will discover ten verses stating that the believer indwells Jesus. Ten to one! But until very recent years, I could count on one hand the number of messages I’d heard on what it means to be “in Christ.”

I’ve heard thousands of sermons on the one side of the relationship, how to get Christ to come into you and save you. Praise the Lord for those messages! But on the other hand, if the Word is weighted ten to one with side B verses, do you see that many Christians are being fed on short rations? A straight diet of salvation messages to the church won’t bring us to maturity. God makes that clear to us in Hebrews 6:1: “Therefore leaving the elementary teaching about the Christ, let us press on to maturity, not laying again a foundation of repentance” (emphasis added).

John 3:16 served up in eighty-seven ways to the believer is not God’s plan for victory. A Christian will starve on such a milk diet. That teaching won’t help me much when I experience an assault on my self-esteem and feel rejected. I need power to resist; I don’t need to quote John 3:16. I need to know how to appropriate what side B is all about.

Side B (In Christ)

Consider a few of the verses that speak of the believer’s being in Christ, side B. What does the Bible state that God accomplished for you in Christ? How did this solve the problem of your alienation from Him? Consider Ephesians 1:4: “[God] chose us in Him before the foundation of the world.” In some way, God placed you into the lovely, innocent Jesus before the world was formed. That doesn’t mean you had no choice, but God saw the problem before time ever began (see Appendix C). He saw your need before you even had one!

Thus, imagine yourself being in Christ as He came to planet earth to solve your problem. God placed you in Him. Ultimately, He went to the cross. Where were you? In Him. As the lovely, innocent Jesus died, you, too, were crucified. The difference is that you deserved it and He didn’t. But it wasn’t your earthsuit that died; not the physical you, but the spiritual you (see Figure 5.1).

That rebel you, that Lord-of-theRing you, that spiritually dead-to-God you, that spirit-son of Satan was crucified with Him. “I have been crucified with Christ,” Paul said (Galatians 2:20, emphasis added). “Knowing this, that our old self was crucified with Him” says Romans 6:6. Romans 6 and 7 and many other verses in the Word of God state categorically that all believers died when Christ died. The verbs in the Greek are all past tense. You and I were executed in Christ (side B). God executed everything about you He could not tolerate in His holy presence and buried you with Jesus (see Romans 6:4; Colossians 2:12). That’s what water baptism is all about. It’s a pantomime of your co-death and rebirth in Christ.

Dear Christian, the Word unequivocally states in each of the verses cited above that when Christ died, you died. As Watchman Nee points out, every Christian believes that two thieves were crucified with Christ on Calvary. However, there is much more biblical ink dedicated to your death on the cross than there is to that of the thieves. Why won’t you believe that you were crucified with Christ? May I tell you what I suspect? I suspect that you refuse to believe it because your religious man-made tradition makes no allowance for it.

You must deal with the abundance of verses which describe your death in Christ. You must deal with the question, “What died?” I have dealt with it, arrived at the conclusion that it was the old self, the old identity that died, and have appropriated this in my own life. When I did all that, I immediately began to experience a vastly more consistent victory over lifelong hang-ups.

If you say, “No, Bill, I know you mean well, but the old self did not actually die,” then you must answer the question, “What did die?” You cannot be intellectually honest with yourself and God by simply sweeping under the rug this abundance of Scripture referring to your death in Christ. This truth permeates much of Paul’s writings. You have to come to grips with that before the Lord. What died? It was everything about the former “you” that God could not tolerate in His holy presence. The old you, your old spiritual identity, was executed and replaced by a lovely, new, godly you. In Christ, at salvation, you were not only given a new present and a new future, but you were also given a new past! Your spiritual roots are no longer in Adam, but in Christ.

Christ’s Blood for Your Sins

Christ’s Body for Your Identity Change

Christ’s Spirit for Your Life Change

All born-again people know that God solved the problem with their sins (performance) through the shed blood of Jesus Christ: “without shedding of blood there is no forgiveness” (Hebrews 9:22b). But what the vast majority of Christians have not seen is that God solved the problem with the source, your old man, through the body of Christ on the cross. “We have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all” (Hebrews 10:10, emphasis added). That goes even beyond forgiveness. Through the body of Christ you experienced a change in your identity. You were changed from a sinner-man to a saint. It means that as new creatures in Christ, we have been made pure and holy before God through the body of Christ, not through His blood.

Finally, through the Spirit of Christ, the Holy Spirit, you have exchanged your old Adamic life for Christ’s Life. By His indwelling Spirit, He longs to express Himself through you and fellowship with you. Christ’s blood, Christ’s body, and Christ’s Spirit…it takes all three to give you victory over the world, the flesh, and the devil.

The blood and the body of Christ are both critically important. Did you ever stop to ask yourself why we partake of two elements at the Lord’s Supper since it is the blood of Jesus that has cleansed us from our sins? Why did Jesus introduce the wine and the bread? Why not just the wine since it is to remind us of our forgiveness bought with His precious blood? Forgiveness is all that is ever mentioned in most churches as we partake of the elements. But that’s only observing half the celebration.

The bread, the second element, represents Christ’s body in which God crucified our old son-of-Satan, self-centered, sin nature—the old man. Then you were recreated as a new creature in Him (in His resurrection body). Ephesians 2:10 says, “For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus” (emphasis added). It doesn’t reference the spirit-person created in your mom, but the new you who was created in Christ. This is your true identity!

Do you see how presumptuous it is for an instructed Christian to willfully appropriate only the blood of Jesus Christ while ignoring His Body and His Spirit? It’s as if he were saying that he functions so well that he needs only one facet of Christ’s sacrifice for him. The bread is to remind us to commemorate the execution of our old identity through our co-death in His body, in which that old rebel who refused to submit to God’s rightful authority, who insisted on playing Lord of the Ring, was eliminated and replaced by a brand-new person in Christ who desires to do God’s will. “Therefore if any man is in Christ, he is a new creature; the old things passed away; behold, new things have come” (2 Corinthians 5:17, emphasis added). This new person really desires to submit to God’s authority and desires his life to be lived to bring glory to the Lord Jesus. That’s a 10!

No Siamese Twins

Please understand that God had no plan for joining His Holy Spirit to any person’s old sin nature. He had no plan to give birth to spiritual Siamese twins who are half spirit-child of Satan through Adam and half spirit-child of God through Christ. Jesus said, “Any city or house divided against itself shall not stand” (Matthew 12:25). God would never set you up for guaranteed failure by making you a “house divided against yourself.” I’ll agree that my experience and my feelings at times “tell” me I am a house divided, but since God would never set me up for certain failure, I must search His Word to find another cause for my strife within. I am not a house divided.

Jesus made this very clear, and the body of Scripture documents it. He said you couldn’t sew a patch of new cloth on an old garment. He meant this as an analogy of the new man and the old man. It would be futile to try to join them together, and God did not make a lie of Jesus’ teaching. Jesus said you can’t put new wine (the Holy Spirit) into old skins (the old nature), because the old skins can’t contain the glory of His presence. You’ve got to put the new wine into new skins (new nature).

The Scriptures likewise say you cannot join light (Holy Spirit) with darkness (old man). The Word further says that a believer (live-spirit child of God) must never join himself in marriage to an unbeliever (dead-spirit child of Satan). It follows that He would never violate His own admonition by joining into union the old man and the new man inside your earthsuit.

Jesus said, “No one can serve two masters” (Matthew 6:24). Now I ask you, would God who taught all the foregoing truths deliberately “set up” the Christian by giving him two conflicting identities, one loyal to God, the other equally loyal to Satan? No! Lost people have one master (Satan), not two. Christians also have one master (God), not two. But your former master constantly tempts and badgers you to submit to him again.

My True Identity in Christ

Let’s take a biblical look at the sort of “raw material” this new spirit man is made of whom God has created to live with Him forever. What sort of nature does he have? To do this, we must not speculate, but examine the verses which speak of our being “in Christ,” “in Him,” “in whom,” etc. We must note the verb tenses to determine whether they speak of some future nature we shall acquire or if they speak of present day reality. This will then reveal your true identity.

• You are justified and redeemed (already)—Romans 3:24.

• Your old self was killed (crucified)—Romans 6:6.

• You are not condemned. (My performance is condemned when I don’t trust in His life through me, but God does not condemn the performer, just the performance.)—Romans 8:1.

• You are free from the law of sin and death—Romans 8:2.

• You are accepted. (All my life I’ve sought to be accepted. Now I am!)—Romans 15:7.

• You are sanctified (holy, set apart)—1 Corinthians 1:2.

• You have wisdom, righteousness, sanctification, redemption (I am ransomed—restored to favor)—1 Corinthians 1:30.

• You are always led in His triumph (whether it appears so or not)—2 Corinthians 2:14.

• Your hardened mind has been removed—2 Corinthians 3:14.

• You are a new creature. (Even though I don’t always feel or act like it.)—2 Corinthians 5:17.

• You are the righteousness of God. (You can’t get more righteous than this.)—2 Corinthians 5:21.

• You are liberated—Galatians 2:4.

• You are joined with all believers (not inferior to anyone)—Galatians 3:28.

• You are a son and an heir—Galatians 4:7.

• You are blessed with every spiritual blessing in heaven—Ephesians 1:3.

• You are chosen, holy, and blameless before God—Ephesians 1:4.

• You are redeemed, forgiven—Ephesians 1:7.

• You have obtained an inheritance—Ephesians 1:10,11.

• You are sealed with the Spirit. (Imagine the real you sealed up in the envelope of God Himself.)—Ephesians 1:13.

• You are alive (formerly a dead spirit)—Ephesians 2:5.

• You are seated in heaven (already)—Ephesians 2:6.

• You are created for good performance. (And I can let Christ live through me to perform it.)—Ephesians 2:10.

• You have been brought near to God—Ephesians 2:13.

• You are a partaker of the promise—Ephesians 3:6.

• You have boldness and confident access to God (not slinking as a “whipped dog”)—Ephesians 3:12.

• You were formerly darkness, but are now light—Ephesians 5:8.

• You are a member of His body (not inferior to other members)—Ephesians 5:30.

• Your heart and mind are guarded by the peace of God. (Peace is knowing something, not always feeling it.)—Philippians 4:7.

• You have all your needs (not greeds) supplied—Philippians 4:19.

• You are complete (perfect)—Colossians 2:10.

• You are raised up with Him—Colossians 3:1.

• Your life is hidden with Christ in God—Colossians 3:3.

This is who God raised up in Christ. You are not grubby. You are glorious in your nature! The new natural you is really someone special. You are a child of God as Jesus said in John 1:12, and as the Word repeats in many verses such as Galatians 3:26: “For you are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus.” And He is now your life. He will live the same life through you that He lived through His own earthsuit when He walked the planet if you will cooperate with Him. This means a supernatural life of agape, not a life of constantly striving to get your needs met. Jesus Christ wants to express through you what the Father expressed through Him, bringing love and hope to a hurting world, beginning with your own house.

Sinner Saved by Grace or Saint Who Sins?

Earlier, I made the point that it is birth, not performance, that dictates nature. Humanity’s definition of a sinner is performance-based. If a person sins, he’s a sinner. But that is not God’s definition. His view is that a sinner is a sinner because he was born that way, and neither good nor bad performance can alter it. It’s not sins that send a person to hell; his nature sends him to hell. All you have to do to go to hell is be born and get old enough to be accountable. Unless you submit to God’s plan to get your nature changed, you’re sunk!

When a sinner gets saved, he does not become a sinner saved by grace. He becomes a saint who sins. The way the worldly man sees it, a saint is a person who rarely sins. We usually reserve this label for people who are too old to sin! We refer to them as “dear old saints,” but we never speak of “dear young saints.” The label is bestowed as a reward for years of good performance. If we teach a Sunday school class for forty years or serve as a church officer for thirty, we may have a chance to be referred to as a “saint” in our golden years. That’s not God’s Word, however; it’s human religious tradition.

Fifty-six times after the cross, the Word refers to born-again people as “saints” (mostly penned by Paul), whereas it uses the term sinner rarely when referring to a Christian. One definite reference, however, is where Paul proclaims that he is chief of sinners in 1 Timothy 1:15. How can we deal with this apparent contradiction?

My friend Lee LeFebre uses a helpful analogy to explain Paul’s intent. Suppose you were a high jumper in college and you broke the school record by a foot. The school placed a mark on the gym wall with your name beside it, showing the height of your jump and proclaiming you champion, or “chief.” Twenty years later you walk into the gym. There is your mark on the wall. No one has even come close to breaking your record. You’re still the chief. This is what Paul meant.

Saul of Tarsus was the number one performer of all time who ever tried to earn his way into God’s acceptance. He “jumped” higher than any of us. According to God’s Word, that makes him the most “mature,” the “gold medal winner,” the “highest,” or the “chiefest” of sinners.

Whether you accept that explanation or not, however, the fact remains that the Word gives us a fifty-six to three ratio of “saint” over “sinner.” Traditional teaching clings to the two or three because of the erroneous, performance-based definition of saint and sinner. By faith, through understanding the new creation in Christ, I’m accepting the fifty-six.

Whose Life Arose Out of the Tomb?

Did your old sin nature have resurrection power? Could that life walk out of a grave? No. It had no such capability. Was God interested in resurrecting that life? If so, then why co-crucify you in the first place? That would be meaningless and futile. Only one life has victory over death.

Tell me, will you obtain that life someday, or have you already got it (Him)? If you are born anew, you already have eternal life in the person of Jesus. Eternal life is a synonym for Jesus (see 1 John 1:1,2).

So now that you are new in Christ, how does the Word of God describe your present life? It states that Christ is your life. Colossians 3:3,4a says, “For you have died and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ, who is our life…’’ (emphasis added). Did you say that you died! Yes! Yes! When did you die? You died in Christ’s body when He died. How did you get alive again? You were made new in Him, and He is now your life. Notice that your life is hidden, gang. You have to discern that Christ is your true life through your eye of faith.

Perhaps you’re like I was, operating like a cordless drill, running on my own power all week and then attending church on Sunday to get my battery recharged. That’s not God’s plan. We’re to operate like a drill that’s plugged into the wall socket which draws its life from a great hydroelectric generator! Living like that will so fill you with gratitude and love for Christ that you’ll gather with the church each week to release your praise.

God’s plan is that you would cooperate with Christ to let Him express His life by filtering that life through your personality and earthsuit. Do you think He could hack it in your circumstances? I wonder if His life would be able to “bypass” all those old, green highways in your brain and work directly through your new spirit to empower your personality, using your body for good to minister to a hurting world?

Dear Christian, the Lord never intended you to try your best to live the Christian life. He placed His Spirit within you to live His life through you to bring glory and honor to Himself. He does His work of ministry on earth through you. The battle is the Lord’s.

Your new purpose is different from your old one of seeking to get all your needs supplied by using the old ways you learned beginning early in life. Your new purpose is to glorify Jesus. God has given you a new heart and has written His desires upon your heart and mind (Hebrews 10:14-16).

God has also placed His own Spirit within you to enable you to live out the law of love prophesied in Ezekiel 36:26,27:

Moreover, I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you; and I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put My Spirit within you and cause you to walk in My statutes, and you will be careful to observe My ordinances.

Yes, this prophecy was given to the Israelites, but it is present-day reality in all believers. You and I are already the spirit-children of Abraham. Jews are the physical children and their time for the fulfillment of that prophecy is yet future.

The Airborne Infantry

No, I am not going to discuss the rapture. I’m going to speak of something that has already happened, another basic truth about the Christian life. Jesus remained on earth forty days after the resurrection, and then He ascended to the right hand of the Father. Now, if you are in Him, where are you right now? Ephesians 2:5,6 says, “Even when we were dead in our transgressions, [He] made us alive together with Christ…and raised us [already] up with Him, and seated us [already] with Him in the heavenly places, in Christ Jesus [side B]” (emphasis added). This is all spiritual, not physical (see Figure 5.2).

In other words, we are already there, friend. You say, “I don’t feel like I’m in heaven.” Well, rain on how you feel. God says you are there, and if your feeler seems to tell you that you aren’t, which is the liar, God or your feeler? Read Colossians 3:1-4, paying special attention to the verb tenses, and see where God states you are right now:

If then you have been raised up with Christ, keep seeking the things above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your mind on the things above, not on the things that are on earth. For you have died and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ, who is our life, is revealed, then you also will be revealed with Him in glory (emphasis added).

We are in heaven, but we must accept and appropriate this as factual on the basis of God’s statement, not by what our five senses tell us is true.

The old “rebel you” was crucified in Christ and buried. The “new you” was born, raised, and ascended into heaven where you are in Christ, totally accepted and loved.

Now, you can choose to simply file these truths in your existing body of knowledge as interesting facts about the Christian life, in which case they’ll do you no good whatsoever. God calls you to grit your teeth and choose to die (by faith) to clinging to your old techniques for living. Only then will these precious truths become yours experientially.

Clue to Why We Still Sin

God’s plan was to execute the rebellious man and give birth to a new spirit-creation, one who adores Him and has His law of love written on his heart and mind. But He placed this new man into the same old earthsuit. It has the same old brain with the same old, green highways in it. Uh, oh! That’s going to cause a problem, because it’s going to be through those old, green highways that the Evil One, through the power of sin, will try to control the new man and get him to dance to the old tune (see Figure 5.3).

Someone says, “Oh, no, Bill, you don’t understand. That’s just the way God sees us. It’s positional truth.” Listen to me: There is no such thing as “positional truth.” The Bible speaks only of truth and deception. The term positional truth is simply Satan’s deception that will block you from accepting the present reality of God’s solution to your problem. He has now accepted the new you, and He finds it delightfully easy to do so. Ask the Holy Spirit right now to reveal to you your true identity as you study just a very few of the abundance of verses in this chapter that document the identity of any person who is in Christ rather than in Adam.

Are You Experiencing Christ’s Life Through You?

What are you doing with His life during your earthwalk? Are you still trying to milk acceptance and self-esteem out of the world like lost people when you’ve already got both? Are you still employing the same old methods, such as trying to perform for others to get them to accept you, or striving to perform up to your flesh’s standards to generate and maintain self-esteem moment by moment?

You are of infinite worth. You are accepted. Not by people, perhaps, but by God! If you’re rejected by certain people, welcome to the club. So was Jesus. But He didn’t go around with His head down. Why? Because He knew it’s not a feeling that matters; it’s what you know. He knew He was accepted.

Do you know that? Or are you prostituting Christ’s life by living to get your need for acceptance met? That’s sinning, and you are still walking after the flesh, the results of which will be burned up at the Judgment Seat of Christ. There will be no reward, because you will already have had your reward. Self-acceptance. A “righteousness of your own.” You are not to strive to get love; we don’t live that way now. We live from a posture of knowing that we are loved.

It’s time to go to the Lord and repent. You have swallowed the deceiver’s lie and wasted many years of Christ’s life by striving to get your need for love met through the flesh. You can accept yourself now as the new person you truly are in Him, just as the Father accepts you—perfectly.

Spend some time praising Him for His fantastic, gracious plan whereby He has solved the problem in sweet Jesus. Praise Him, dear relative! Go ahead and weep for joy! It will tickle Him to death. He’ll weep for joy with you and hug your neck unabashedly, just as He did when the Prodigal Son came down the road to his father’s home. You are totally accepted forever as the new creation you already are.

Questions for Further Study

1. What’s the importance of grasping the side B truths (Christians are “in Christ”) of salvation?

2. What was it within you that died when Christ was crucified?

3. Does God intend for you to live the Christian life? What is His plan?

4. You already identified some of your unique flesh patterns. As you study the Scriptures, looking at the verses referring to your being in Christ, what biblical statements do you find that are direct answers to your struggle with your version of the flesh?

Answers in “Answers to Questions for Further Study”.

CHAPTER 6

You Can Keep a Good Man Down

A while back, I received the following letter:

Dear Bill,

I don’t know where to begin. You don’t know me, but I feel so desperate, and it seems I have been under the pile for so long. I am hoping you can help.

A friend loaned me your tape about our being crucified in Christ and born again as new creations. I’ve listened to it over and over again, but it just doesn’t work for me. I know you’ll think I’m stupid, but honestly, I’m trying as hard as I can to claim what you teach. It just doesn’t work for me.

It seems like I see a glimmer of hope, but when I try to claim what you say, nothing different happens. I’m still the same old me! It all seems so hopeless. Can you help me?

Bless her heart. I can identify! This sweet lady is asking the pleading question, “But how do I do this?” She had gotten just enough teaching to give her a glimmer of hope, but her friend had unwittingly left town without giving her the “how-to” teaching tapes. Satan’s goal is to entice the believer into employing his same old fleshly techniques to get his human needs satisfied, or, in the case of the Yukky Flesh Christian, create a sense of hopeless despair. In this chapter, we’ll see how he deceives you.

But How?

The woman’s question points to exactly the same problem Paul addressed in Romans 7:18b: “…but how to perform that which is good I find not” (KJV). Many Christians say, “Amen,” and camp right there, failing to see Paul’s “Thanks be to God” shout of victory in verse 25.

To better understand what caused him to shout verse 25, let’s trust the Holy Spirit to enlighten us by studying the passage leading up to it. What I am about to share with you is one of the most revolutionary truths the Holy Spirit has ever revealed to me. God has used it as a tool to give victory to thousands of Christians over the years I have taught it. I invite you to read carefully.

Look at Romans 7:15, the defeated Christian’s verse: “For that which I am doing, I do not understand; for I am not practicing what I would like to do, but I am doing the very thing I hate.” How many actors are there in that verse? One: “I.” Now jump down to Romans 7:20: “But if I am doing the very thing I do not wish, I am no longer the one doing it, but sin which dwells in me [is doing it]” (emphasis added). How many actors do you count in this verse? Two: “I” and something called “sin.” Somehow, an entity or power called sin is the “one” who wishes me to do “the very thing I hate.” Something that indwells me wants me to rebel against God.

Now, I’m not teaching “the devil made me do it.” He can’t make me do anything. What I’m saying is an entity called sin somehow suggested that I do it. When I bought into sin’s idea, it became mine, and I did the very thing I do not wish. Clearly, there are two actors identified in verse 20, but only one in verse 15. And clearly Paul says in verse 20 that he did not want to commit this sin, but that somehow this other actor was able to entice him into doing it.

I do not understand exactly what this entity is that the Bible calls sin, but I have an opinion that I expressed in Chapter 4. I believe it is Satan’s counterfeit of the Holy Spirit, “the spirit that is now working in the sons of disobedience” (Ephesians 2:2). Sin rules the spirit, soul, and body of the unregenerate person, but sin only indwells the body of the new creature in Christ (see Romans 7:23).

The Deceiver

Many years ago when I recognized the truth of the preceding paragraph, I said, “Lord, there are two actors in verse 20 and only one in verse 15, yet I know that the power of sin was in this man in verse 15, too. Sin entered the human race at the Fall. How did sin manage to go underground to keep from being identified in verse 15?” And over a period of several weeks of examining and meditating on God’s Word, I believe the Holy Spirit showed me how the Evil One operates.

Names are important in Scripture. You will often get marvelous truth by studying them. Satan is called “deceiver,” “tempter,” and “accuser,” among other things. What’s a deceiver? A deceiver is someone who will make you believe something is true when it’s a lie. Or he will make you believe something is not true when, in fact, it is. Magicians are deceivers. They make you think they cut a woman into two pieces, when in fact they do not. And what part of you do they seek to deceive? Your mind.

The Word says that Satan “disguises himself as an angel of light” (2 Corinthians 11:14). What is “light” in the Word? Truth! He can come at you as “truth,” as “revelation,” as “insight into reality.” But how? It’s simple. He gives you a thought in your mind and disguises it to seem as if it is your thought. You say, “How could he do that?” By speaking to you with first-person singular pronouns (I, me, my, myself, etc.)!

When the power of sin speaks to your mind, it does not use the pronoun “you,” but the pronoun “I.” Instead of experiencing the communication, “Why don’t you go ahead and give her a piece of your mind!” it will be served up to your mind as, “Well! I have a good mind to tell her off! By George, I’m going to do it!” And you often wind up “doing the very thing you hate.” You grab the idea and convert it into action. You sin! Yes, you did the evil thing, but the genesis of it, the origin was the power of sin, not your mind. Let’s go to the diagram again to explain how this spiritual warfare transpires in you.

In Figure 6.1, the shaded portion represents everything earthy. The curved surface represents the curvature of the earth, and everything below the horizon belongs to earth. It is not necessarily evil, just earthy. It belongs to this earthly dimension. Your body in its present form is in this category. It will never get to go into the presence of God (without being transfigured). Your body isn’t evil; the Holy Spirit lives in it. It’s neither good nor evil, but neutral. It’s sort of like an oak tree; it can be used for a pulpit or a totem pole.

Satan’s kingdom is here on planet earth. After the Fall, he was given the right to wage war against God and His people. His goal is to destroy God’s plans and to usurp His Kingdom and His glory for himself. He’s an egomaniac. Let’s place him on earth in our diagram.

Satan has agents through which he works to accomplish his goals, including the world (system), the flesh, and (the power of) sin. Let’s place the flesh and sin in their biblical locations in our diagram. Employing our definition of “flesh” as “the old ways,” we will place these green highways in the brain. These are the memory traces, the habit patterns, the software in your computer. If you are deceived into staying locked in on this software, your brain will play the same program over and over.

The power of sin is located in the body, too. Romans 7:23 makes this location very clear: “I see a different law in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind” (emphasis added). Sin is in the body, not in the personality or the spirit. Your soul and spirit have been “sealed with the Spirit.” They are holy now. My guess is that sin is located in the brain, but so as not to clutter the diagram, I will draw it elsewhere in the body (see Appendix D).

God created you with needs. These are very good things. The idea is for you, the created, to turn to Him, the Creator, in total dependency on Him, worshiping Him, loving Him, fellowshipping with Him, cooperating with Him and His plan for you. Part of this agreement is that He promises to “supply all your needs” (Philippians 4:19). But Satan’s strategy is to get you to opt to live to get your needs met. He wants you to be deceived into making this your goal. Thus, he offers you “Plan B” for getting your needs supplied—your “old ways.” That’s what sin is all about. It is independence from God.

Macho Flesh

Let’s take the sex drive, for example. It was God’s idea to create it, not Satan’s. Now, let’s draw a curvy lady on our diagram (see Figure 6.2). You are parked in your car in front of the post office. Let’s give you an eye on your earthsuit so you can see the lady walking by. The sunlight bounces off her earthsuit through your eye, up the optic nerve to your brain, where you get a printout of the curvy lady. Let’s make you a male, a dedicated Christian, but let’s give you an eight-lane, green highway for sexual lust. It’s that wide line in your brain on the diagram.

How did it get there? Oh, it could have resulted from many things, but let’s say that your dad was as strong as an acre of garlic. His strength, talent, and domination so intimidated you that you have spent many years struggling to measure up to his model, attempting to prove to your feeler that you are male. Your goal was to generate and maintain masculine self-esteem.

One of the ways you discovered to accomplish this along your journey as a god-player was to seduce women. It always made you feel so good about yourself when you could accomplish this. The chase and conquest were so satisfying. But you’re saved now. Oh, yes! You are still tempted to seduce women to bolster your need to feel macho, but you don’t want that. You desire victory over that. Your desire is different from your temptation. That’s why God says He will give you the desires of your heart (see Psalm 37:4).

Let’s add another variable to the mix. Let’s say that your wife is the type of person who withholds sex from you if things are not all right on the home front. She has withheld herself from you for two weeks. Tell me, would this heighten your godly normal need for sexual satisfaction? Of course. The Bible says the Spirit lusts against the flesh (see Galatians 5:17), so the word lust is not always an evil word. It simply means an accelerated appetite. Sin tries to capitalize on this heightened need to get you to rebel: “But each one is tempted when he is carried away…by his own lust” (James 1:14). If you receive the tempting thought, you’ll be carried away by your own lusts.

But wait a minute. We’ve also got to consider your “stuck feeler.” Your emotions were so intensely programmed by feeling threatened in your masculinity during your years under your dad’s domination that they are stuck at level 8. So let’s draw your stuck feeler as an eight-lane, green highway in the diagram. You feel the need to prove yourself male at level 8 constantly. But to you this is normal, as you have long since renumbered your emotional Richter scale and you call an 8 a 1.

The curvy lady is not the temptation. She’s the object of the temptation. The temptation is going to come from (the power of) sin, Satan’s agent through which he seeks to control. You are a saint being tempted to get your human needs met through fleshly techniques, acting like someone you are not (a sinner). You are not a sorry sinner just doing what comes naturally. What you believe about your identity is what is going to make the difference. You will live out whatever you believe to be your true self, your true identity.

Now, for the record, it’s not a sin to be tempted. Jesus Himself “has been tempted in all things as we are, yet without sin” (Hebrews 4:15). It is very normal for a Christian to be tempted. I have seen many Christians who spend a great deal of time begging God for forgiveness simply because they are tempted to do evil. That’s error! Just being tempted doesn’t make you guilty any more than it made Jesus guilty.

Sin simply waits until the printout of the curvy lady appears on the brain’s visual screen (see Figure 6.2). Then as your mind considers this stimulus, sin, using the old, eight-lane, green highway in your brain, says to your mind, “Man, oh man, how I’d like to take her to bed.” Wake up! Look at that pronoun, I. You see, it is actually the Evil One’s agent sin, attempting to get you, a godly saint, to “do the very thing you hate.” Notice that I have drawn a line from Satan through sin through the brain, traveling your flesh pattern for sexual lust and into the mind. You are being presented this idea for consideration. You, saint, did not originate this idea; he did. But if you buy it, you are sinning in your thought life. You will be totally guilty of sinning against God. You’ll be acting like something you’re not, a sinner. The Bible says we are now “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4). As such, you do not want to rebel against God.

But let’s say for illustration’s sake that you do receive the thought from sin. When you buy into this thought, the rattlesnake illustration I used previously is activated. Feeler begins to respond to the stimuli of both curvy lady and sin’s lustful thought. Remember, however, that you’re not playing with a full deck in this battle. Your feeler is already sitting on an 8 (or probably higher because of your wife’s disobedience to the Lord’s authority over her). So once your feeler starts to escalate, how long will it take it to get to 10? It’ll hit 10 before she passes the hood ornament on your car!

Now you’ve got sin hammering your mind with all sorts of creative ideas about how you can get your needs met, and you’ve got feeler slamming into chooser, demanding satisfaction. “I feel I have to! I feel I can’t refuse this! I feel I’m powerless!” Sit there and swallow this garbage for just a few, fleeting moments and you’ve lost the battle. You are playing with dynamite! Swallow the first thought and sin will follow that up with another: “I think I’ll just get out and follow her into the post office. Man, what a walk!” Look at that pronoun again: I. It will seem as if the old man is alive and well. But if he is, God’s Word is not true. Do you see it? The Evil One’s strategy is to disguise himself in your thought life as your old man resurrected from the dead. But the old man has no resurrection capability. He cannot resurrect. God did not raise him up. Satan can’t do it. But sin surely can deceive you by impersonating the old man in your thought life. And that is exactly how sin is controlling Christians.

Your victory lies in appropriating your true identity as the saint you are in Christ. You must counter the temptation along these lines: “No! I’m dead to that! That is not my thought. I recognize that strategy. It’s true that I would like to get my sexual need satisfied, but my deep desire is to trust You to take care of that for me, Lord. That’s Your problem, not mine.” Then, act as though you’re dead to sin’s thoughts coming to you. How does a dead man respond when you try to stimulate him? He doesn’t! He just sits there!

You, on the other hand, are alive! You are dead to the power of sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus. “Do not go on presenting the members of your body to [the power of] sin as instruments of unrighteousness; but present yourselves to God as those alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness to God” (Romans 6:13). Note in Figure 6.3 that I have placed the words “Dead to Sin” in the mind.

This is a faith (belief) position taken by the mind and will. God said that I am dead to sin but alive to God in Christ (see Romans 6:11-13), so I will choose to act as if I’m dead to sin by acting as though Christ is living through me in this situation. I “set my mind” that Christ is expressing His life of victory over temptation through me, and I act as though it’s true. I pray, “Well, Jesus, it sure is good to know that I am dead to this situation and You’re living in it through me.” And then I “flee from evil” (see 2 Timothy 2:22). “Gee, Lord, those are interesting bricks on the post office. I wonder how many there are under each window? Yes, there are seven. Isn’t that interesting.”

If I were standing behind a curvy lady in the grocery checkout lane, and her perfume were wafting its way to my nostrils, I wouldn’t stand there claiming who I am in Christ! I’d act like Christ through me was backing my cart out of the line. Then we’d move over a couple of aisles and pull in behind the guy wearing a cowboy hat and overalls. Friend, He will deliver you, but you must obey quickly. Stay there and sniff that good perfume of hers like a big Delbert Dumb and you’re in deep trouble. Remember, you’re playing with double dynamite due to your stuck feeler. Don’t give your flesh even the smallest opening.

Hostile-Toward-Females Flesh

Now let’s shift to another Christian who happens to be sitting in the car next to yours. This is a woman. She is a very committed, witnessing Christian leader. She, too, has her unique version of the flesh that she battles against. She has an eight-lane, green highway for hostility against females. Why would she have this sort of problem? Again, it could have resulted from various circumstances. In her case, she was rejected by her mom. Her mother was a Victorian sort of woman, very cold toward her daughter. When the child attempted to get involved in the cooking or baking at home, her mom would typically respond by telling her that things would go much faster and more efficiently if she would just leave the kitchen. “Get out of here,” she would snap. “You’re in my way.” (In other words, “I find you a most undesirable person. I am happier when you’re not around me. You’re too dumb to learn how to cook anyway.”)

This carried over into many of the typically feminine activities in the home. Mom never taught her anything—how to sew, how to line her eyes, how to hem a dress, how to shop. At the onset of menstruation, Mom tossed a pamphlet through the bathroom door to her. Who was this girl learning about all these years, Mom or herself? Herself! She learned, I’m not feminine. I can’t do anything right with regard to being feminine. I’m worthless! Then her feeler got stuck. She feels unfeminine at level 8 and has for years. She’s playing the game with only the top two points on her feeler scale.

Along about age nine or ten, this little girl began to fight back at all this rejection. Now that she had learned to reject herself as a female, she was getting more and more frustrated at her inability to satisfy her need for love. This generated hostility that she directs mainly at herself for being such a loser as a female. But she scatterguns her hostility toward females in general because they all represent rejection to her. She has been trained to relate to women by rejecting them first. She anticipates their rejection of her. It seems normal to her! If they won’t reject her, she will try to make them do so. This is the turf on which she is most comfortable (a very miserable comfortable).

Then she got saved. Her old identity died in Christ, and she was born a new woman in Him. But her brain still has all that software in it for feeling hostile toward females. The curvy lady represents the epitome of femininity to her—everything she feels she is not. Curvy ladies are a painful reminder of her own failure. She is tempted to react to this stimulus with rejection and hostility.

When the curvy lady passes into her view, the brain yields a printout. Sin says, “Look at that! I’ll bet she’s wearing more pads than the Chicago Bears!” This is not her thought. As the new woman she now is, she loves women. God did not spawn a new woman who hates other women. He has written His laws of love “on her heart” (see Hebrews 10:16). He has given her a new heart (see Ezekiel 36:26). These prophecies have already been fulfilled in born-again people. If she doesn’t know this, however, if she believes that God left her a hopeless house divided against herself, spiritual Siamese twins who battle each other constantly, she will likely accept this thought from sin. And once she does that, its thought becomes hers. She is deceived, and she’s now sinning in her thought life.

The next step is the rattlesnake routine. Feeler begins to climb. But wait! Remember that her elevator never starts from the lobby. She feels hostile toward women at level 8 on her best days. With this advantage, sin instantly socks it to her mind again: “Look at that bleached hair! I’d like to jerk it out by its black roots! Women like that make me sick! Worthless little pet house dog!” The power of sin will keep pouring it on her mind as long as she will be sucker enough to sit there and drink it in.

Passing It On

Now, this woman is not being driven by a biological need the way the macho flesh man was. Whereas he may well leave his car at the Evil One’s insistence to try to make friends with the curvy lady, our lady is not apt to chase her down and start a street fight. No, she will just sit in her car and fume until her feeler gets to 10.

About this time, the woman’s seven-year-old daughter returns to the car from the errand she had run. She has great difficulty closing her car door. Slam, rattle, rattle, rattle. Open up again…slam, rattle, rattle. Open up again. Now we have a new printout in mama’s brain: young female (an extension of mama’s own self-image, and she hates herself) can’t even close a door right.

If you were sin, what would you say to mama now? It will travel up yet another green highway and trigger the thought, You idiot! Can’t you do anything right? Do I have to do everything? This anger is not directed against the curvy lady, though. There is no danger of damaging mom’s Christian witness with “real” people here. This is only a kid! Much of the restraint is gone. She bellows it out, reaches roughly across her daughter’s lap, and slams the door with all the hostility she can release. Wham! Then she starts the car and aims it toward the house. Her jaw is set. Her knuckles are white as she grips the wheel. She tells her daughter to shut up when she meekly tries to apologize. She snaps off the radio that had been playing. They speed toward the house in deathly silence.

Who is this little girl learning about? Is she learning, Boy, mom, you are really a hard case! No, you realize by now that she’s learning, Ugh. I just can’t do anything right. I always mess up. I always cause mom to be upset. And I don’t blame her. She has every right to be upset. I’m such a klutz! I hate myself! I wish I were gone! She’d be so much happier if I were just gone. I wish I were dead. And the sins of the parents are visited “on the children to the third and fourth generations” (Exodus 34:7).

Mom got rejected by her mom. Now she is rejecting her own daughter. The daughter will grow up and reject her own. And where will it stop? I’ll tell you where it can stop. At the cross! This precious sister in Christ can hold a good funeral to all that she used to be and then celebrate the fact, not the feeling, of who she now is.

She is a new creation whom she can love and accept. She has always longed to be a new and different person. Well, congratulations are in order. She is a new person. She has simply never been taught who she now is as the new woman. When she claims these things as her own, agreeing with God’s Word that it is true, and begins to act like it’s all true in her, His beautiful healing process will begin. She will be “transformed by the renewing of [her] mind” (Romans 12:2).

Inferiority Flesh

Next to this lady’s car, yet another Christian woman sits waiting in front of the post office. Her child has gone in after the mail from their box. This dear lady was rejected by her dad during childhood. In her case, it resulted from his being a workaholic. He simply never took time to be with her. There was the day she marched in her first parade with the band. She was the fourth one from the right in the clarinet section. She had told him right where to look for her when they came past his store. He missed it. It seems a man had asked him if he could come out to do an estimate, and, of course, he had to go.

There was the time he was going to go out to see some land he was thinking about buying. He promised her she could go along. She had braided her hair all by herself for the big event. She still remembers it. She was seven years old at the time. She sat out on the porch in the swing. She got there ten minutes early because daddy didn’t like her to be late. But he never came. He completely forgot, he said. And he had such a phenomenal memory. Everyone always said so. She never did make much of an impression on him, though. Need I continue?

Out of this relationship with her dad, the little girl learned that she was worthless, unlovely, unattractive to males, unimportant, and non-stimulating, among other yukky things. She felt this way for so long a time that her feeler got choreographed. She had a very low self-esteem. Then she got saved. It was a wonderful experience for her. She felt loved for the first time in her life. But alas, the feelings came with a one-year warranty. She slowly but surely gravitated back to her old feelings rut.

Our sister in Christ is now twenty-nine, married, has two kids, is overweight, and is very unhappy with life. When the curvy lady appears on her visual screen, sin says to her, “If only I had been born to look like that. Sigh. Then maybe I’d be more attractive to my husband. Sigh. I don’t see why he puts up with me. I’m such a clod!” And she swallows it hook, line, and sinker. She is now sinning in her thought life. The more she sits and listens to sin’s thoughts, the more depressed she becomes. Then sin says to her, “I’d like a doughnut. I think I’ll just stop in and have one on the way home.” And she does! In fact, while she was in there, she received the idea to have three. Guess where that idea came from? Are you beginning to see how Satan’s agent, sin, works?

If she is to attain victory over her unique version of the flesh, she must recognize that, based on the reality of God’s Word, those are not her thoughts. They are coming from her enemy, sin, waging war against her mind. She must claim experientially her true identity. She is a godly woman who has God’s love written on her heart. She is a lovely creature, a princess, the younger sister of the King of the universe, Jesus. This woman is not the same person who generated those old ways through which sin is now attempting to control her. She is to respond to this deprecatory attack against her by thinking, No! Those are not my thoughts. I am dead to them. They’re being fed to me. I choose to act dead to them because God’s Word tells me that I am dead to sin. I choose instead to “set my mind on [the reality of] things above,” the way things really are (see Figure 6.3 again).

The Fleshly Self-Image

You can see from the development of this biblical perspective that each Christian’s flesh is essentially his self-image that he has generated while walking as a rebellious, lost person and then later as a deceived and controlled saved person. If he has been successful at getting his need for self-esteem satisfied, he has generated USDA Choice Flesh; if moderately successful, he has an average self-image—Plain Vanilla Flesh. If he’s been unsuccessful, he has Yukky Flesh with its low self-esteem.

USDA Choice Flesh

What is the successful person’s self-image? Great! In his life, he has completely accepted certain “givens” about himself: “I am as good as anyone else, indeed better than average. I am successful. I am lovable and worthy of respect. I respect myself. I am secure. I have my life together. I accept myself.” I do not intend to imply conceit. He’s just secure.

Well, isn’t that what we’re all looking for? Isn’t this what our culture says is the ultimate goal? Moms and dads pray their daughters will marry such a man. I want him for a next-door neighbor. He would probably mow my lawn if I got sick. So why knock him? I do not knock him. I disapprove of his method for attaining the above. It was all a product of his effort to gain self-esteem as he used the resources over which he was made steward, the ones God entrusted to him to bring glory to Jesus. He expended his life to get his need for love and self-esteem satisfied, perhaps even by living for others, but his covert goal was to feel good about himself. He has successfully played Lord of the Ring.

Just like Saul of Tarsus, this dear “successful” person’s self-esteem is of his own doing. It is a righteousness of his own, a house of cards built on the sandy foundation of his own misuse of the resources that were entrusted to him by the one who owns all things, including him. He is to count all his fleshly building as loss, not having any righteousness that can be called his own based on his performance (see Philippians 3:7-9). His self-esteem must now be based on entirely different criteria: 1. who he is as the new man in Christ, and 2. letting Christ express His life through him as a “living sacrifice” to do His will (see Romans 12:1). Only this will bring solid satisfaction. Only this will enable a person to build a self-image that will be totally impregnable to anything this world can throw at it. This is a self-acceptance built of spiritual materials, not fleshly ones. It is an esteem based on our “righteousness which comes from God on the basis of faith” (Philippians 3:9).

“Homemade” Vanilla Flesh

The “Ordinary Christian” type of flesh is the result of win-some, lose-some experiences with which most of us can identify. An example of this could be the possessing of talent in a specific area such as athletics, music, or mechanical repair. We also have some Yukky Flesh patterns that produce a low yield or even a negative yield, such as being too quick to speak and thus alienating people with whom we would like to establish friendships. This results in loss of love from others, and also loss of self-love.

Whereas Captain Christian up there in the previous example would be scoring himself 8 to 10 on all the positive characteristics, Ordinary Christian is going to give himself 5s and 6s.

Yukky Flesh

The difference between low self-esteem and humility is that low self-esteem concentrates totally on self: “What are people thinking about me? How do they think I look? Why am I so dumb!” Humility, on the other hand, concentrates on the welfare of others: “I’ll take this back seat so others can sit up there. I hope she’s chosen instead of me because I feel she needs that.” Low self-esteem and humility often look the same on the outside, but they are poles apart.

Jesus had a healthy self-esteem, but He was humble. Embracing a low self-image is one big fleshwalk. It’s concentrating on self constantly. Though it may pass for humility in the church, it’s seen for exactly what it is by God. If the shoe fits, you must hold a good funeral to that, dear one.

Channel #1

No matter which general category of flesh you may fall into, it is all of this world system, not of God. If you keep on listening to those familiar thoughts that seem to be your old sin nature, you will be a pawn in the Evil One’s hand. You will be neutralized in the spiritual warfare.

Figure 6.4 depicts the believer’s being controlled by indwelling sin. I have drawn a full circle from the devil, who is in authority over the power of sin in the believer’s body, through the flesh in the brain, into the mind to: 1) deceive the believer, who then 2) chooses with his will to 3) set his mind on the deception, which 4) results in heightening the emotions, which 5) increases the pressure on the will, which 6) chooses to “do the very thing I hate.” This behavior then cycles back through Satan, and he thus keeps the believer under his domination. But remember: We do not have to act on these thoughts that are now foreign to us. We are no longer under sin’s control.

I am going to call this “Channel #1.” Stay tuned to Channel #1 and be deceived. That’s the way the Evil One works, especially on a Christian who believes he has two natures. Satan is capable of talking that Christian into some pretty raunchy behavior and then justifying his failure by giving him thoughts like, Well, my old sin nature took over, and I did it again. But that’s normal for us Christians. No, it’s not! It’s abnormal for us Christians, but unfortunately, as old Brother Schofield said, it’s the normal experience of most Christians.

Tragically, many high-profile Christians are falling and bringing great harm to the name of Christ. They seem powerless to “life out” the victory they teach. Somehow their Christianity is not working. The reason it’s not working is they do not understand their true identity and how to offer themselves as a living sacrifice to Christ to live the victorious Christian life through them.

Questions for Further Study

1. How does Satan offer up temptation to you that are truly tempting when you really don’t want to sin in the first place?

2. Do the sinful thoughts that new creatures in Christ experience originate in their minds? Try to explain your answer by using Figure 6.4. After having done so, refer to the paragraphs describing Channel #1 to check your answer.

3. Try to verbalize what your personal temptations sound like as Satan offers them up in accordance with your flesh.

4. “You will ‘life out’ whatever you believe to be your true self, your true identity.” What does this statement mean to you?

5. Where does your victory lie as a person in Christ, a child of God?

Answers in “Answers to Questions for Further Study”.

CHAPTER 7

Living Like a New Creation

The changes in my marriage since Anabel and I began to let Jesus live through us are astounding. Listen again to Anabel:

If only I could express to you how different my life is from what it was seventeen years ago as I seriously considered ending it all after twenty years of living in a hell on earth. Bill tries so hard to make up for all the years of lashing out at me from his frustration with himself. I could wish for any woman the marriage I have today.

I could mention many things, but I’ll just share one way in which things have changed. He brings me things, little things. Like when he’s out running in the mornings, he might bring me a little wildflower he picked. I’ll find it floating face up in a juice glass on the windowsill over my sink as I turn on the light to fix breakfast. I love it!

Do you know what it says to me? “I was thinking about you. I know you. I know what you like. I’ve listened to you to discover what you like. I’m interested in you. Your needs are important to me. You’re not just someone who can meet my needs.”

But, oh, there is so much more than just the change in Bill’s behavior toward me. Even though that has been wonderful, I would have still been a prisoner to my own unique version of the flesh. But I’m free! Free from losing the inner wrestling match. And free from listening to and receiving the inner condemnation I lived with for forty years! It’s still there; Satan hasn’t given up. But I’m much better at recognizing his tactics now, and I set my mind on the truth about myself from God’s Word.

How in the world can Anabel say those kind things about me after the way I’ve treated her? It’s a result of God’s giving her the grace to forgive me; the result of her being able to “set her mind” on how secure and accepted she is in Him, which means she can consistently rest in Him; the result of Christ’s living through me to radically change my behavior; and the result of my resting in my total acceptance in Him, being freed from fighting for survival in my role as a male. Oh, yes, we still struggle at times, but we have entered into God’s rest (see Matthew 11:28,29).

You Can Keep a Good Man Down

We have already seen in Romans 7:15-25 how the law of sin will control the believer to keep him captive. Sin continually condemns many Christians in their thought life. This is especially true for those with perfectionistic flesh. Sin hammers these dear people constantly, “telling” them that they are failing because they cannot achieve perfect results. I’ll now use the same passage to accomplish a second goal, documenting the believer’s true identity in Christ.

Let’s take this passage verse by verse and apply our hypothesis that the Christian person is actually, literally holy in his heart and see if it will fly. Romans 7 is usually thought of as the most depressing, defeating chapter in the New Testament. I propose to take this passage and prove to your discerning mind that the person in Christ is literally godly. Then we’ll see how to make our behavior consistent with that reality.

Romans 7:15 says this,

For that which I am doing, I do not understand; for I am not practicing what I would like to do, but I am doing the very thing I hate.

We have here a person whose desire is to obey God, but who lacks the power to live it out somehow. He sins, but he hates it. The first point I wish to make, then, is this: What kind of “heart” does this person have?

What do I mean by heart? I mean the deepest, innermost dynamic of what drives this man; his deep desire. Does this man rejoice over his sinning, or is he miserable because of it? He is miserable, and the reason is that he’s powerless to make his performance line up with his heart. His heart is good. If his heart were only semi-good, he would have a tolerance for sinful performance. If he had two “natures” as we have been taught, one good and one evil, this verse would read entirely differently. It would read to accommodate the two desires like so:

I understand very well what I am doing; for I am practicing what I like to do. Half the time I do evil things, and the other half I practice good. I delight to do both and find no conflict in this, as it is perfectly normal for me to satisfy both my “natures.”

Such is not the case with Paul, however. He is miserable because he cannot bring his performance into line with his holy nature.

Let’s go on to verse 18: “For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh.” Note, he doesn’t say that he is no good, but that nothing good dwells in his flesh. Now, the Holy Spirit dwells in his earthsuit, and He is certainly something good. So Paul must be speaking of the old, green highways definition of the term flesh, and truly, “nothing good” dwells there.

Please note though, that he does not say he is not good. The remainder of the verse states “for the wishing is present in me, but the doing of the good is not.” He is a good man who cannot find the power to “life out” his goodness.

I believe I would be too charitable to say that most Bible teachers take the position that Christians are “half good and half evil” as new creatures in Christ. What most imply is that we are 90 percent evil and 10 percent good. Many are even harder on us than that. Their messages to Christians imply that we are 100 percent evil and 0 percent good, citing, “in me dwells no good thing” as “proof,” failing to complete the verse, which states, “in me dwells no good thing, that is, in my flesh.” Of course there is “no good thing” in my flesh (old ways), but the person in Christ is now “the one who wishes to do good.” We’re the good guys! Or they cite, “The heart of man is desperately wicked” from Jeremiah 17:9. Of course that man’s heart is desperately wicked; the prophet was speaking of the “old man” in this Old Testament passage. That is not the new person. The new creature in Christ has had a heart transplant! We deeply desire to do good.

A Fly in the “Anointment”

Paul continues in Romans 7,

But if I am doing the very thing I do not wish, I am no longer the one doing it, but sin which dwells in me (verse 20).

As we have already seen, Paul identifies the culprit, the source of his poor performance. This thing is somehow controlling this good man and deceiving him into “acting sinfully.” And you will recall that the power of indwelling sin will deceive the believer in his mind by sending him thoughts with first-person singular pronouns through the flesh, attempting to control him against his true nature.

Paul says,

I find then the principle that evil is present in me, the one who wishes to do good (verse 21).

Evil is present in this man. This doesn’t say that he is evil, but that he (the one who desires to do good) has evil present in him. That’s a very real and crucial distinction. He is a good man.

If you have a gold crown on your tooth, does that make you a gold mine? No, you have gold present in you. If you get a splinter in your foot, does that make you a totem pole? No, you have wood present in you. Neither is this good man anything other than good because he has evil present in him, according to this passage. But many Christians have misinterpreted it.

Your Body Is Not Saved

Paul continues further, saying,

For I joyfully concur with the law of God in the inner man (verse 22).

This man totally agrees with, loves, and desires the law of God in his true identity.

But I see a different law in the members of my body (verse 23).

Aha! Now we identify the location of the problem. Sin still resides in the body. It is not in the soul or the spirit. Those two parts are the righteous new man (see 2 Corinthians 5:14-21). But technically, the body has not been saved yet: Later in the epistle, Paul says that we are “waiting eagerly for…the redemption of our body” (Romans 8:23). It is still earthbound and destined to return to the dust. It will be saved one day at the resurrection. It will be transformed into a new, glorified body (see 1 Corinthians 15:42-44). Our bodies aren’t evil, but they are earthy. I call the body the “vehicle of vulnerability.” It is vulnerable to being used by the evil one if we submit to him.

Continuing on with verse 23,

…but I see a different law in the members of my body waging war against the law of my mind.

What sort of law is the “law of my mind,” godly or evil? Godly! Your mind has to be pure and good for there to be a battle. If there is a war going on, can the opponents be on the same side? No. They must be in total opposition to each other. A “new person in Christ” is a “partaker of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:3,4). He “has the laws of God written on his mind.” This man’s mind is good. He has a “sound mind,” “the mind of Christ,” or there would be no war.

Wretched man that I am! Who will set me free from the body of this death? (verse 24).

The word wretched does not mean evil; it means unhappy. This man is stating that he is terribly unhappy living like this, as will be any person who has only one nature, a godly one, and who has not claimed his true identity in Christ. But—praise God!—look at his answer to his own question in verse 25: “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” He’s free! But he will never experience it if he walks according to the flesh, only if he walks in the Spirit. His identification in the death, burial, and resurrection with Christ has set him free.

So then, on the one hand I myself with my [sound] mind am serving the law of God [the law of love], but on the other, with my flesh [the “old ways”] the law of sin (verse 25).

When he chooses to walk in the Spirit (in his true identity), he serves the law of love, but when he is deceived into walking after the flesh, he is serving the law of sin. He doesn’t have to sin. He is free to obey God through Christ’s indwelling life.

Paul then goes on in the next chapter to explain how we, as new people in Christ, are a battleground in which God fights His archenemy, the devil. Note how many verses in Romans 8 pit sin against God, the Spirit versus the flesh, and so on. But make no mistake about it, Christian, we are free to obey God: “For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death” (Romans 8:2, emphasis added). And “there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Romans 8:1).

You are literally a brand-new person in Him, a good person who loves Jesus and deeply desires to submit to His Kingship. The kingdom of heaven has arrived. It’s in us! Let’s turn Him loose to reign in us by acting dead to sin and alive to God!

Pop Quiz!

Okay, it’s time to take a little test to see what you’ve learned so far. Choose an answer from either column A or column B.

All of the correct responses are in column A. How’d you do? If you chose any responses from column B, pay close attention to the next section. You’re in for some great truths!

Concentrate on Starting, Not Stopping

Now that the deception, the “walking according to the flesh” pattern, has been identified, let’s trust the Holy Spirit together to put some practical handles on how to implement God’s provision for victory. As with every spiritual principle, this victory will not be so much a matter of fighting against the power of the Evil One, but rather a matter of starting up a new method of walking, moment by moment, experiencing Christ as your very life while simultaneously you “act dead” to those thoughts that will be served up to your mind through the flesh in the brain. The Word says you are “dead to [the power of] sin” (Romans 6:11). To make this an experiential reality, you must act dead to it regardless of feelings.

Let’s look at just a few of the many astounding and glorious things God has to say about our true identity, the new people we are in Christ.

I Am Holy

Many can identify with having learned in this world that they are unlovely, worthless, inadequate, or insecure. But if God says that the “old you” died and the new resurrected you is holy, even though the world won’t agree, what are you? Whom will you believe? You say, “But I don’t act holy.” Well, I hope this will change radically as you read this book, but the Word doesn’t state that you always act holy. We’re not discussing performance; we’re discussing identity.

Some may ask, “But isn’t it just that God sees us as holy?” No, that would be saying that God somehow deceived Himself by pretending we are holy when the fact is that we’re grubby. That can’t be the case, dear Christian! God told Peter in the vision on the rooftop, “Don’t you call unholy what God has called holy” (Acts 10:15, author’s paraphrase). God has called you holy: “…who have been sanctified in Christ Jesus, saints [holy ones] by calling, with all who in every place call upon the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, their Lord and ours” (1 Corinthians 1:2). “For the temple of God is holy, [literally] which you are” (1 Corinthians 3:17b, see NASB margin).

I Am Accepted

Are you accepted or rejected? You say, “Well, I feel like the other women in the women’s group at church sometimes reject me.” Okay, so perhaps they reject you. Did God promise you they wouldn’t? No, He just said they shouldn’t. But He did promise you that He wouldn’t. Has He? No. Will He? No! He can’t. How do we know? Because He said so: “I will never desert you, nor will I ever forsake you” (Hebrews 13:5). Believe Him. You are accepted: “Wherefore, accept one another, just as Christ also accepted us to the glory of God” (Romans 15:7).

I Am Blameless

Is God holding grudges against you for the times you’ve failed Him in the past? No! “You were dead in sins, and your sinful desires were not yet cut away. Then He gave you a share in the very life of Christ, for He forgave all your sins” (Colossians 2:13 TLB). He has declared you blameless before Him: “That He might present to Himself the church in all her glory, having no spot or wrinkle or any such thing; but that she should be holy and blameless” (Ephesians 5:27). “Just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before Him” (Ephesians 1:4).

I Am Already in Heaven

You are actually seated in heaven, according to God’s Word, experiencing God’s rest (above your circumstances). You are secure, loved, and treasured: “And [God] raised us up with Him, and seated us with Him in the heavenly places, in Christ Jesus” (Ephesians 2:6, emphasis added). It’s to be believed continually, Christian, not felt continually.

I Am Complete

You’ve already “made it” with God. You are complete in Christ. How are you going to improve on perfect? I didn’t say it; He did: “In Him, you have been made complete” (Colossians 2:10).

I Am Totally Forgiven

Are you guilty or forgiven there in heaven? Can anything guilty be in heaven? “And when you were dead in your transgressions and the uncircumcision of your flesh [lost], He made you alive together with Him, having forgiven us all our transgressions” (Colossians 2:13, emphasis added). You are forgiven—totally!

I Am a Conqueror Over Evil

You are no longer inadequate but more than a conqueror. You are victorious through Him (see Romans 8:37). The circumstances may not always support this view, but the Word does. Whose scorecard are you reading, anyway? We are resting in His victory. It’s a mind rest, not an emotion. Meditate on it! Appropriate it!

I Am Not Condemned

“There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Romans 8:1, emphasis added). You’re not condemned! Yes, the Lord will condemn your sinful performance, and you will experience the accompanying conviction. This must be dealt with in a biblical manner, but the verse clearly states that God will never condemn your person, your identity; He only rejects your sinful performance.

Do you see who you are? I understand that you may not feel like this. Your feeler won’t agree with the message, but your mind can. God’s Word says that these beautiful things are now the fabric from which the new you has been cut. You must simply accept God’s statements about “any man in Christ” at face value and step forward as if this were all true about you.

Don’t be intimidated by your emotions and the “logical arguments” that are continually being served up to your mind by indwelling sin.

For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war according to the flesh, for the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh, but divinely powerful for the destruction of fortresses. We are destroying speculations and every lofty thing raised up against the knowledge of God, and we are taking every thought captive to the obedience of Christ (2 Corinthians 10:3-5, emphasis added).

The Word says in 2 Corinthians 5:14-21 that all Christians died in Christ and were reborn as different people who are not to live to get their needs met, but for His service. It says that we are no longer known by our old identity, but by who we now are (2 Corinthians 5:16). “We are ambassadors for Christ” (verse 20). Ambassadors are citizens of their home country who reside in a foreign land as representatives of their homeland. That’s us! We are spiritual citizens of heaven who live on Satan’s turf as representatives of our Father God.

Commands Are Not Optional

In essence, God says in Colossians 3:1-4, “Now then, Son, I want you to understand what your true identity is and the method I have designed to enable you to live it out. If you have been raised up with Christ, keep seeking the things above where Christ is, because you’re in Him there, too, seated at the right hand of God. Set your mind on the things above, not on the things that are on earth.”

What “things above” should you think about? Well, don’t dwell on golden streets and mansions. That won’t transform you. Rather, see yourself relaxing there in Christ. All your needs are met. Your Father has everything under control. He is totally accepting you and loving you. You are a son or daughter in the Father’s forever family. You are holy and blameless before Him. You have become a “partaker of the divine nature.” Think on these things. Pump this truth through and through your mind. It’s reality!

“When Christ, who is our life…’’ (Colossians 3:4). Wow! He is your life! Right now, He is the only life you have. If He were ever to leave you, we’d know it right off, because your earthsuit would fall over dead. Your soul and spirit could not reside in it without His life, because your old life died in Him at Calvary. So much for losing your salvation.

Since Christ is your life, wouldn’t it be a normal thing for you to let Him express His life through you? Jesus is the only one who ever lived a victorious life, and the indwelling Holy Spirit is the way He can now express that life through you. That wouldn’t make you another Jesus, as some teach, any more than you were another Adam when you used to be in Adam. It’s just that now, instead of Adam’s life of self-service, you have Christ’s life of other-service. It’s His life we have, not His personality.

On the other hand, if you don’t let Him live through you, you are “presenting the members of your body to [the power of] sin” (Romans 6:13). Your motivation will be to get your needs met. You will be depending on yourself. That’s the same “life” a lost person lives.

Don’t assume, either, that Christ’s living through you means you’re to be passive. You’re not to sit there until you feel Him take over. He will express the same life through you that He lived through His own earthsuit and personality, a life of obedience to the Father. He lived a life of service, not survival. But we have to act it out, believing it’s Christ doing it through us, by faith.

First, His life must manifest itself in and be most noticeable in your own home, to your family. Next, it must be obvious to the brethren. Jesus said, “Your strong love for each other will prove to the world that you are my disciples” (John 13:35 TLB). Finally, it must be demonstrated to the lost. Unless the lost can see Christ in and through you as you interact with your own physical and spiritual families, your words to them will be a brass gong. As you allow Christ to live through you, you can actually be victorious in this. You can act lovingly.

Please listen. Such a life of victory is open for you to appropriate as your own. God is in fact commanding all Christians to “set their minds” on the way things really are. That’s not optional; it’s a direct command from your God to you. Think, meditate, attend to, contemplate. You are a new person resting in heaven (side B), while simultaneously here on planet earth, Christ is expressing His loving life through you (side A). We’ll represent this “mind set” with a series of lines and label it Channel #2, the reality channel. (See Figure 7.1.)

How to Set Your Mind

“Setting your mind” must be attainable or God wouldn’t command you to do it. In fact, you do it every day. Let me illustrate.

Imagine you are walking down a gravel road in Arkansas. Put a cool creek bubbling alongside the road. Hear the water gurgling? Let’s make it an early morning in the month of May. Put a red bird in a tree and have him singing. Imagine a light ground mist on the meadow across the road. Now put a couple of cows in the pasture. See how easily you can choose to let your mind get caught up in this scene?

Now let’s change the imagery. I want you to set your mind on eating a hamburger at your favorite burger restaurant. It needs just a tad more seasoning. Put some on it. Now take another bite. Ah, that’s better. Take a swig of your favorite beverage. Let’s make it a really hot summer day, and you’re dying for a drink. Feel it going down? Um, so refreshing.

Change the scene again. Set your mind on driving your car down the freeway. Let’s make it night, and you’re out in the country. A truck is stalled on the shoulder ahead. See the flares? Smell the diesel fumes as you whiz by? You constantly set your mind, don’t you? It’s a daily practice.

Bringing Heaven to Earth

Perhaps it will help you to picture yourself seated in heaven if you can think of it as a place much closer than “somewhere out beyond the stars.” The Scriptures teach that the direction of heaven is upward, but there is no indication it is 40 million light-years beyond Pluto. Quite the contrary, Abraham and the rich man carried on a conversation from heaven to hell within sight of each other (see Luke 16:19-31). I don’t know how far up heaven is, but it’s not going to be heresy for us to pretend that it’s only one inch above the earth. That’s up!

Study Figure 7.2 to see yourself at rest in heaven while facing life on earth simultaneously, allowing Christ to express His life through you. This is “setting your mind on things above” in a practical sense. Set your mind (by faith) that you are holy, blameless, righteous, and accepted, with all your needs (not greeds) supplied. Simultaneously set your mind that Christ is expressing His life through you to meet your daily circumstances. You and I are not to worry about life: “Be anxious for nothing” (Philippians 4:6). That’s not something to be felt; it’s the act of setting your mind. You can’t set your feeler, but let your feeler be God’s problem.

Now let’s build on our new picture of where heaven is. You are in heaven (one inch off the floor). You are relaxing in Christ near the right elbow of God the Father. How many troubles do you have there? How nervous are you? How badly do you hurt emotionally? How rejected are you? How worried are you about what tomorrow holds? Isn’t it peaceful there? While you are resting there, imagine the Father reaching around you with His strong right arm and snuggling you up to His chest. Can you smell how clean His robe is and feel its texture on your cheek?

Come on now, you guys with your feeler stuck so much that you’re uncomfortable with the picture I’m painting. If your feeler won’t cooperate, rain on it! Set your mind on this scene anyway. Let God worry about taking care of your stuck feeler in His own good time. Just set your mind on this scene because this is reality, Channel #2. Pause now and “set your mind on things above” for five whole minutes. Go! (Sin just said to you, “Oh, I won’t do that right now. I get his point. I’ll just read on.”) Come on now. Do what I asked you. Please. You’ll love what will happen inside you.

Friend, what if you set your mind on the reality I’ve described for about three or four hours each day? Not all at once, but fifteen seconds here, a minute there, and so on. What would happen to you? You’d be “transformed by the renewing of your mind.” Because, you see, this process would leave you four hours less time to set your mind on Channel #1. And what would happen to those green highways in your brain because of that disuse? The same thing that happened to your high school algebra. They would dissipate. Tell me, by what process did you forget your algebra? Did you try to “overcome” it by attacking it, or did you simply “set your mind” on something else and the forgetting took care of itself?

Do you see it? One of the critical keys to victory over your flesh is consistently “setting your mind” in the reality of Channel #2. Don’t concentrate your energies on fighting against setting your mind on Channel #1. That would be concentrating on “death,” which would effectively cut you off from your life, Christ. You are dead to Channel #1, so why fight against it? Simply act as though you’re dead to it.

Being dead to sin, however, is not sufficient by itself. You are simultaneously alive to God. Victory lies in concentrating your energies in generating Channel #2 thoughts with your sound mind. Start ’em up! See yourself seated in Christ, resting while in this circumstance. See yourself loved, totally accepted, godly, and holy. This is your life, “for… your life is hidden with Christ in God” (Colossians 3:3). Your obedience to truth will result in light conquering darkness. This isn’t a world-system, counterfeit power of positive thinking, or Eastern religious meditation. It’s the Bible. Nor am I teaching man-made psychotherapy with Scriptures attached to help you play Lord of the Ring more effectively. This is the Bible. God didn’t give you an option of setting your mind or not as you choose. He has commanded you to do it. And when you do it, you’re walking in reality. When you choose not to do it, you are walking in deception, controlled through the thoughts by the Evil One in Channel #1.

Your Emotions Will Begin to Be Reprogrammed

Set your mind on reality and the Holy Spirit will gradually begin to supernaturally lower the stuck threshold of your feeler down toward a more normal position. This will give you more points to play the ball game with on your emotional Richter scale (see Figure 7.3). You’ll be much more able to tolerate situations that formerly would have led to certain spiritual defeat.

Will the Real Hypocrite Please Stand Up?

Since God says the Channel #2 perspective is truth, what does that make the Channel #1 perspective? Deception. It’s based on the false premise that the old man had resurrection power, that he somehow arose from the dead and continues to wage war against the new man.

If you are embracing and living out Channel #1, you are living a lie. You are acting as if Channel #1 were reality and Channel #2 an idealistic pipe dream that you can’t seem to make “come true.” Therefore, you are “pretending” Channel #1 is your identity, when in fact Channel #2 is your identity! You are pretending to be what you are not. And do you know what God has to say about folks who pretend to be what they aren’t? He calls them hypocrites. (Jesus called the Pharisees hypocrites because they claimed they were holy, when in fact they were not.)

Pay attention, now. This is another one of the most powerful truths the Holy Spirit has ever shown me as a key to living victoriously. It has helped to liberate me as well as thousands of other people over the years. Without this understanding, you’ll be set up for failure:

God’s Definition of a Hypocrite:

Pretending to Be What You Are Not

Satan’s Definition of a Hypocrite:

Acting Contrary to How You Feel

The devil’s definition of a phony is based totally on the condition of our emotions. If you buy into it, you will never be able to walk in your true identity in Christ! Tragically, all world-system counseling embraces his definition and much of Christian counseling naively does as well. The majority of counselors major on how people feel, and if their techniques make the counselee feel better, they pronounce him “better.” A person is only better if he is “walking in the light,” gang. We determine truth by what God says, not by the state of our emotions. (See Appendix E.)

Try to act in a manner contrary to how you feel and Satan will accuse you in your mind of being a phony. He is “the accuser of the brethren” (see Revelation 12:10). It will seem like self-accusation, however, because again, the thoughts will be presented to your mind by the power of sin with first person singular pronouns: “Why, I can’t tell my wife that I love her and that I’m thankful for what she does for me when I don’t feel like it. That would make me a hypocrite!”

Christians swallow that line because they don’t know it is originating with the accuser. Most of them never break through the deception to victory. They sit there and wait, hoping the Lord will somehow change their feelings so they can act accordingly without “being a hypocrite.” Channel #1!

Now, what if you would simply act (by faith) as if Christ were expressing His life through your personality and earthsuit to bypass the flesh and speak loving, encouraging, tender words to your wife and children. What if you act (by faith) as if Christ were using your arms to reach out in love by giving them a hug or a pat on the back? You would be acting as if Christ actually were your life. You would be acting like something is true that is true, wouldn’t you? Would you be a hypocrite, or would you be acting like what you are? You would be living obediently to the Word of God by faith. Do you see it? Ignore how you feel and the accusations served up to your mind that are contrary to your true identity. You’ll be experiencing Christ as life, letting Him filter His life through your personality. And repeat with me, “Rain on how I feel!”

Practical Applications

Let’s put the rubber on the road and apply these truths to some everyday situations. Consider a man (me) who has a wide, green highway in his brain for selfishness and self-indulgence. He often finds it difficult to give of his time to his wife and kids. He experiences persistent thoughts (served up to his mind by the power of sin) and feelings of resistance when any of them make demands on “his” time. Although the illustration I’m about to use may sound a little silly to you, it illustrates an intense problem for him.

His wife requests that when he mows the yard, please use the catcher on the lawn mower and bag the cuttings. You see, she’s really saying, “Husband, please love me by bagging the grass.” This is the way she’s spelling love today. But sin says to him, “It’s such a hassle to bag the grass! It takes twice as long! I wish she’d get off my case!” It’s always worse if his feeler is acting up on that particular day. Hey, this is Anabel and Bill! This describes one of my flesh patterns.

How am I going to experience victory in this situation? It won’t do me much good to practice seeing myself seated in heaven. That won’t get much grass cut and bagged. I need some performance! Thus, I will employ the side A truth of Christ’s being my life. I will let Him filter His life through me by cutting and bagging the grass. I know He wants to do it, because it really does need to be done. It would be ugly to “windrow” it, because it is pretty high. Anabel’s request was quite reasonable. Besides, He has told me to love her as He loves His bride.

I start the mower and begin to push it across the lawn, but I simultaneously choose with my will to set my mind that He is mowing the lawn through me. It’s just a matter of believing that He is and acting as if He is. It’s all done by faith and obedience. You keep concentrating on your method of operation—faith and obedience.

As I walk along, I generate in my mind, “Well, Lord, it’s really neat not to have to mow and bag today. I’m sure glad you let me off the hook by doing it all for me. What a neat thing it is to rest while I work. You are something else! Uh, oh, Lord, the bag’s full. We’d better stop and empty it. That baby sure fills up in a hurry, doesn’t it? Man, I’m sure glad I don’t have to empty the grass into those bags. That’s the part I hate the most! Boy, You sure do make short work of it. Yessir, it’s a real pleasure to watch You do the work through me.”

You say, “Come on, Gillham, what a dumb story! Let’s move on to some illustrations of claiming the abundant life. Get on to the story of when you went to the big meeting at the convention center and saw a guy’s leg grow a quarter of an inch and then everybody swung on the chandeliers.” Well, I enjoy a little chandelier swinging, but the abundant life is not always doing one-and-a-halfs off the ceiling fixtures. The abundant life is being able to spend Saturday morning mowing and bagging grass for your wife without getting resentful over it. That is the abundant life for me. That’s victory over my flesh.

Someone says, “That’s what you call suffering? Bagging grass? How hokey can you get!” I guess suffering is a relative thing. But yes, I confess that initially, bagging grass was suffering to me. It’s no longer such, as I have been “transformed [in this area] by the renewing of my mind.” I even bag the grass when Anabel is out of town. I enjoy it. My feeler’s unstuck on this one.

Now that we’ve seen an illustration in which the believer employs side A of our identity in Christ (Christ’s life through me), let’s develop an example in which the believer will appropriate the truth that he is in Christ (side B).

Suppose you are a woman with six-lane, green highways for feeling inferior and rejected. Your feeler is stuck at about a seven on each of these. You are a teacher in a large elementary school. The state teachers’ meeting is this weekend, and you had so hoped to travel to it with three ladies who teach in your building. You get the word, however, that they have arranged to invite another woman because one of them thought it would be fun to have her along, which means that she’s more fun to be with than you are.

Do you feel rejected? Yes! Have you been rejected? Yes, by them you sure have. Would this be apt to make anyone’s feeler go up a few points on feeling rejected? Yes. The trouble is, though, that you’ve got only three points of tolerance on your Richter scale. This is going to be a tough one to “turn over to the Lord.” Do you also feel inferior to the other woman? Yes. Are you? According to the world’s view, yes. According to reality, no.

Now, this calls for appropriating side B, setting your mind on resting in heaven in Christ, totally accepted and secure in His love for you. You must instantly fight to set your mind. Sin will flood your mind with thoughts such as, I’m such a yukky person. I’m such a Delberta Dumb. It’s no wonder they didn’t invite me. I hardly blame them. I seem to have such a talent for casting a wet blanket over any party. Oh, if I were only different! These “beat on myself” thoughts would be served up only to certain women with this unique sort of flesh.

The woman having self-pity green highways would experience thoughts from sin such as, Well, after all I’ve done for them! It’ll be a cold day when I ever volunteer to take their playground duty when they have a sore throat. Imagine inviting Elsie! That clod always manages to worm her way in. Lord, it’s no wonder You have so many enemies, the way you treat your friends! You always seem to make it difficult for me to keep up my faith. Others always get the breaks, and they don’t try half as hard as I do. Sometimes I wonder if it’s worth all the effort to serve You!

This woman has fleshly patterns to blame others when her needs are not met, while the first woman accepts self-blaming thoughts for the deficiency. It’s also very common for a person to experience a combination of these thoughts.

In either case, you must instantly begin to generate thoughts contrary to these based on truth in Channel #2, while simultaneously claiming what the Scripture states. You are dead to the power of sin that’s feeding you those negative thoughts. If you don’t, your feeler is going to break the sound barrier. Instantly think, I am relaxing in Christ at the right hand of the Father. I’m so glad it’s not a zillion light-years away, Lord, but right here in this room! Oh, I’m loved and accepted! Imagine yourself snuggled up against His chest. Feel His strong, reassuring arms about you. Are you insecure there? Ha! Are you inferior? Never. No one in Christ is either superior or inferior. First Corinthians 12 makes it clear that eyeballs are equal to elbows in the body of Christ, and you’re not inferior to anyone. Confess the truth—aloud if opportunity permits.

Life-or-Death Matter

Set your mind on these truths. Choose with your will to force your mind to generate appropriate, biblical, productive, true thoughts while refusing to accept sin’s thoughts fed through the brain to your mind. Force yourself to keep at this five minutes, ten minutes, whatever time is necessary until the “attack” of sin’s thoughts begins to ease off. If he tries to crank it up again, you crank up again with thoughts contrary to his. You see, it’s the setting of your mind in Channel #2 that will enable you to experience being dead to Channel #1. As I said earlier, it would be a fatal mistake to try to concentrate on being alert to recognize sin’s thoughts to you so you could become more skilled at rejecting them. That would be concentrating on death, which would effectively cut you off from life. Generating therapeutic, biblical thoughts and setting your mind on these is what will make you more and more victorious over the world, the flesh, and the devil.

You’re going to be “transformed by the renewing of your mind” (Romans 12:2). You’ll begin to mature experientially into what you already are in Christ. Your emotions will begin to settle down into the normal Christian ballpark, and the ultimate outcome will be the emergence of godly character that will evolve out of your godly nature and godly behavior.

Watchman Nee, our beautiful Christian brother who used to wear a Chinese earthsuit, made a powerful statement years ago. He said that all knowledge is the outgrowth of obedience; everything else is just information. In other words, you can believe the truths taught in this book. Yet, they can still remain just information to you. If you would convert this information into knowledge, you must obey it. You must grit your teeth and hold a good funeral, celebrating after the fact the death of the old man.

So, start setting your mind. Your character will take on the properties of Christ. The fruits of the Spirit will begin to emerge from you as a natural product of your obedience. You don’t see the branches on a grapevine straining and groaning to produce grapes. They simply abide, and the life of the vine produces the fruit. That is what you will see happening to you when you begin to appropriate your true identity in Christ. Praise His name!

Questions for Further Study

1. What does it mean to say that the old man died in Christ? Of what significance is this to you?

2. What are some of the attributes that God has given to those who are in Christ that are especially meaningful to you?

3. Once you begin to understand these biblical truths, of what importance is it that you set your mind on these truths as they apply to you?

4. Look again at the section titled “Practical Applications,” and then determine an area of your life that is a particular struggle. Make practical application for it using what you’ve learned thus far. Write this out. It will help you grasp the principles more firmly.

Answers in “Answers to Questions for Further Study”.

CHAPTER 8

Handling Your Emotions

In the last chapter, we saw how it’s possible to live like a new creation. But maybe you’re wondering how to deal with your emotions. Perhaps you identify with one of these three people:

“I have given until I don’t feel like I can give anymore. There are babies and bottles and diapers and beds to make, and dinners and dishes and baths, and then when I fall into bed I’m supposed to be the great lover girl. I feel like I’ve gone under for the third time! How do I deal with these feelings?”

“Something comes over me and I just let it all go at once! I have this hot temper, and I can’t control it. I’ve always been this way. No matter how hard I try, I can’t overcome it! I go totally out of control. I feel like it’s hopeless.”

“I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I tell myself that I’ll never let it happen again, but then when we’re alone and I feel his nearness, I just feel like putty in his hands. I wind up doing it all over again. Help me! Please help me!”

What’s the role of my emotions? God gave them to me, so they must be good to have. I’d hate to go through life without them or go through eternity unable to feel the euphoria of being in the Savior’s presence. But here on earth, my emotions have such a powerful influence on me to violate the will of God at times. The problem is that they respond readily to circumstances, but sometimes painfully slowly to spiritual truth.

How do I deal with my emotions? That’s the question I’ll address in this chapter. Through carefully studying it, you will gain solid answers you may have sought for years. Thousands of Christians have already gained victory over being controlled by their emotions through the simple teaching in this chapter.

To illustrate how to handle emotions, I’m going to tell a story about a man-eating bear. I am indebted to Chuck Solomon for the initial idea of the story which he shared with me in 1975. However, I will take the scenario and greatly elaborate on it, establishing a hierarchy of reactions and then applying the illustration to walking in the Spirit.

An Invitation to Dinner

Let’s say you are a stranger visiting Alaska. You’re out in the wilderness with no one around. A man-eating bear lives in these parts, and he has just spotted your earthsuit on his turf. He’s eight feet tall and weighs six hundred pounds. About a month ago, he ate one of your friends and left only his belt buckle and cowboy boots. He’s as mean as a junkyard dog. At the moment, he is occupying himself with running at top speed toward your earthsuit! It’s going to take him about ten seconds to close the gap between the two of you and invite you to dinner. Depending on the size of your earthsuit, you are about to become either an hors d’oeuvre or a meal.

Let’s draw a picture of this scene (see Figure 8.1). We’ll put an eye on your earthsuit so you can see the bear. The sunlight bounces off the bear, through the eye, and up the optic nerve to the brain, where you get a printout of him as he runs toward you. The moment the image of that running bear appears on your picture tube, mind and emotions, which have been sort of sitting there lazily watching TV, come to attention. Instantly, mind is going to trigger off a data retrieval system, and up out of the memory banks comes all data relevant to this stimulus.

There are things in your memory banks about bears that you are not going to retrieve at this point, information such as, Bears hibernate in winter. Instead, you’re going to retrieve stuff like, Bears eat meat, and I am meat. Running is an option, but bears can run faster than people. However, I could be running while I generate more options. Climbing a tree’s no good, since he’d just eat me in the treetop. But then you spot a little cabin through the trees, and mind says, I can run into that cabin!

All these options are recommended by your mind to your will at varying levels of intensity according to how strongly mind believes the option will solve the problem. Will is then going to have to choose from among the options presented.

Meanwhile, feeler is getting in on the action. Feeler’s going to generate but one emotion appropriate to this situation: fear! On a scale of 1 to 10, that’s a 10! Thus, feeler socks it to will at level 10: “I feel like that bear’s going to eat me alive, so get moving!” Now, feeler is a tremendous motivator to will. When feeler is talking 10s, will is heavily influenced to submit to its demands.

Being thus motivated by both mind and emotions, your will quickly chooses to command the brain to make the muscles propel the earthsuit into the cabin as fast as the legs will move, and they’ll be empowered by special rocket fuel injected into the carburetor by adrenal glands at feeler’s direction. Feeler has the God-given ability to bypass having to get will’s permission to trigger adrenaline flow into the bloodstream. Earthsuit then covers the forty yards to the cabin in 4.6 seconds, establishing a new world’s record for the forty in cowboy boots.

Now, this cabin is constructed of railroad ties bolted together—even the roof. It’s built like a fort. But it’s also covered with vines, so you can’t discern its construction. The instant you get inside, you slam the door, which is made of cured-oak bridge timbers three inches thick. You drop a huge wooden bar into a cradle behind the door, and when you do, you instantly become safe in the cabin.

Just as you drop the bar in place, the bear, who was right on your heels and closing fast, slams his nose into the locked door. It stops him cold. He raises up and puts an eye to the lone window (which has no glass, by the way). His head is so big that he can get only one eye to the window at a time. He sees you in there and goes absolutely bananas with rage! He begins to try to rip the cabin apart to get at the nut inside this big husk. (You can relax, now. I’m not going to let him in.)

Being a stranger to these parts, you have no knowledge of this cabin’s construction, and the exterior vines and inner darkness don’t help. If I’m a fly on the cabin wall watching you, I’m going to see you plastered against the back wall of the cabin, fearfully awaiting what you fully believe is the inevitable. You are about to get eaten alive by that bear!

But wait a minute. You’re safe in the cabin, remember? You could lie down on the floor and catch up on your daily Bible readings, since you’re going to be there for a while with nothing to do. You could even order a pizza and let the bear eat the delivery boy.

Ah, but the problem is that you don’t know you’re safe. Feeler is saying to will, “I feel like that bear is going to burst in here and eat me, and that’s a 14!” Mind, being thus influenced by feeler’s intensity, says, “Well, since I feel so strongly about this matter, I believe that my emotions are telling the truth. I believe I’m going to get eaten by the bear, and that’s an 8!” Will, having no input to the contrary, chooses to command brain to make muscles act like a man who is about to get eaten by a bear, and there you are—doing an imitation of wallpaper.

Do you see that you could actually die of a heart attack in the cabin and never benefit from your safety? You are safe and you don’t even know it.

Let’s examine this situation and what needs to happen in four steps, beginning with the fact that you are now safe in the cabin.

This is true. However, since you don’t know you’re safe, you could still die of that heart attack. So what good would your safety do you? None! It isn’t enough to be safe. You must believe it.

The critical factor in my little story is time. As time marches on, you are going to survey your situation and ultimately come to the conclusion, I believe I’m safe in this cabin. This is faith.

This is not Christian faith; it’s cabin faith—faith in the cabin and the cabin’s ability to meet your need. It will take you who have what I call “feeler flesh” much longer to arrive at Step 2 than it will others. You have a flesh pattern of believing that your feeler is usually telling it like it is. You often arrive at “truth” by trusting in your emotions; you make them the object of your faith. (Faith is a function of the mind; it means believing something, and it must have an object. It is never a feeling, but a belief upon which you take action. And it’s a fatal mistake to make feeler faith’s object.)

Now that Step 2 has arrived, you begin saying things like, “Oh, I’m so thankful! Without this cabin, I’d be dead!” But all the time you’re saying how safe you are, you remain plastered to the wall. Can you see that even after arriving at Step 2 you could still die of a heart attack with your faith? What good would your faith do you? None, because it is faith without works. Faith without appropriate action won’t do you one whit of good. You might as well not have any faith at all (see James 2:17).

Knowing that you’re now safe, why would you be acting as if you’re unsafe? Because the intensity of your faith (in your mind) is about a two, whereas feeler is still demanding its way at level ten. Will is choosing to go along with feeler’s assessment of the situation, even though will knows better. Feeler’s recommendation is five times stronger than mind’s at this point. Will is intimidated and chooses to go along with feeler’s demands in an effort to relieve the pressure. But remember who’s boss. Will can overrule feeler or mind or both simultaneously, no matter how intensely they apply pressure to sway his choice. Will is in charge.

Feeling Saved

This disparity between faith and feelings has a direct and important spiritual parallel. I’ve had many people come into my office during my years as a counselor and say to me, “I just can’t get Jesus to save me. I try to get Him to come into me, but He just never has. I can’t feel Him at all. I thought I did one time, but it went away.” They want to feel saved. Typically, these are the “feeler folks.” Unless they can feel something, they have difficulty accepting it as reality.

The Word of God never says, however, that anyone will feel saved. It says things like, “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you shall be saved,” not feel saved (Acts 16:31, emphasis added). As I lecture around the country, I take straw polls, asking the audience how many of them felt Christ enter into them when they were saved. The results (among charismatics and noncharismatics alike) are about fifty-fifty. God chooses to give a feeling to some folks, but He chooses not to give one to others, and I guess that falls under the heading of “His business.”

But even if He should give you a zingy feeling to boost you off the launching pad into the Christian life, it’s only got about a ninety-day warranty. It’s going to dissipate. It’s got to at times, because the Lord has no interest in strengthening your fleshly pattern of being controlled by your emotions. “Without faith it is impossible to please Him” (Hebrews 11:6).

God is committed to training you to walk in the Spirit by faith, and a critical part of that training is to teach you that you cannot trust your feeler, but you can trust Him. At times, He’ll give you all the zingy feelings you can handle, but He will not permit you to build a tabernacle there. Sometimes it’ll feel as though He’s gone to Mars for a summer vacation. He will withdraw all experiential evidence of His presence in order to train you, indeed, to box you in and force you to walk by what you know rather than what you feel. But has He left you in those times? No. How could He do that? Your earthsuit would fall over and die if He left, because He is your life. Your job is to keep believing He has everything under control. It’s just that He’s allowed a testing time to come upon you. Don’t be anxious about it (see Philippians 4:6). Keep operating by what you know.

Performance

With the passage of additional time in the Alaskan cabin, you will arrive at Step 3, which the King James Version of the Bible calls “works.” That means performance, activity, behavior. You’ve got to put some action to your faith if it’s ever to benefit you. Mind is going to say, “That bear can’t get into this cabin! Here I am with sweaty palms, dry mouth, heart palpitations, and shaky knees. I’m going to have a heart attack if I don’t get my act together! Get off this wall! Sit down on that floor and relax!”

Will is beginning to act on mind’s suggestion instead of feeler’s and is starting to slap feeler around a little. “Now, relax,” you tell yourself, “shake it out. Breathe slowly and deeply. Close your eyes. Don’t look at that bear. That’ll just get your emotions all bent out of shape again. Plug your ears; don’t listen to him. Unclench your teeth, and let your tongue unstick from the roof of your mouth. Now, imagine some relaxing scene in your mind like sitting in the sun out on the creek bank in the springtime. Relax!”

You are now choosing—forcing yourself—to “live like a safe man lives.” You are bringing your behavior into line with the truth, according to your faith. The Bible calls this “walking in the light.” You are choosing to go against feeler’s recommendation because mind has gotten more information about the security of your situation. You might say your faith has increased as a result of becoming better acquainted with the object of your faith (cabin). Will has now determined that it would be the wise thing to overrule feeler’s intense recommendation in favor of mind’s weaker one. You have thus arrived at Step 3.

The Bossman Takes Over

As will forces all your members (except feeler) to relax on the floor and insists on exercising the authority that is his by God’s edict, Step 4 will evolve. We will label Step 4 “Feelings.”

Your feeler will gradually begin to respond because you have chosen to act the way safe people act. Notice that Step 4 says, “I finally begin to feel safer—sort of.” In other words, you can never get complete control over your emotions. True, you can exercise some control over them, but never total control. It is humanly impossible to do so. God has created us to be unable to control the emotions. As a saved person, you can control your mind and your will, but not your feelings. God’s plan is for us to believe Him and choose to submit ourselves to His loving care and authority regardless of how we feel. All together now, Rain on how I feel!

Jesus Could Not Control His Emotions

Jesus Christ could not control His emotions when He walked planet earth. Have you ever thought of that? He took on the form of a man and chose to acquire man’s limitations (see Philippians 2:5-8). Consider the scene in the garden the night before the crucifixion. The Bible says that Christ’s “sweat became like drops of blood” (Luke 22:44). Tell me, what were His emotions doing if His earthsuit was sweating blood? They were a fourteen. Your emotions have never been that high: “You have not yet resisted to the point of shedding blood in your striving against sin” (Hebrews 12:4). That passage isn’t speaking of Calvary, but of Gethsemane.

Let’s say that you were there in the garden with Him and spoke to Him, “Excuse me, Sir, but it would appear that You have lost Your peace that You speak of so often. Have You?”

He’d answer, “Oh, no, I have great peace. But it’s a peace that passes [human] understanding. The peace I have is knowing something. It’s a function of the mind, not the emotions. It is knowing that My Father has everything under control. He and I discussed the events of tomorrow before I became a human being. As it approaches, I dread what is to come and have asked My Father if there isn’t another way, but all I am getting is silence from Him.”

Do you know how I know Christ got silence? Because if the Father had answered no and He’d persisted in asking (which He did), that would have constituted rebellion, and He would have been unable to be our Savior.

Silence is a very normal part of the victorious Christian life at times. When that happens, we must just forge ahead based on what we believe the Bible teaches His will to be for us, trusting that if our fine-tuner is off, He will reveal it to us. I want His will for my life, and He wants His will for my life. If I’m seeking His will, it’s His move if I’m a bit off the course He wants for me. I am to behave according to my understanding of His Word and ways, believing that He is leading me.

Christ would then continue to say of emotions, “Human beings often cannot understand the peace of which I speak, because the only peace they typically comprehend is a feeling. They want to feel peaceful. They will tell you that they have great peace of mind, but they don’t. It’s just that they feel good, so they set their minds on how good they feel. Let adverse circumstances arise, and they’ll tell you they’ve lost their peace of mind. However, they never had peace of mind in the first place. It’s simply that their feelers have gone off the Richter scale, and now they’re keeping their minds set on how bad they feel. It was feel peace instead of mind peace all the time.”

How Satan Uses Feeler Flesh

Let’s look at an example of how the Evil One will use a woman’s stuck feeler to control her if he can. Let’s make her thirty-two years old and married to a believer. Sharon, we’ll call her, experienced considerable rejection from her dad. Her feeler was subsequently stuck on 7. She feels rejected by males at level 7 on her very best days. Thus, she’s got only three points of tolerance for rejection on her emotional Richter scale, and with that she attempts to handle perceived rejection (whether it’s actual or not).

On this particular day, she has planned a beautiful evening at home with her husband. Her idea is to surprise him, having farmed the kids out to grandma. She has her best tablecloth and china out with all the trimmings. She’s worked so hard, and now she has her nails painted and her prettiest dress on. It’s going to be hamburger steaks for two by candlelight. Oh, how she hopes nothing will spoil this exciting evening!

Then big daddy comes home. “Surprise, surprise,” she says. “Tea for two, and the kids are over at mom’s! Just you and me and the candles.”

He replies, “Oh, my soul! They called me from the church today, and they’re one man short on the church bowling team. I told them I’d fill in.”

“But, honey—candles, china, perfume, nails…’’

To which he responds, “Sugar, you know how much I’d like to stay, but we’re bowling against the Mormons tonight. This one’s for Jesus. Just put my hamburger steak between some bread. I’m sorry, but I have to go.” And out the door he goes, into his car, and down the street.

The poor woman’s brain processes this episode, and a printout (perception) is generated: “Husband going bowling instead of staying here to party with me.” Now an interpretation must be made by the computer analysts in Sharon’s head (mind, emotions, sin, and the Holy Spirit). Sin comes on loud and strong, “I believe Earnest is rejecting me.” Note that this is Step 2, Faith, from our hierarchy of steps that we developed in the story about the bear. When Sharon accepts sin’s thought, feeler reacts (Step 4, Feelings), “I feel rejected two points worth.”

We must remember, however, that our little wife has only three points of tolerance for feeling male rejection, so her feeler goes from 7 to 9, not from 1 to 3. Now, with the intensity of this high feeling to capitalize on, sin says to mind (Step 2, Faith), “Well, since I feel such intense rejection, I really believe Earnest is rejecting me!” Sharon swallows this line from sin. And once she accepts this thought, it’s hers.

Feeler (Step 4, Feelings), triggered still higher by the process described in the rattlesnake story in Chapter 1, quickly tries to zoom up another three points. But wait a minute. Sharon’s elevator can only go up one more floor, and then she’ll be at 10. Thus, the intensity of the emotional strain becomes highly motivating. It’s at this point that sin “assures” her that she has arrived at Step 1, Truth. Sin says, “It’s true. Earnest has rejected me! Don’t bother me with the facts. I know how I feel.”

Do you see how the power of sin has taken a circumstance in this lady’s life and, capitalizing on her unique version of the flesh, has deceived her into arriving at “truth” through her emotions? This dear lady may be quite logical in her thinking when it comes to following a recipe’s instructions, but when it comes to interacting with other people, herself, or God, she makes her emotions the object of her faith and goes by what feeler says is truth. This whole process takes perhaps two or three seconds, and then she’s under sin’s control.

About two minutes later, however, here comes hubby’s car back up the drive. He walks into the house, repentant over his mistake. It seems the Holy Spirit showed him he was making a mistake before he reached the stop sign at the end of the block, and he responded in obedience by returning with nary a bite taken from his hamburger steak. “I’m sorry, honey,” he says. “The Lord showed me how wrong I was to disappoint you after all your plans. Here, pop my burger into the microwave while I go change into something more comfortable for our party.” And off he goes into the back bedroom.

Now her sound mind generates, “Wow, he didn’t reject me! He’s back. Oh, thank You, Lord, for answering my prayer.” You see, mind has the capacity to change instantly. Whereas it formerly believed she was being rejected, it has now dismissed the thought. But how about feeler? It’s still sitting on 10, and it’s going to stay there for a while. In fact, since it was energized to try to go to 12, it’ll have to experience at least two and a half points of “cool-down time” before she’ll feel any relief at all.

Now, the devil isn’t going to let this golden opportunity pass. Capitalizing on the wide “credibility gap” between the belief mind is attempting to embrace and the way she feels, sin is going to feed thoughts rapidly into her “sound mind” to try to take advantage of feeler’s inability to respond quickly to truth. Sin will do its dirty work in accordance with this woman’s flesh pattern. If she has “pity-party flesh,” sin will serve up thoughts such as these to her mind: “As hard as I worked and planned for this evening to be special! And for him to treat me this way! Sure, he came back, but the louse left in the first place, didn’t he! Does he ever plan anything nice for me? Oh, no, he’s too busy worrying about how he can be the big Christian helper at the church! He always takes me for granted!” See how effective this would be, especially if it is laced through with truth and near-truth?

On the other hand, Sharon may have “beat-on-myself” flesh, and if so, sin will give her thoughts such as these, “I never do anything right. I try so hard to plan things well, and it seems like everything always turns out wrong for me. I’m so yukky! I just hate myself. If only I were different! I can’t even compete with a bowling ball! I can’t blame him for not wanting to stay home with a dullard like me.”

You get the picture. The Evil One will serve up whatever sequence of thought patterns will best enable him to deceive the believer under the circumstances. The trick is that he must maintain a low profile to keep from being discovered, and the key is to serve up very “familiar” thoughts, thoughts that were very much a part of the “old man’s” experience. Once Sharon embraces these thoughts, she is now sinning in her thought life (in that she has failed to refuse the thoughts).

The only step left in our hierarchy is Step 3, Works. Overt behavior will follow close on the heels of the inner buildup of frustration. This behavior will once again be a function of a person’s unique version of the flesh. If the old patterns are for dumping hostility onto others, big daddy is going to get punched out as soon as he returns to the kitchen all showered and perfumed and with his new jumpsuit on. Hardly what he anticipated!

If Sharon has flesh patterns for dumping her hostility back on herself, on the other hand, he may walk into an awfully quiet kitchen. “What’s the matter, honey? I said I was sorry.”

“Oh, it’s nothing. I’m just a little tired tonight.” And then the meal is taken in silence except for, “Please pass the salt.” She manages to say that she’s had a hard day and wants to get a good night’s rest before she departs for the bedroom with a “headache.” He watches TV, wondering how the bowling match came out but afraid to phone anyone to ask.

You can never make the victorious Christian life a reality approaching it by the faith, feel, stronger faith, truth, actions sequence. God has prescribed one and only one way to consistent, moment-by-moment victory. And that way is the way of faith and obedience, never the way of the emotions. It is applying the biblical steps in proper order: truth, faith, behavior, and feelings. If the feelings are reluctant to line up, rain on them. You can walk in complete victory without their lining up for as long as He wills it. You can make it work with only the first three. God will grant you the grace to enable you to do so. Just go for it. He’ll take care of your feeler in His time after He has taught you to walk in the Spirit by faith.

Finally, the state of your emotions is never the criterion of whether you are walking in victory or not. Lining up on the Word of God by faith and obedience is the sole criterion you can trust.

Questions for Further Study

1. How important is it to feel the presence of God consistently in your life?

2. Do you believe the man in the cabin was being hypocritical when he began forcing himself to act safe even though the bear was still at the door? Do you think it is hypocritical for a Christian to act contrary to his feelings if his feelings don’t line up with God’s Word? Give the reasoning for your answers.

3. As you reflect upon Jesus’ prayers in the garden just before He was betrayed, what insights do you have that are applicable to your own prayers?

Answers in “Answers to Questions for Further Study”.

CHAPTER 9

Making Your Behavior Match Your Identity

A friend of mine who has made several trips to the Holy Land was telling me the other day how much different it was when he traveled with the tour guide he met on his fourth trip. This guide was Jewish, had been reared in Jerusalem, had studied Hebrew history in an Israeli university, and was also an enthusiastic Christian. My friend told me about some pretty exciting insights this guide had given him with regard to prophecy.

Personal experience is often invaluable if you are to serve as a guide to others. Accordingly, I’d like to relate briefly how the Holy Spirit took me through the experience that has “qualified” me to take pen in hand and to serve as a spiritual tour guide. I hope my experience will give you insight to help you appropriate your own victorious walk. We will also look at a step-by-step sequence of how to trust Christ to express His life through you as you face a particular task.

My Credentials (for Writing This Book)

Before coming to the end of my resources in attempting to live the Christian life, I depended on my ability. I saw all Christians as working for God. It was as if He needed my help. I never stopped to ask myself if He was that impotent. I just went along with the program of my church and “tried to do my best for God.” Sound familiar?

I received my doctorate in counseling from Oklahoma State University and accepted an appointment as a psychology professor in the Oklahoma higher education system. I was very proud. Dr. Gillham! Hot dawg! “Lord, here I go to my new job,” I prayed. “And my main goal is going to be to win souls for You in my new position. Man, what an influence I’ll have for You—a born-again psychology professor on a university campus! You must admit You don’t have many of those around!”

I have since envisioned the Lord’s saying to Himself, “Well, there he goes again. Bless his heart. That boy means well. He thinks he’s going to that campus to help Me, and I’m really not so hard up that I have to depend on a man. I could raise up a stone to do My work if I chose to. But I love that boy! He has a good heart. However, since My strength shows up best in weakness and Bill sees himself as strong for Me, I’m going to have to allow him to get weak. Then, in his weakness, he will turn to Me as his strength, his only strength.”

So the Lord allowed a little “all things” to come into my life. I’m speaking of Romans 8:28,29, where He says that all things are going to be used by Him to conform me to the image of His Son. Now, I don’t mean to be “familiar” with the Lord, but I do think He has a fine sense of humor, and I enjoy picturing Him that way at times. So maybe some angels said to Him, “Do you want Gillham to get a full order of ‘all things’ or a half order?”

“I believe you’d better give him a full order,” the Lord no doubt replied.

I want you to picture me lecturing to my new psychology classes. I’m well prepared, having generated and rehearsed my notes as best I could so as to make a good first impression. Oh, I so wanted to do well! But right in the middle of the lecture, it was as if my notes went cold. I couldn’t figure out for the life of me what to say next. My lecture ground to a halt, followed by fifteen seconds of awful silence while my face got as red as a beet. It was a terrible experience that I shall never forget.

I was desperately trying to salvage some pride (ugh!) out of the situation. “Lord!” I said. “I’m Your man on campus! Your saved ‘sicoligy perfesser.’ Your man-of-the-hour-with-power is in big trouble! My reputation, Lord! How will I work for You if I lose my reputation? Help!” And it was as if He’d gone to Jupiter.

I didn’t keep a diary of those experiences, but their frequency was often enough to keep me paranoid about facing my classes. The circumstances varied in that sometimes they’d ask me a question I couldn’t answer. It wasn’t a question where I could say, “I’ll look it up and tell you later,” but something like, “What’s Sigmund’s last name again?” “When is your birthday?” Really tough ones! And there I’d go with the silence and red-face routine again.

I’d be strolling across the campus—I had a tweed sport coat and everything just like the “normal” professors—and here would come a cluster of kids. “Good morning, Dr. Gillham.” Oh, I loved the sound of it! Here comes Doctor Gillham. And then the devil would tell me that I could know what they were really thinking about me: “There goes Delbert Dumb! What we don’t need on this campus is another educated idiot.” It nearly beat me to death. I didn’t share my misery with anyone, not even Anabel. I was too ashamed.

I’d try binding the devil before I entered the classroom, and it was about as effective as screen doors on a submarine. I claimed the blood. I did everything I knew to do, and still I was a miserable failure as a psychology professor. Can you see God at work? He was allowing Satan to attack me in my area of “strength” to bring me to the end of myself, of my ability.

What’s your source of pride, dear one? He hasn’t got you reading this book as a time filler. You can choose to come to the end of yourself right now if you will. Or you can wait until the “all things” treatment forces you to come to grips with the flesh. How are you getting your needs met on this planet?

I don’t know how long it took me to finally wake up and smell the coffee, but it was a long time. Finally, however, a pamphlet “somehow” came into my hands that spoke of my co-crucifixion with Christ. I couldn’t understand it. I ultimately read it onto a cassette tape that I played over and over as I drove alone in my car. Finally I arrived at a point of very limited comprehension. I studied the Scripture references the writer cited and cross-referenced them. I seemed to see a glimmer of hope. Christ, as my life, would teach the class through me.

I got on my knees in my bedroom and prayed, “Lord, I don’t understand this, but the Bible says that the ‘old me’ died, the ‘new me’ was born, and Your desire is to express Your life through the new me. You want me to depend on You to teach those psychology classes through me, using my personality and my earthsuit to do it. Okay, Lord, I enter into that agreement. One thing I am convinced of: I can’t teach the class. You do it.”

Put Some Legs to the Commitment

Then I took a very important step, Step 3 from the bear story: Behavior. I got up off my knees and walked down the stairs acting as though Christ was going to do it through me. If I had waited on my knees until I “felt” Jesus take over and move me to the classroom and wiggle my lips for me, I’d still be there. We’re not robots. I got up and I moved my legs in obedience, but I believed by faith that Christ was doing it through me because the Bible says He is my life, my only life. But I felt like a hypocrite. Like the biggest phony in town! I did it anyway, however, because I was desperate. I was at the end of my resources. I couldn’t hack it anymore, and I knew it.

Thus, I began my new walk of utter dependency. I dared not depend on my university training, my skills as a communicator, my cleverness, my ability. I had depended on all those things before, and they had let me down like the Titanic. I wanted out, and I believed I had seen a biblical crack in the door that would bail me out of this awful situation and glorify Christ if He pulled it off. I was going to let the Lord do it all through me.

And it worked! Praise God, it worked, and it’s still working! It’s working just as well for multitudes of Christians who have come to the end of themselves and claimed their true identity in Christ with Christ as life. Our brother Paul said it best, “For to me, to live is Christ” (Philippians 1:21).

“Lord,” I prayed, “there are classes I must prepare for and lectures I must deliver. But with this new arrangement, I’m sure glad that I don’t have to do either of them. You will do it all for me. You have commanded me to cast my burden upon You in Psalm 55:22. That’s not an option, but an order! Okay, I’m casting this on You. You do it.” And then I set about acting as though He was doing it all through me.

My lecture notes still looked the same—balloons with arrows zooming across the page, and so on. The pages didn’t begin to fill up with automatic writing. If something like that had happened, I’d have begun to “walk by sight,” which would have created yet another problem that God would have had to help me overcome. I simply had to believe that He had taken over, that everything was now under His control and was His responsibility.

I gave it my best. I applied all the knowledge of psychology I possessed. I tried to generate the best lecture notes I was capable of, but I gave Him the responsibility for it. If it turned out praiseworthy, to God be the glory. If it didn’t, to God be the responsibility, and praise Him anyway! The monkey was on His back to produce, not on mine. Hallelujah! This is what He meant when He said His yoke is easy. What freedom! Not freedom to goof off, but freedom to see His power through me.

White Sands Proving Ground (Testing Time)

Here’s an example of how it actually worked: I’m walking down the hall toward my Abnormal Psychology classroom. Do I feel confident that this is going to work? No! I feel insecure, just like always. Is there any guarantee I’ll be successful? It all depends on your definition of success. If you’re defining it as “perfect performance with perfect results,” the answer is no. If you’re defining it as “perfect method, trusting Christ as my life,” the answer is yes.

What a relief! I began to sail along, class after class without a hitch. There was no hint of the old memory lapse problems—until one fateful day. Here it came, the test. I could detect it immediately, and I saw my options. I could choose the panic road, or I could choose the road of faith and obedience. I said, “Okay, Lord, here it is. It looks bad for the home team. I’m glad it’s not my responsibility to pull it out. I’m blank! I’m sure glad You’re on the hook. You can do whatever You want. If You want to let me look like a Delbert Dumb, go ahead. Let me get red as a beet. That’s okay. I’ll hate it, but that’s okay. That’ll be Your problem, too.” I gave Him permission to let the worst thing I could think of at the moment happen to me. The worst fear the devil could suggest. And He pulled me through. Praise the Lord, He pulled me through!

You say, “Bill, that’s too simple. You have no comprehension of what kind of a pickle I’m in. My life makes your situation look like Ned in the first reader.” I hear you, and you’re right; I don’t know what your situation is. But I can tell you this. Trusting Christ as my life has carried me through the experience of having a mentally retarded son. It has carried me through fathering four physically incomplete sons and agonizing and wishing that there were something I could do—even exchanging places with them if it were possible. It carried me through speaking at my son’s funeral. It has reduced my super-critical tongue, which was formerly being used to destroy my beautiful, faithful wife and my dear sons—while all the time I was striving to stop doing “the very thing I hated”—to a trickle. It liberated me from lusting after nearly anything in a skirt, whether in or out of church.

Oh, dear friend, God’s grace is (not will be) sufficient for your situation. He wants to carry it all for you. Won’t you give up and let Him live through you? You don’t need to wait for one single thing to be added to who you already possess if you know Christ as Savior. Just celebrate a good funeral for the “old man,” and then celebrate the birth of the new, victorious you who arose in Christ by beginning to act like who you are.

Testing times will come, but the one who is in charge of the “obstacle course” has designed it to motivate you to claim Him as your strength. He will not allow it to destroy you. The “course” is specifically designed to conform you to the image of your lovely older Brother. Relax in it. Keep your mind on this. Our moment-by-moment battle is to fix in our minds that we are resting in heaven in Christ while simultaneously setting our minds to move through our daily tasks, believing that Christ is meeting them through us. We work at resting while we rest at working.

Making It Practical

We will now apply the four-step sequence of truth, faith, works, and emotions from the previous chapter to develop a technique for walking in the Spirit rather than “according to the flesh.” I have a friend, Paul Burleson, who states, “Just as it is important for every Christian to know who he is in Christ, it is also important for him to know who he was prior to salvation if he is to understand ‘walking according to the flesh.” That’s true, and if you check the areas where you seem to have the most difficulty walking in the Spirit, you’ll discover it’s in those areas where your emotions seem to be stuck. You’ve probably verbalized it as “My emotions shoot up to 10 almost instantly.” In all probability, however, this is a misperception. Your emotions began their journey up from a base of 6 or 7 or even 9. It was but one short hop to the top for many of you.

We will take each step from the bear story illustration, recall how it applied to the bear and the cabin, and then make practical applications to the spiritual walk.

Step 1: Truth

The truth is: 1. The believer is identified with Christ in His death, burial, resurrection, and ascension to the Father’s right hand. 2. Christ is now my life here on earth, and His will is to express His life through me. 3. I am resting in Him in His victory. The Bible states these truths in Romans 6, Colossians 3, and elsewhere. These verses are true, whether people accept them or not, because God said so. They are true of all who are born again. Thus:

You will recall that even though it was true that the man was safe in the cabin in the bear story, he could have died of a heart attack because he did not know he was safe. Similarly, there are millions of Christians who, due to a lack of understanding, will die and go to heaven this year having never benefited from the truths of these verses. They are not “heaven verses” but “earth verses” to be appropriated here. They are true. There’s an old saying: “What you don’t know won’t hurt you.” That may apply in some cases, but in the Christian faith, what you don’t know will destroy you.

Step 2: Faith

I wonder if you have enough faith to make these steps work. Let’s run a quick test and see. Do you believe the Bible is the Word of God? You say, “Yes, I sure do.” You just passed the test. You’ve got all the faith you need.

Many well-meaning Bible teachers will tell you that the reason you have no victory is that you need to get more faith. But if you want an exercise in futility, try to generate more faith by tomorrow morning. Talk about sending someone on a guilt trip! You don’t need more faith. You need more knowledge of the Object of your faith (see Appendix F).

Suppose you enter a church and observe the pews. You conclude, “I believe that pew will support my weight,” and you sit down. Sure enough, it does. That’s faith. It’s not Christian faith; it’s pew faith. Let’s suppose, however, that the pew were to collapse. And suppose some well-meaning brother said, “You know, if you had more faith that would never have happened to you.” Now, I realize the guy means well, but his theology is wrong. Did your faith let you down? No, your faith was sufficient. It was the object of your faith (the pew) that let you down. The pew wasn’t worthy of the trust you placed in it.

God’s love and trustworthiness, on the other hand, are always dependable. You must put your faith in Him, the beautiful object of your faith. You don’t need great faith, but more understanding of the Object of your faith.

Step 3: Works, Performance, Behavior

Remember, however, that the man in the cabin had faith, too. He believed he was safe, but he still could have died of a heart attack with his faith, because he failed to act like he believed it. Similarly, I have talked to people who tell me, “Oh, yes, the old truths of our crucifixion with Christ. I believe that. Why, I’ve known those truths for years. I did an extensive study on that and taught it to a Bible class.” But stay around these people and watch them operate. Anyone with a half-ounce of spiritual discernment can detect that they are neither resting in the Lord nor allowing Christ to express His gentle, loving life through them to others.

It isn’t enough just to “have faith.” You have to add something to your faith if you would walk in the Spirit. You have to act as if you have faith. Remember at the beginning of the chapter how I had to get off my knees and act as though Christ is living through me? Well, so do you. You must step out on your faith. “Faith, if it has no works, is dead” (James 2:17).

Here is the step where most Christians miss the mark. The flesh wants to skip over Step 3 and move directly to Step 4, Feelings. The flesh loves to feel something happen as “proof” that things are now different, that “it has worked.” The flesh always “seeks for a sign” so it can hang its hat on the sign instead of on the Word of God. It wants to use the sign as the object of its faith rather than the Word that God has spoken. Many believers walk by this motto: “A sign a day proves the devil’s away.”

This is no longer your way, however, it’s the way of your flesh. The way of the Spirit is now your way: “However, you are not in the flesh but in the Spirit” (Romans 8:9). But even though it is no longer your way, it certainly is your “old ways,” and indwelling sin will continually bug you with first-person-singular-pronoun logic that his way is the true way (see Appendix G).

You may ask, “But Bill, if I were to act like Christ is living through me but be unable to feel Him doing it, wouldn’t this make me a phony?” No. Remember God’s definition of a hypocrite: pretending to be what you are not. When you act like Christ is expressing His life through you, you are simply acting out reality, acting like who you are. You’re being obedient.

Success by Whose Definition?

The dictionary defines failure as “not succeeding” and customarily refers to the performance of a task. Christians have been deceived into believing that we should be able to design and build an improved computer, be a perfect mother with perfect kids, or install a new electrical outlet in the kitchen for the wife’s food blender, as “I can do all things through Him” (Philippians 4:13). Well-meaning disciplers cite this verse to struggling believers as “proof” that they should be able to handle any performance task successfully. This is not true. Neither this passage nor the rest of Scripture teaches that.

Instead, this oft-quoted passage (Philippians 4:11-13) refers to our being able to maintain a stability of mind as we experience all circumstances, resting in Christ as we do so. This is the “secret” spoken of in verse 12:

I know how to get along with humble means, and I also know how to live in prosperity; in any and every circumstance I have learned the secret of being filled and going hungry, both of having abundance and suffering need.

You see, it never implies the perfect results the flesh craves. It implies perfect method, resting in the Lord and His sufficiency to supply all my need. We can praise the Lord whether we’re eating peanut butter or steak. He’s got everything under control.

A Simple Illustration

We’ll use a simple performance task to illustrate the biblical method of how to “turn it over to the Lord.” There is this woman whose husband likes his eggs cooked over easy for breakfast. If she accidentally breaks a yolk, he has been known to storm away from the table and leave for work without any breakfast, making her feel terribly guilty. He’s a real doll.

Each day she carries the same burden at 6:45 a.m.—eggs to be cooked. We’ll construct a grid to help us organize the events of her experience so we can apply biblical methodology in analyzing whether she is walking in the Spirit or walking according to the flesh in doing this job.

Now, how will she solve the problem? She will use the method found in the “Self-Help” section of the local psychotherapy clinic library. Her method is, “I must do this myself.” Her thinking is, I can’t bother the Lord with such trivial matters as egg-cooking. After all, I’m perfectly capable of doing this myself. God expects me to carry my end.

Her method, in other words, is independence. God despises independence. He loves dependence. He desires that believers depend upon Him and His ability to supply all their needs, remember? Independence says, “I can supply my own needs. In fact, I am my own supply. I don’t need You, God, except for the things I can’t do alone, such as take myself to heaven. So go help the weaker ones, Lord, who, unlike me, are not able to help themselves. Thank You, God, for making me so strong” (see Appendix H).

Next step: “Now, Lord, I really would like perfect eggs to be cooked this morning. I’m going to do the best I can, but You know, Lord, sometimes they break in spite of all I can do. I would appreciate it if You’d just take up the slack and help me a bit if the eggs are in danger of breaking.” Under this method, you see, the better she can do things alone, the less she needs to depend on the Lord and His strength. She is living as if her unstated goal is to become so skilled at handling life that the only thing she needs Christ for is to take her to heaven when she dies! So we add this to the grid.

Lo and behold, the eggs are perfect this morning. Two prettier eggs she’s never laid eyes on. It looks like this day is starting off right. We’ll add this to the grid.

How does the flesh react? “Success! Look at those eggs! Perfect! I sure hope Joe responds to me this morning and gives me some recognition for all I do for him.”

The flesh, having been programmed through years of living in the jungle warfare of planet earth, striving to get needs met through worldly methodology, always looks to tangible results to evaluate success and failure. If the results are perfect, the flesh says, “Success”; if the results are poor, the flesh says, “Failure.” Also, the flesh expects a return on its investment of “service rendered.” I call it “’fishhook love,” because it always has a catch to it: “I’ve done something nice for you. Now it’s your turn to do something nice for me.”

The Lord, however, gives this woman an F on her performance. “Lord, how can You do that?” she might respond. “Just look at those eggs. They’re perfect! Even my husband likes them. And everyone at church knows he has higher standards than You. Can’t You give me at least a B or maybe B-? I tried so hard to be pleasing to You.”

Let’s imagine that the Lord came down to converse with her in the same manner He did with Job. The Lord might say, “Now, my dear, I agree that the eggs look delightful. They are about as good as any wife could be expected to do. However, I’m not looking at the eggs to score you. I gave you an F before you ever cracked the shells! You see, I score you on your method, not on your results. Your method was independence, self-sufficiency. That’s the way of the world, the way of the flesh. And as for giving you a B or a B-grade, I always score people pass–fail, for your method is always either right or wrong. It is either trusting in Christ’s life through you or trusting in flesh-proven techniques.”

The one criterion by which we will be graded is whether our work is composed of the same substance as the foundation, which is Christ. The life of the vine is the same life that’s in the branches. The work will be tested by fire to determine whether it was accomplished with vine life or flesh. It’s how we build, not what we build. Read 1 Corinthians 3:11-15 carefully, slowly. Your work is either gold, silver, and precious stones or wood, hay, and stubble. That’s pass–fail.

God said to Abraham, “Take now your son, your only son…and offer him…as a burnt offering” (Genesis 22:2, emphasis added). But wait a minute. Abraham had two boys, Isaac and Ishmael, didn’t he? No. God was speaking of Isaac, the “son of promise,” and His attitude was, “Abraham, you have only one son that I recognize. That other son is the result of your, Sarah’s, and Hagar’s fleshly action as you were trying to ‘help Me’ bring about My promise.” Only God’s work will be acknowledged by God at the Judgment Seat of Christ. That is precisely why even though some believers will see their entire earthly performance consumed by the fire, they, themselves, will be saved. Salvation, after all, is a work of God, not of the flesh, and that’s the reason it will pass safely through the fire (1 Corinthians 3:15; see also Appendix I).

With that understanding, we can see that our grid will now look like this:

Finally, our housewife recognizes that something is drastically wrong with her approach as she experiences a roller coaster Christian life. The Holy Spirit speaks to her through His Word, a pamphlet, a tape, a book, or whatever, and the lights turn on. She sees that she is to let the Lord live His life through her, even to cook eggs. What a relief! Praise the Lord! He’s taken the burden off her. He desires to carry it all. So now we’ll construct a new grid based on her new discovery.

Notice that the burden is still the same, eggs to be cooked, but look at the method. She’s chosen to turn the burden over to the Lord. She’s going to choose against her unique version of the flesh (which is self-reliance) and become dependent. She says, “Lord, I’m going to act as though You are cooking these eggs through me, because the Word says You are my life.” The desired results are still the same, unbroken yolks. And look at the actual results, unbroken yolks!

Even though God now approves of the wife’s egg-cooking, however, He’s also saying, “Yes, I’m pleased, but we have a major problem here. You are swallowing the flesh’s definition of success. You’re looking at the eggs, and because they’re perfect, you believe Jesus cooked them through you. You are looking at the results for ‘proof’ that Christ really is your life. You’re making the results the object of your faith instead of My Word. You are walking by sight, not by faith.

“Now, I’m going to let you practice Christ as life with pretty eggs for a while to get you started off the launchpad, but ultimately I’m going to have to break you from walking by sight.”

We will now construct our third and final grid, which will illustrate how the Lord will accomplish this goal through the use of His “obstacle course.” This dear Christian woman deeply desires to walk in victorious obedience, and the Lord is going to reveal His provision for accomplishing exactly that.

Here she is three weeks later, still trusting the Lord to cook the eggs through her. She’s built up a pretty good confidence in His ability to do it through her by this point. She is being trained to abandon all confidence in self and self’s ability to meet her needs.

On this eventful day that God has selected to teach her not to walk by sight, she says, “Okay, Lord, let’s have two more perfect eggs. How I wish I could have learned this lesson years ago. I’m going to let You cook them through me. Okay, I believe that’s enough time on that side, now let’s turn them over nice and easy.” But shock, horror! Look at the results! Broken yolks! What went wrong?

Notice how indwelling sin is going to take advantage of the situation. Sin says, “I blew it! I thought I had learned how to turn it over to the Lord, but I guess I haven’t. Somehow I took over and ruined the eggs. The horrible thing about it is that I don’t know exactly where I took the task back on myself, so how can I ever be secure that Jesus is living through me? I used all the faith I had. I’ll never really know He’s living through me. I guess I’ll have to back off until I get some assurance that He really is living through me again before I can ever believe it’s true. I sure wouldn’t want to be a hypocrite.” Look at those pronouns: I, me, my! Those thoughts are not hers; they are being served up to her mind by the power of sin to intimidate her into abandoning further attempts to trust Christ as life.

The Lord says, “Oh, you didn’t take over and break the yolks. I let them break to teach you not to walk by sight. I want you just to believe My Word. I said Christ is your life. Your job is to do the very best you can, trusting that I’m doing it through you, and leave the results to Me. If it turns out well, praise Me; if it doesn’t, praise Me anyway, and let Me handle any problems that are created as a result. Your job is to concentrate on your method—dependency.”

Thus, our task is to strive for excellence while at the same time trusting that Christ is living through us. The results are then His results, and we will praise Him in them. Now, I’m not saying that our egg cooker should begin to flip the eggs in the air, saying, “Okay, Lord, let’s see You make these turn out well!” That’s like lying down in the road and saying, “Lord, You said Your angels would protect me from harm.” He’ll let a truck run flat over you! Don’t test the Lord like that.

In no way can we “put God in a box” and approach Christian victory by a cookbook-type manual. But when you’re in the fourth grade and having trouble with your math, it’s sometimes very helpful to sit down with a sixth grader and review the steps he’s learned to solve his problems. (You will note I don’t claim to have a Ph.D. in Christian living.)

Let me summarize what we have learned thus far in the book:

FACTS:

• When Christ died, you died as an “old man.”

• When Christ arose, you were born as a “new man.”

• Christ is now the only life you have. Any other technique you employ for living is “death.”

• Christ is now resting in heaven and so are you in Him.

• You have the same rights Jesus had when He left heaven and came to earth—none. You are a “living sacrifice.” You are to “seek God first” and He will supply all your needs.

FAITH:

• You must believe the above based on revelation by the Holy Spirit to you from God’s Word.

WORKS:

• Moment by moment, by faith, you are to act as though Christ is expressing His agape life through you to accomplish His will.

• You are to apply all diligence to the task.

• You are to study God’s Word so the Holy Spirit can train you to discern good and evil, that you might not prostitute the life of Christ by living for self while claiming it to be the life of Christ through you.

• You are to rest in your mind that your method (faith and obedience) is correct.

• You are to rest in your mind that the results are Christ’s results through you, and you are to praise Him whether “successful” or not.

• You are to recognize that your emotions are not your primary barometer of truth. God’s Word is.

God’s Acceptance Is Not God’s Approval

The method by which God accepts you is never performance-based, but Jesus-based, and He grades pass–fail. All who know Christ as personal Savior and Lord are accepted; all who do not are rejected. But have you discovered that He will also grade you pass–fail at the judgment seat of Christ? Understanding how to defuse our fear of this judgment is another key we all need in order to experience a victorious life, so let’s talk briefly about it.

You must understand that it’s your works which will be judged, not you who will be judged. Failing to see this results in fearing the judgment for the wrong reason. Many feel like God is going to subject them to public humiliation for certain sins they’ve not overcome. Come on. Has God removed your sins as far as east from west through Christ or not (Psalm 103:12)? Enough of such disbelief. That’s the wrong reason to be apprehensive about the judgment.

God only honors His own work. First Corinthians 3:6-17 reveals that only a work of the Spirit can pass His judgment and that His grading system is gold, silver, and precious stones versus wood, hay, and stubble; that’s pass–fail. It’s how you build that will be judged—how you lived life, totally dependently or independently. Is your method Spirit-dependent or flesh-dependent? “They will be held guilty, those whose strength is their god” (Habakkuk 1:11). If that is the way you approach life, you have good reason to be apprehensive about the judgment because your entire life’s work (even if you are a pastor) will be burned.

But you can defuse those fears right now. Just quietly bow your head and trust Christ to begin living through you to do His will. Then begin to act like He is doing it! By so doing, you will be producing a work of God which will merit the “Well done” in the future. “You were faithful with a few things, I will put you in charge of many things” (Matthew 25:21). Talk about a profit-sharing plan! Thus, we complete Step 3.

Step 4: Feelings

As I continue to walk by faith and obedience, setting my mind on the reality of how things are rather than on how I feel or on “circumstantial evidence” that belies God’s Word, God will begin to bring my feeler’s “stuck threshold” more into line. I’ll be transformed by the renewing of my mind (Romans 12:2). Thus, we complete the final step.

Notice I said “sort of.” God is never going to bring your feeler totally into subjection so long as you remain in your earthsuit. He has deliberately designed it to vacillate so as to force you to walk by faith, not by feel, if you would experience the “peace that passes understanding.”

Remember, that peace is not a feeling, but a knowing—knowing that the Father has everything under control; that you are in Christ, seated in heaven, resting; and that He is in you now, living. Bow before Him right now. Praise Him for dreaming up such a fantastically innovative, glorious, gracious plan whereby you and I can face anything this world can throw at us, not due to our ability but to His ability through us.

Questions for Further Study

1. This chapter discusses the need to “put some legs” to your commitment. Has there been a time when you found yourself in a similar position as Bill in his psych classes? As you reflect on that time, what added insights do you gain looking at it again?

2. Do you get the idea that everything went great after Bill began to trust the Lord and walk in the Spirit? How do you account for your answer?

3. How would you “cook an egg sunny side up”?

Answers in “Answers to Questions for Further Study”.

CHAPTER 10

“Leftly” Dividing the Word of Truth

Maybe you’re saying, “Bill, I see what you’re teaching about the sin nature’s being dead and how we now battle against the power of sin and the flesh. You just teach it a little differently than I do. I call the power of sin the sin nature. It’s a little different, but I believe we’re both saying the same thing. It’s just semantics.”

I’ve had Bible teachers say that to me, but it’s not correct. They and I are poles apart in our teaching. If they’re right, I’m battling against myself. I’m fighting a civil war. If I’m right, on the other hand, I’m collaborating with the Holy Spirit to fight against sin. It’s God and me against him. It’s two against one and I can win! I’m “more than a conqueror through Him” (see Romans 8:37).

The Bible can be interpreted as saying that salvation, security, sanctification, and all the rest of God’s blessings must be earned through performance. But it can also be interpreted that these are bestowed upon the believer solely by grace through faith in the finished work of Christ.

Discerning the correct interpretation is critical to consistent victory over your version of the flesh. Does this mean I’m going to resolve theological issues that the world’s greatest intellects have struggled to understand? Do I claim I can show you the “right” way? Well, I don’t claim to have the market cornered on truth, but I do have an opinion. Whatever truth I have is purely by the grace of God, as is the case with anyone. I believe “rightly dividing the Word of truth” on all the attainable growth plateaus for the new creation in Christ is critical to consistent victory, and I have an opinion on how to go about understanding it that I believe is biblical or I would abandon it.

One Spirit

This book interprets the Bible as teaching that no human being has two spiritual natures. Lost folks have one; saved folks have one. The Bible teaches that all people are spiritual creatures who temporarily dwell in earthsuits, not physical creatures who have spirits. There’s a big difference in those two views. Our eternal identity is spiritual, not physical. This is true for both the saved and the lost: “Therefore…we recognize no man according to the flesh” (2 Corinthians 5:16a). With this in mind, let’s compare a Christian with an unbeliever as follows:

The above list is only partial, but one can readily see that it describes two polarized identities. We can condense each column into one summary label as follows:

1. Unregenerate man has a sin nature, meaning that he has a deep-seated desire to avoid Jesus’ authority over him. He is committed to ruling his own life and destiny. He is his god.

2. Regenerate man is a “partaker of the divine nature.” He has a deep-seated desire to submit to Jesus’ authority over him. He is committed to submitting his life and destiny to Jesus. Jesus is his God, and he is delighted with the arrangement, even though he experiences some very difficult times on earth.

Now, here’s the rub. We can find verses in the Bible that appear to teach that Christians have two natures, not one. How can we deal with that? Furthermore, there are other apparent contradictions in the Word, although we know the Word is totally true. For example, how about the verses that teach you have to be baptized to be saved versus those that teach you don’t? And how about those that teach that a saved person can become unsaved versus those that teach he can’t? What do we do with these? Which is the right position to take?

Webster defines enigma as “a perplexing or baffling matter.” As I took this enigma to the Lord, studying His Word and striving to remain open to His Spirit, digesting the truth and discarding the error (including that in my own denomination’s teaching) by His gracious revelation, I have some things to offer to you that I believe are from the Holy Spirit.

Two Roads

The Lord showed me that the Christian life is like a road upon which I travel and upon which I encounter a series of forks, each of which demands that I turn either to the right or to the left (see Figure 10.1). Choosing the correct fork may or may not be accompanied by feelings of euphoria, but the feeling (or its absence) must never become the object of my faith.

A right turn on this road leads to an area I’ll label “Law.” This stands for the concept that God has people on a performance-based acceptance; the more nearly our performance measures up to God’s Law, the better He accepts us. Conversely, if we fail from time to time, His smile fades to a frown of rejection. The epitome of this condition would be to incur His ultimate rejection, eternity in hell.

Taking a left turn on this road, however, leads to “Grace,” God’s unmerited favor poured out upon undeserving humanity through Jesus Christ. After salvation, my motivation from this perspective is not based on guilt over my failures, but rather I am motivated by love for Christ to offer myself to Him, to let Him express His life through my personality and earthsuit to a hurting world. I believe correctly understanding the Word requires separating law from grace. Thus, a left turn is the right turn to take on this road, and hence the title of this chapter.

Salvation

Once upon a time, I traveled this road and encountered the very first fork in the way. I’ll label this fork “Salvation” (see Figure 10.2).

As the Holy Spirit was dealing with me, a group of people approached me with a tract containing “fifteen verses” in the Bible to “prove” I’d best turn right toward law if I hoped to make it to God. But then there was a second group who approached me with a tract containing “fifteen verses” that Jesus had already paid it all and that I must simply accept His forgiveness by faith; that His death on the cross had made my access to God a matter of pure grace, God’s Riches At Christ’s Expense.

I chose the left-turn option and much to my delight, I have discovered through the Word and my experience that I now have the Holy Spirit of Christ Himself indwelling me. I am saved.

Baptism

Before long, I found myself at a second fork in this road, the fork of baptism (see Figure 10.3).

Another group of well-meaning folks approached me with a tract they’d developed containing “fifteen verses” to “prove” that unless I got baptized (and the message was urgently pressed upon me lest I die and miss my opportunity), I could not be saved. These folks were sincerely convinced that they were “rightly dividing the Word of Truth.” But there came a second group of folks having a tract with “fifteen verses” showing me that baptism was but a pantomime depicting my death, burial, and resurrection with Christ, my public testimony to what had happened to me at salvation. They explained that baptism was a picture of God’s grace.

I chose to turn left at this fork also, believing it to be the rightly divided grace position rather than the law position. I have received reinforcement from the Word, as well as from the indwelling Holy Spirit, that this was the correct way. For example, Paul said to the Corinthians in 1 Corinthians 1:14,17, “I thank God that I baptized none of you….For Christ did not send me to baptize, but to preach the gospel” (emphasis added). Therefore, the pro-baptism group would have to declare Paul misguided in this verse, as he didn’t include baptism in the gospel.

Security

I don’t know how many of these forks there are, but I’m convinced that one of the functions of the Holy Spirit is to lead people up this road, fork by fork. One particularly controversial fork is the one of “security” (Figure 10.4).

Well-meaning brothers and sisters in Christ will approach with a tract that quotes “fifteen verses” “proving” that I have to keep holding onto Jesus lest I slip and fall away into hell. Their position is that it is my job to keep myself saved through performance, and I’ve got to keep holding on (sometimes with oil-slick hands, it seems). In other words, I must perform to retain what I couldn’t perform to acquire in the first place.

Then another group armed with a tract quoting “fifteen verses” takes the position that my security lies in the fact that Jesus holds me, not vice versa. They show me verses such as, “No one shall snatch [you] out of My hand” (John 10:28) and “I will never desert you, nor will I ever forsake you” (Hebrews 13:5). By exercising spiritual discernment, I saw this position as adhering closer to the truth of God’s grace and I turned left. As I have walked in this position over the years, the Holy Spirit has again and again reinforced the truth of it to my inner man.

Sanctification

There is one additional major fork in the road I wish to discuss, the fork about which the Lord has raised up this book. It’s the fork of “sanctification” (see Figure 10.5).

Are Christians a truly holy people, or are we trying to become a holy people? This fork represents our opportunity to accept or reject the death of the “old man.” Groups of well-meaning Bible teachers approach with a tract of “fifteen verses” “proving” that to attain holiness, I must stop smoking, stop lying, stop cheating on my tax return, begin praying more, begin Bible memorization, begin witnessing, and so on. Through this process, we’re told, I will become holier. It’s performance-based holiness. It’s law. God has some pretty strong things to say to us about avoiding that approach to holiness. “Hey, El Stupido! Having begun this process by the Spirit, are you now going to take over and complete it on flesh power?” (Galatians 3:3, loose paraphrase).

Then there are others who have discerned that the “mystery” of the gospel that liberates one to live a consistent, obedient life is found by turning left at this fork. I must believe at face value all the verses that document my new identity in Christ, that say I am literally a new person now. It is from this posture that I can begin to lay aside my old ways (smoking, lying, cheating) and put on the new (prayer, Bible memorization, witnessing, etc.).

It’s not that I cease to have one identity and begin to have another as a gradual process. My old identity terminated at the Cross in Christ (see Galatians 2:20), and my new one was created (past tense) in godliness in Him at His resurrection (see 2 Corinthians 5:21). I can become a mature example of who I already am. As an oak sapling grows, it doesn’t get “oakier.” Oak is oak. It simply matures into what it is, a full-grown oak tree.

It’s the same with us. We are the holy sons of God. We don’t get holier, more accepted, more justified, or more forgiven. We simply experientially “life out” who and what we already are. It’s not a “from–to” situation with us. We are a holy people. Now let’s get on with acting like who we are.

The tragedy is that most evangelicals have turned right at this fork and are beating their heads against a brick wall, striving to get holier through performance. One of the patriarchs of the faith who no doubt dedicated a major portion of each day to striving for holiness asked that the epitaph on his tombstone refer to him as a poor, wretched, worthless worm. And this was from one of the all-time champions of the faith. I just read today that one of the most intelligent, well-respected seminary professors in the land states that he completely identifies with that posture. What incentive to growth does that leave us plain folks in the pew? It’s enough to make a person give up even trying, and that’s exactly what I see in so many Christians. It is breaking God’s heart.

The Key

We might want to ask at this point, “Well, Lord, why did You put all these forks in Your Word? It seems it would have been good to eliminate the opportunity for people to err by misinterpreting Your Word. Why did You do this? Why not sixty-six books clearly spelling it out in black and white?” And this is what I believe He has shown me in response to my seeking.

The devil is a liar; God is truth. That’s a polarity. If I don’t believe God, I lump Him in with His archenemy and imply that He, too, is a liar.

I believe every word in the Bible is inspired and absolutely true. It breaks my heart to hear a Christian leader state that in his “wisdom” he has come to “understand” that Jonah wasn’t a literal man swallowed by a literal fish, or something like that. What a grief to the heart of God! (C. S. Lewis has an excellent treatment of the critical-historical view of biblical interpretation and its devastating results in Chapter 27 of The Screwtape Letters.) I am delighted to be counted with the simpleminded who just believe what God says.

In giving me the opportunity to either believe or disbelieve, however, God has made Himself so vulnerable as to structure His Holy Word so that the devil can use even that to deceive me. That’s the way he tempted Jesus in the wilderness. He quoted Scripture to “prove” his point. He quoted it perfectly, but he misconstrued God’s meaning. Jesus countered him by quoting opposite excerpts from God’s Word that correctly interpreted God’s will. Satan will try the same with you if he can. He seeks to malign God’s integrity in your thoughts and deceive you.

The focal issue of all eternity is Christ on the cross. Everything prior to that blessed event points to it; everything after it points back at it. It will always be so. Our God has scars in His hands that we will see daily throughout eternity.

Jesus Christ volunteered for the cross to demonstrate one attribute of God and one only. He did not hang there to demonstrate His omnipotence, omnipresence, etc. Christ on the cross demonstrated God’s limitless, loving, forgiving grace.

Therefore, where law appears to conflict with grace in biblical interpretation, fix your eyes on Jesus Christ on that cross to “rightly divide” the passage. Put on Son-glasses, and filter every interpretation of the Word through Him there. The Holy Spirit will always point me toward grace, always.

The law is intended exclusively for the unregenerate man, to motivate him to salvation (Romans 6:14; Galatians 3:19-26; 1 Timothy 1:9a). The new man in Christ is motivated to righteous living by the Holy Spirit within (Ezekiel 36:26,27); he has the laws of God written on his heart and mind (Hebrews 10:16).

“The Power of Sin Is the Law”

(1 Corinthians 15:56)

Realizing the fact that law is not made for a righteous man [and new creatures are righteous], but for those who are lawless and rebellious, for the ungodly and sinners [remember, we are saints who sin], for the unholy and profane, for those who kill their fathers or mothers, for murderers and immoral men and homosexuals and kidnappers and liars and perjurers, and whatever else is contrary to sound teaching (1 Timothy 1:9,10).

The law is not for you if you’re a new creation; it was used by the Lord to convict you of your hopeless state and thus motivate you to accept Jesus Christ as your Savior. Now that the law has served its purpose for you, you are no longer under it. But if you choose to stay under it and approach the Christian walk with the law attitude of “I must, I ought, I have to” instead of “I am new, I delight to do God’s will, I love Him, His ways are good,” you are laboring under law; you have not “entered into God’s rest,” and it’s just a matter of time until you burn out.

“The power of sin is the law” (1 Corinthians 15:56, emphasis added). Law is the “gasoline” that fuels sin’s engine. That explains why we sometimes see a pastor who hammers away with law teaching run off with the church secretary. The power of sin in him “fed itself” on the man’s teaching and destroyed his ministry with it. You give the power of sin a law to work with and it will eventually beat you, because God’s provision for the believer is grace, not law.

Notice how God polarizes law and grace in John 1:17: “The law was given through Moses; grace and truth were realized through Jesus Christ.” Jesus satisfied the law for all who will appropriate His grace. Appropriate His finished work for you and you pull the teeth from the power of sin. You drain sin’s gas tank! Tragically, many disciplers’ major tool for trying to motivate a believer to grow is law. But God’s plan is for us to learn who we now are and how to appropriate grace for victory in each day’s circumstances, so Christ gets the glory. “Thanks be to God, who gives [that’s grace] us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Corinthians 15:57).

Always, Always Look to God’s Grace

Thus, I believe that God has shown me, “Always turn left, Bill, and you’ll be right. But if you ever turn right, you’ll be left.” Truly, any time a person takes a turn toward law, seeing himself on a performance-based acceptance with God, God will allow the individual to travel that wrong road until he hits a brick wall. He’ll allow the devil to punch the “hold” button on the person’s telephone and just let him sit there and blink. That person will never go on with God until he turns around and goes back to the fork where he made the wrong turn.

I care not whether the fork represents a law position on baptism, eternal security, forgiveness, acceptance, righteousness, holiness, justification, or anything else. You turn right and you’ll be left. You’ll wear out trying to measure up to law, and you’ll crash sooner or later. Tragically, the dear people who turn right at the salvation fork will be eternally left. You cannot earn God’s acceptance.

As C. S. Lewis said in Mere Christianity, “If, somewhere upon the road of life, you discover you have taken a wrong turn, the quickest way forward is to turn around and go back. Or, if somewhere along life’s road you find yourself traveling with a group which has taken a wrong turn, the first man to turn around and go back is the most progressive.”

I realize someone may use verses to “prove” that the Christian’s old sin nature didn’t die in Christ. But he must arrive at that conclusion by turning right. He must adopt the posture that a born-again person attains holiness through performance. The Word says, however, “The flesh [not the old man] sets its desire against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh” (Galatians 5:17). It’s not our old sin nature we struggle with. It’s the power of sin working through the old, worldly ways. You will never get good, solid victory in this battle we all experience until you see by His Word and appropriate the truth that the old man literally died in Christ. It’s not positional, it’s literal. Dead men tell no tales. Those “tales” you experience moment by moment are being offered up to your mind by the deceiver of the brethren through your flesh.

Questions for Further Study

1. Why do you believe God’s Word contains seemingly contradictory statements?

2. What is the primary key to correctly understanding and interpreting God’s Word?

3. Perhaps you sense that you have made a turn toward law on the road of life. If so, what do you need to do?

4. If you believe that up to this time you have turned toward grace, what can you do to avoid taking any wrong turns toward law?

Answers in “Answers to Questions for Further Study”.

CHAPTER 11

Is God Trying to Tell You Something?

The pastor slumped in the chair across from my desk, his face giving silent witness to the turmoil within. He’d been very successful, having ascended to the position of heir-apparent of his denomination’s highest state office.

Then the young divorcée came to him for counseling. In his zeal to help her, he became emotionally involved, and they eventually fell into sin. Their secret was exposed, and the pastor was dismissed in disgrace. Dashed were his dreams of denominational honors and esteem. Dashed were the long years of labor as he’d climbed the ladder through the tiny churches to the large city church. There he was at the pinnacle he’d savored throughout his adult lifetime. Almost there. And then, crash! It was gone. All of it. He was totally defeated.

This was our tenth counseling session. I had discussed most of the truths in this book with him repeatedly. He could articulate quite well the principles he was learning, but to my knowledge he never appropriated them. They remained just “information” to him, “interesting insights.”

The only thing this dear brother wanted to discuss in our sessions was how he could recoup his losses. As far as I could discern, he never gave up his fleshly yearning for the honors of men. He longed for human acceptance and fleshly-generated self-esteem.

Satan’s Favorite Road

As with this deceived brother, a great deal of your flesh was generated by your efforts to get your need for acceptance and self-acceptance satisfied by extracting it out of people and the world system. You see, Christ was not number one with this pastor; his job and prestige were. It is my conviction that Satan’s most effective tool against Christians is to deceive them into continuing to use their old, green highways to satisfy this need we all have for love and self-esteem.

Jesus desires that we look to Him as the source, moment by moment, to supply this as well as all our needs. Once we’re called out to Him, He lovingly begins to woo us away as His bride from our “former lovers” through which we sought to get our needs supplied.

Spiritual Descendants of Gomer

We hear a lot about the necessity for “brokenness,” but it seems that some of us have a hazy understanding of what we must be broken from. God seeks to destroy our Lord-of-theRing ways. They are harlotry! Often He has to allow suffering that our flesh can’t handle to come into our lives in order to break us. The book of Hosea presents a graphic typological study of this process.

Chapter 1 tells of the Lord’s command to Hosea to marry a whore. I don’t understand why learned men argue over whether or not this is literal. The Bible says very clearly in verse 2 that it was the Lord’s command to Hosea, and it fits perfectly into the book’s purpose as a typological study. Hosea obediently married Gomer, who proved to be woefully unfaithful to his commitment to her. That’s a picture of God and the nation Israel; Christ and His bride, the church; and Christ and you as an individual.

Gomer bore children by her various lovers as she flitted from one to another, seeking to get her needs supplied in ways other than her husband. Sexual intercourse was not Gomer’s primary goal, but simply a means to an end. She was trading herself to her lovers, allowing them to use her so she could get all her needs supplied. We, likewise, are tempted to return to our fleshly techniques in order to satisfy our need for love.

Let’s pick up the story in Hosea 2:5: “For their mother has played the harlot….For she said, ‘I will go after my lovers, who give me my bread and my water, my wool and my flax, my oil and my drink.’” Gomer was continuing to use her old techniques to milk her needs supply from the world system. This is a picture of the contemporary Christian who strives to climb the corporate ladder, denominational ladder, athletic ladder, club ladder, or whatever to generate and maintain acceptance and self-acceptance.

“Walking after the flesh” could range from clinging to physical beauty to striving for perfectionism in performance; from displaying Christmas cards from the “right people” to craving an invitation to the party where many of the “in” group at church will be gathering tonight; from striving to acquire the house with the right address so you can “feel good” about where you live to having to have your hair look “just right” before you can feel “comfortable” going out; from name dropping to having to have a snappy car or clothes or boat to feel better about yourself. Ad infinitum! All these things are fleshly techniques for obtaining acceptance and self-esteem from the system rather than from the Lord, your husband. It’s infidelity! There is nothing evil about many of these things per se. It’s the motive that is not of God.

Jesus, the committed Husband, reveals His divine plan for wooing His bride away from all competition. He fixes things so that flesh trips cease to be productive. He dries up the supply so His bride will wake up and turn to the one who really loves her instead of chasing after those who are looking to her as their needs supply.

The End of the Road

God was going to make Gomer’s flesh less productive than before.

I will hedge up her way with thorns, and I will build a wall against her so that she cannot find her paths [old ways] (Hosea 2:6).

Christian, are you experiencing a diminishing return on your efforts lately in terms of the satisfactions you formerly derived? Are you traveling on “old roads”?

“And she will pursue her lovers”—she was reluctant to give up this “good” thing she had going for her—“but she will not overtake them; and she will seek them, but will not find them.” Then she will say,

I will go back to my first husband, for it was better for me then than now! (Hosea 2:7).

Jesus likewise allows you to walk in your old ways, patiently wooing you and suffering through your infidelities to Him. He tearfully watches as you look to your former ways of extracting your needs supply out of the world system, ways you learned so well prior to the marriage (salvation). Then He allows you to begin experiencing a diminishing return on your efforts.

At first the unfaithful wife’s prayers are centered on asking the Lord to defeat the devil and restore her “victorious life.” Sound like any TV programs you’ve heard? As her fleshly effort weakens in productivity, she usually becomes frantic, believing the devil’s lie that the Lord must have put her on hold to take care of more pressing matters. She often begs Him to hear her plea, which seems to be falling on deaf ears. Oh, but He’s lovingly working.

Jesus, Our Source

Finally, the adulterous bride realizes there is something drastically wrong in her life. It’s at this point that she is most receptive to “returning to her first love,” Christ, her Bridegroom, to adore Him (see Revelation 2:4) and seek Him alone as her source.

For she does not know that it was I who gave her the grain, the new wine, and the oil, and lavished on her silver and gold [which she misused] (Hosea 2:8).

She just thought she was getting her needs supplied by her fleshly effort, but it was God who was supplying her needs all the time. She thought her life would surely be a disaster without her source, the thing she had always depended on.

“Therefore, I will take back My grain…and My new wine…My wool and My flax,” the Lord said (Hosea 2:9, emphasis added).

It all belongs to our Husband: “The earth is the Lord’s and all it contains” (Psalm 24:1).

Hosea 2:10,11 says that God vowed to put an end to Gomer’s ability even to marginally satisfy her needs through the flesh. It might even get so “bad” (from her perspective) that she would despair of life itself. This was what was happening to the lady who wrote the suicide note which began this book.

Can you discern with spiritual eyes how a well-meaning but unbroken, world-system-trained Christian counselor actually defeats God’s purpose if he “helps” such a “self-sufficient” person by making his fleshly techniques more productive? The client might get “better,” but he is working against the Holy Spirit’s goal of weakening the flesh. Hosea 2:12 states that Gomer’s supply which she attributed to her flesh would be destroyed. Then God said,

I will allure her, bring her into the wilderness, and speak kindly to her (Hosea 2:14).

Why bring her into a wilderness? Did you ever consider how well your flesh will supply your needs in the wilderness? Let’s say that you have a fancy address, you come from the “right” family, or your bumper sticker boasts you are a native-born citizen of the “right” state. How much good will these things do you in the wilderness? The only thing you can try to impress out there are the jack rabbits! You’re going to find one source and only one out there, and that’s Jesus. He is your only hope in the wilderness. Everything else is unproductive. He will take you there because He loves you, not because He’s mad at you.

God finally hemmed Gomer into the box canyon of unproductive flesh, “I will give her her vineyards [supply] from there,” He said (Hosea 2:15, emphasis added). He had to take her to a point of despair before He could trust her to know who her source was. This way she got the message loud and clear that her flesh could not meet her needs.

Then God further stated, “The valley of Achor [will be her] door of hope” (Hosea 2:15). The valley of Achor is where Achan, the man who stole the forbidden “needs supply” at Ai, was executed in Joshua 7. Israel’s (and Gomer’s) fleshly effort had to be dealt with before she could move forward into an intimate walk with the Lord as His beloved wife. Dear people of God, verse 15 says,

Then I will give her her vineyards from there, and the valley of Achor as a door of hope (emphasis added).

Achor means “trouble.” God has to bring a Christian to the end of the “trusted old ways” before she will turn from her “former lovers” to Him alone. This is often painful but always essential.

The Desert Song

Though God frequently has to accomplish this discipline through trauma, look at the results:

She will sing there as in the days of her youth [salvation], as in the day when she came up from the land of Egypt (Hosea 2:15b).

Whatever “song” is on the lips of the Christian who has yet to come to the end of the flesh’s resources is like the latest tune to hit the top forty. It comes with about a thirty-day warranty. The only permanent, lasting song that any Christian will experience on this planet—the only one with a lifetime guarantee—is the one she learns to sing in the valley of Achor, where she comes to the end of depending on her flesh. This may happen in different ways for different Christians. There will be different degrees of suffering for different folks. It’s all relative, and God is the one in control. He never causes it, but He allows it, and its purpose is love. He’s taking you to a deeper level of oneness. This is not something to fear. It is simply a matter of keeping your eyes of faith on Jesus. He is totally committed to your best welfare.

My Husband

“‘And it will come about in that day,’ declares the Lord, ‘that you will call Me “my Husband” and will no longer call Me “my Master”’” (Hosea 2:16, NASB margin, emphasis added). She has been His beloved wife all along, but she hasn’t recognized who she is. God has called her by her true name (beloved wife) ever since the relationship began, but she saw Him as a burdensome master. She had to experience the valley of Achor before she began to call Him “my Husband.” She never appropriated her identity until she got caught in the box canyon of Achor where her flesh stopped yielding its usual productive return.

Look at verses 19 and 20:

And I will betroth you to Me forever; yes, I will betroth you to Me in righteousness and in justice, in lovingkindness and in compassion, and I will betroth you to Me in faithfulness. Then you will know the Lord (emphasis added).

Christian, is your life humdrum? Does your husband not appreciate all the things you do for him? Do your kids take you for granted? Does your wife seem to expect more than you feel you can possibly deliver? Does it seem that no matter how hard you try, your boss has always got another “if only” chinning bar for you to pull on? Is your earthsuit wearing out, and the jogging you thought would surely help hasn’t overcome the force of gravity? Did the deal for your dream house fall through? Are you widowed? Are you facing retirement, horrified at the prospect of having no “purpose” left in life? Do you fear death? Does no one seem to understand you? Have your friends or even family turned away from you? Do your years seem to have been wasted as you conduct “instant replays” of your life?

Dear, unhappy bride of Christ. If you are under the load, you are in the valley of Achor. Stop trying to milk your needs supply out of this world by the flesh. That’s the wrong spouse. You are loved. You’re the beloved bride who has “no spot or wrinkle or any such thing; but…[is] holy and blameless” (Ephesians 5:27).

Turn from leaning on the “trustworthiness” of your talent, your attractive earthsuit, your spiritual gifts, your intelligence, your position, your popularity, your good job, your financial security, your good marriage, and your obedient kids as your primary means of generating and maintaining your inner peace and satisfaction in this life. That’s playing the whore! It’s fine that you have been blessed by your Husband (the Lord) with all the above, but don’t concentrate on that. Remember who you are, and concentrate on and praise your Husband.

You are the totally loved, chosen, called-out, holy, virgin (see 2 Corinthians 11:2), blameless, righteous bride of the Lord Jesus Christ. Imagine your infinite worth! Your Bridegroom has promised by His blood to supply all your needs (see Philippians 4:19). You will never be a worn-out, old wife, cast aside for some younger lover. You are loved, totally loved with a loyalty unprecedented, by the God of the universe. He has identified you this way ever since you gave yourself to Him at salvation when you repented of your old life of rebellious independence and agreed to the marriage terms.

You entered into a oneness relationship with your spiritual Husband, but you must agree with His view (the only true view) and walk with Him as His beloved if you would experience abundant life on this planet. The music and lyrics of this song are usually born in the valley of Achor. It often takes that to get us to turn loose of the old ways.

Questions for Further Study

1. What is one reason God will take a Christian to the wilderness of life?

2. Do you think it is possible for a Christian to really know Christ as life and source if there aren’t some wilderness troubles along the way? Explain your thinking on this question.

3. As you have finished reading this chapter, what practical steps can you take if you find yourself in the valley of Achor?

Answers in “Answers to Questions for Further Study”.

CHAPTER 12

God’s Ultimate Purpose for You

Oh, Bill, I’m so free! Free in Christ! Free at last! Oh, why couldn’t I see all this before? It’s so plain to me in Scripture, now that I know what to look for! It’s all so marvelous!”

The dear lady was beside herself with reveling in her newfound righteousness in Christ. She’d spent her whole Christian life striving to become something she had always been since salvation. For years she had fought a war that Jesus had already won for her. She’d discovered that her victory is to be appropriated by faith in His work, not earned by hers.

“But Bill,” she said, “if I’m already holy, blameless, accepted, righteous, and all those other wonderful adjectives I see in God’s Word, what’s the purpose in God’s leaving me here? Why doesn’t He just take me home?”

That’s a good question and the answer is glorious! Oh, the fantastic opportunity that lies before you between now and the time you go home! You and I have been offered the privilege of preparing ourselves for our future roles in the celestial order God has planned. Earth is very much like graduate school or an NFL training camp. We’re all winners in Christ already, but we have only one opportunity to train for our eternal leadership role, and it’s here on planet earth.

Why He Hasn’t “Beamed Us Up”

To explain why God doesn’t just “beam us up” as they do in Star Trek, we’ll have to digress a bit to get the big picture of God’s plan for you. We’ll begin with your physical birth and represent this event by placing the word birth above the base of the triangle in Figure 12.1.

When you were born, God closed a door behind you so you could never cross back over that threshold. Let’s face it, a person can never cease to exist. We’ll let the base of the triangle in Figure 12.1 represent the closed door. God has established this limit that we cannot cross. Job 14:5 says, “[Man’s] days are determined, the number of his months is with Thee, and his limits Thou hast set so that he cannot pass.” Our God is the keeper of the door, and when He closes a door, it’s closed.

God’s plan for you was to draw you to Himself (see 2 Peter 3:9). To accomplish this, He established limits around you to “crowd” you toward making a decision to submit to Christ. This is not an abrasive teaching, but a beautiful love story of our Lord’s wooing His bride to Himself. We’ll let the apex of the triangle in Figure 12.2 represent salvation, and the two sides the circumstances, or limits, that crowd you toward the decision to receive Jesus as Lord, Savior, and Life. (How many of us failed to get the message about Christ as Life? We simply claimed Him as Savior and Lord; and alas, some didn’t even consider Him as Lord of their ring. They just wanted to go to heaven when they died. They saw Jesus as a type of Celestial American Express Card: Don’t leave earth without Him.)

Perhaps you can recall an episode from your past where in the midst of your sin you worked yourself into such a pickle that you did a 180-degree turn, vowing to reform, motivated by the painful experience. That was one of those limits beyond which God wouldn’t let you go. Others went beyond, but you turned back toward a more middle-of-the-road position. You over-corrected and traveled too far, however, until God let you bump your nose on yet another of His limits. Your pathway as you bumped back and forth between His limits for you led you to a confrontation with Jesus Christ unto salvation. Some, however, shrink back from this decision and carom about inside the triangle till they die in their sins. What a tragic waste of God’s grace.

Let’s presume that you chose to repent and accept Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord. Once you did, God slammed another door behind you. I believe that just as a person cannot cease to have been born physically, so he cannot cease to have been born spiritually. Keeping him in this position is God’s business, and He is well able to do so (see Philippians 1:6). (See Figure 12.3.)

I will quickly confess that some folks who are truly born from above perform as though they are still in the bottom triangle. But when they do, our Father will discipline them by tightening up the circumstances around them until they begin to act more like they’ve been born anew (Hebrews 12:9).

God’s goal in all this is clearly revealed in Romans 8:29: “For whom He foreknew, He also predestined to become conformed to the image of His Son, that He might be the first-born among many brethren.” His plan is to conform us to the image of Christ. Can anything bring more excitement to your heart? He isn’t going to accomplish this after we die, with physical death being the agent of change, but here on earth with the Holy Spirit being the agent of change.

Notice that word, predestined. That means God is going to do it to you. You’ve been placed into the loving obstacle course; I call it the University of Earth in which the Lord is hard at work conforming you. What’s more, He says that He is going to finish what He started with you (Philippians 1:6).

God has two plans for accomplishing His goal. Plan A is for you to see truth in the Word and respond in faith and obedience. I find, however, that most of us Christians are mentally slow. We see a verse such as, “Pray without ceasing” (1Thessalonians 5:17) and respond with, “How can I do that? I can’t pray continually and still accomplish my work.” So God has to revert to Plan B, Romans 8:28. He has to let a little “all things” come into a person’s life. He tightens up the limits around a person to box him into a more dependent position. Gang, 2Corinthians 12:9 says, “The weaker you get, the more My power in you will stick out like a sore thumb” (loose paraphrase).

God hates independence. He wants you to be dependent on Him as Jesus was. So He’ll let something happen to jerk the rug out from under a person’s self-sufficiency, then show him the alternative of opting for Christ’s sufficiency in us. Through this trauma, the person will learn how to pray without ceasing and accomplish his work simultaneously. In fact, he’ll learn that this is the easier way to fly. He will have “entered into God’s rest” by trusting Christ to accomplish the work through him.

Jesus Christ was the most dependent person who ever lived. Many fail to see it. They see Him in His earthwalk as self-sufficient, when actually He was totally dependent on another. “The Father abiding in Me does His works,” Jesus said (John 14:10). Thus, since our Father has dedicated Himself to the task of conforming us to the image of Christ, the circumstances of this planet are designed to bring the Christian person to the end of his sufficiency. Just look at them as courses in the University of Earth which are designed for your best eternal good.

Stop fighting it, brother. Give up all your “rights”—all talents, all abilities, all gifts, all the things you’ve clung to to get your need met for self-acceptance. You’ll love the results! You will find “life” through allowing Him to express Himself through your talents, your abilities, your gifts, and your personality to a hurting world to do His will. That’s the way Jesus walked. He let the Father do it through Him.

Many don’t realize it, but Jesus did not raise Himself from the dead; the Father raised Him. The Word records more than forty verses which categorically teach that Jesus was raised by His Father as opposed to only three which speak metaphorically of Jesus’ raising Himself (e.g., “Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up” [John 2:19]). Jesus was committed to staying in that grave until the Father did it for Him. Check it out in the Word. Oh, that makes His voluntary death for you just that much more precious! Think about Him hanging on that cross, the Father having rejected Him because of your sins, and calling out, Father! Why have You forsaken Me? And yet, He stayed there, committed to dying and going to hades, trusting only in the Father’s integrity to raise Him up again!

Step by Step

Needless to say, maturity doesn’t occur in one giant leap, but through a process: “But we all…are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory” (2 Corinthians 3:18). Notice it’s “from glory to glory,” not “from garbage to glory.” You are already holy in Christ. Figure 12.3 depicts the evolution into the image of Christ for the believer. The escalating triangles represent the various growth stages Christians experience as they participate in the conforming process.

Once a person is born from above, his nature is already Christlike, but it’s infantile in maturity. He is like an oak sapling that can mature into a fully grown oak tree. He is not half oak and half briar bush. Just as an oak sapling does not get oakier as it matures, neither does a new creature in Christ get holier, more forgiven, more accepted, etc. By faith and obedience, as he begins to act consistently with his new nature, he will look more and more like Jesus.

Of course, a Christian can just as surely “walk after the flesh” and develop character that is completely contrary to his true nature. This will then be burned at the Judgment Seat of Christ, but the man himself will be saved, as we saw earlier. As this person ages, his character will evolve contrary to his godly nature. Such a person will be limited in his training for leadership in the future, heavenly realm, because his earthwalk was spent trusting in the arm of his flesh. He’ll be fitted into the “house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens” (2 Corinthians 5:1) as a sapling instead of as a mature tree.

The same will be true for the person with “good, socially accepted” flesh who misses the course on strength through weakness. Earth, not heaven, is the place for learning to walk in dependence. Such a person will automatically revert to dependency in heaven, but there will be no reward for it.

Those who develop Christian character here will occupy positions of leadership in all that our creative Father has planned in the future, eternal social order. Those who have been “faithful with a few things… will [be] put…in charge of many things” (Matthew 25:23). (For some exciting insight into our role in heaven, see Paul Billheimer’s Don’t Waste Your Sorrows, published by Christian Literature Crusade.)

Doors, Doors, Doors

I have no idea how many spiritual plateaus there are through which the Holy Spirit can lead the believer. But when the pilgrim chooses with his will to commit to the new step, God closes the door behind him. Slam. You cannot back out. You can act like you’re backing out, but if you really had your teeth gritted when you threw your will switch, He slammed that door behind you. It’s as serious as a marriage vow to Him. Later on, if you buy into sin’s temptations to back out, you leave God no alternative but to switch to Plan B. He’ll have to let a little “all things” come into your life.

Total Commitment

One door we must pass through if we are to go on with God is total commitment (Figure 12.4). I used to think that total commitment was performance-based. For example, I thought preachers were more totally committed than truck drivers. Some years later, however, I began to counsel a pastor or two who weren’t totally committed and some truck drivers who were.

Total commitment is coming to the point where you are willing to place nothing between you and the Lord. “Lord Jesus, I give You my wife,” I prayed. “You may do anything that seems good to You with Anabel. She is Your property, not mine, and owners have the right to do whatever they wish with their property.” I must do this with everything.

“So here they are, Lord, my wife, my kids, their health, myself, my health, my house, my bucks, my career, my physical appearance, my will, everything! I will place nothing between me and You. I commit it all to You.” And He slams the door behind you. You are now totally committed. It’s a one-time decision that you make with your will, with your teeth gritted. It then becomes His job to choreograph the circumstances of your life to make your decision experientially real to you (see Philippians 1:6; 2:13).

Remember the pastor I wrote about who lost the big church, his reputation, and his future high denominational office because he was caught in adultery? He wasn’t totally committed. You see, he still had Jesus, but Christ was not number one. Those other things were more important to him.

The Last Major Door

I believe the Lord has shown me what the last major door is. It’s claiming the cross (see Figure 12.5). When the Lord said, “Take up [your] cross daily, and follow Me” (Luke 9:23), He didn’t mean you must become a preacher. The cross is not an instrument of service; it’s an instrument of death. When you step across this threshold on your pilgrimage, you have got to hold a funeral. Your own! And I don’t exactly see Christians lining up to die. Many seem to want just one more trip to the pizza parlor.

Let me reiterate, you do not attempt to crucify yourself. Nor do you attempt to “die to self.” That is a misnomer. There is no such teaching in the Word. You do not die to anything; you simply agree with God’s Word that you already have. But this is not just giving intellectual assent to some concept. This is as serious as getting married. You cannot enter into it lightly. You’ve got to grit your teeth and say, “I mean it, Lord.” For many, a house has to fall on them before they’ll give in. For others, it’s a quiet commitment. When you do, He will slam the door behind you. You will have entered into claiming your true identity in Christ.

Accompanying every new commitment by the believer is a time of testing. This time is not so God can determine how I am going to respond to my new commitment. He already knows. Rather, the testing time is for me to know if I am going to stay hitched. The only way I can really know that is when it gets hot in the kitchen.

Testing is purposeful. So when it happens, just praise Him and get with the program. If you kick at it, you flunk the course and He reenrolls you in the fall term. It’s easy to praise the Lord when everything’s cool, but you can “offer up a sacrifice of praise” (Hebrews 13:15) only when it’s not. A sacrifice costs something. It hurts to give it. Praising the Lord when you feel bad is not being a phony either; it’s being obedient. Your heart can be in it even when your emotions are not.

I have depicted these testing times from the cross toward your becoming conformed to the image of Christ as mini-crosses (see Figure 12.6). These are daily choices when you will be faced with choosing either Channel #1 or Channel #2. You can either buy into the deception and blow it, or you can say, “I know where that’s coming from! I’m dead to you! Buzz off!” Then you appropriate truth.

A Cross of Closet Doors

Anabel and I used to live in a house that had sliding closet doors. She liked those doors kept shut; I liked mine open. Anabel frequently made a poignant plea for me to shut my doors when I finished dressing. Sometimes I would, sometimes I wouldn’t. I hadn’t the faintest notion that there was any spiritual dimension to our door preferences.

I will never forget one particular Saturday morning in that house. I was getting a jacket out of my closet when something “said” to me, “The door.” I thought “Aw!” and walked out of the room and down the hall. Something again “said” to me, “The door.” Uh, oh. I figured that must be the Holy Spirit. Let’s face it, it wasn’t the power of sin.

So I stopped. Notice: I stopped. Nothing stopped me. I’m not a robot. I chose to stop and believe that the Lord was speaking to me, that He wanted to use me to close the doors for Anabel. It had never occurred to Delbert Dumb here that all those years Anabel had been saying, “Honey, please love me the way Christ loves His wife by closing the closet doors for me so the room will look pretty.” It actually says I’m supposed to do that right there in Ephesians 5:25: “Husbands, close the closet doors for your wives, just as Jesus also loved His wife.” But I never knew that! I didn’t know that was a way to love Anabel. I’m convinced I am mentally retarded when it comes to knowing how to love Anabel. But praise His wonderful name, He is teaching me how to love her, how to make restitution for all those years of hell that I dished out to her.

As I stopped in the hallway, however, sin said to me, “That’s my closet. If I want to leave the doors open, that’s my business. No woman is going to control me.” But there was that gentle knowing that Jesus desires to love Anabel through me. I was at a mini-cross. I was being given the opportunity to act “dead to sin and alive to God,” love Anabel, and pile up points for the Judgment Seat of Christ. Conversely, I could act dead to God and alive to sin, piling up more wood, hay, and stubble for the big wiener roast in the sky.

So I said, “Okay, Jesus, I’m going to let You close the doors for Anabel.” And I set one foot in front of the other back into the bedroom and slid the doors shut, believing it was Him doing it through me.

Now, I confess that I had closed closet doors on many occasions prior to this incident, but then my attitude was more like, “Dumb doors! Stupid wife! Okay, I’ll close the stupid doors if that’s what it takes to keep the peace!” I was living under law, the law of I should, I have to, I must, I ought to, it’s my duty.

There have also been those occasions when I have closed the closet doors this way: “Maybe if I do something nice for her today, she’ll do something nice for me tonight.” That’s the flesh for certain. It’s nothing but plying her with closet-door-closing. Lost guys do the same thing with their wives.

This time, however, I claimed the truth of who I am—that I am delighted to offer myself to Christ to allow Him to express love to Anabel through me. There was no animosity, no frustration, no hidden agenda for bedtime. I was resting and at peace within.

Some guy says, “I sure wish he’d get past these Mickey Mouse illustrations and get on to explaining how to experience the victorious Christian life.” Hey, that is the victorious Christian life. You would not believe how many hundreds of hours of my marriage I have wasted over such things as closet doors, but now I’m free. Free to obey the law of love. Free to close doors. You can’t believe how good it feels! And remember Jesus’ statement that, those who are faithful in little things will be entrusted with much (see Appendix J).

Brokenness, the Key to Leadership

The number of broken people in the Bible who learned to walk in dependency upon God is so obvious. Only a broken person is fit for leadership in the Kingdom of God. You can bank on it. Show me an unbroken Christian, and I’ll show you a person who is leaning on the arm of his own flesh to accomplish the task. Show me an unbroken Christian, and I’ll show you a person who is milking his need for acceptance and self-acceptance out of his work. He needs the work. Take it away from him and he’ll get depressed. You see, Jesus wasn’t the source from whom he was drawing his esteem; it was the work.

Paul’s work was removed from him the last few years of his life. His goal for evangelizing Spain was gone. He was a hard charger, but he didn’t get depressed over the lost goal. He wrote his most encouraging letters from prison, a place of “nonachievement.” He was able to do it because he wasn’t milking his need out of the achieving of tangible goals. His major goal was “that I may know Him, and the power of His resurrection” (Philippians 3:10). He drew even closer to his goal while experiencing the inactivity of prison life. Again, I challenge you, Christian. What is the source of your acceptance of yourself? How are you getting your needs met? What or who is the source of your purpose in life? How much can the Lord remove from you and you’ll continue to praise Him and rest in the acceptance that’s yours in Christ?

Why are you here? Some say it’s to “work for God.” Consider what my friend Tom Grady says, “Is that the reason you and your spouse had kids? So they could shoulder part of the work around the house? I imagine you planned for children so you could experience the joy of loving them and receiving love from them. To delight in them and in their victories, and to comfort them in their defeats. In short, to develop an intimate relationship with them.”

The notion that God recreated you in Christ to get more work out of you is such a faulty view of our Father. God wants you to adopt Paul’s life verse: “that I may know Him” (Philippians 3:10). As you pursue that goal, spiritual fruit will begin to drop off all about you to the glory of Christ. Men asked, “What shall we do, that we may work the works of God?” Jesus answered, “This is the work of God, that you believe in Him whom He has sent” (John 6:28,29).

You Are a Topic of Conversation

The devil accuses Christians before the Father day and night (see Revelation 12:10). If you are born from above, you are the topic of many of those discussions.

Allow me to take the liberty, through Job’s, Peter’s, and other biblical characters’ experiences, to speculate on how such a conversation could go. The Lord might say, “Have you considered My servant, (your name)? I’m so proud of that child. If I only had more like (your name), you would see a different church on planet earth!”

Whereupon the accuser might respond, “Oh, yes? Let me tell you what I know about (your name)! The only reason he continues to praise You is that it pays off. So long as he ‘pays his dues,’ You keep his life running smoothly. You let me touch that darling spot, that thing he feels he couldn’t live without, that thing that You have given him, that came from Your hand. Let me attack it, and I’ll prove to You what (your name) is made of! He’ll reject You!”

This is the timing the Father has planned. It is time to move you a step “from glory to glory.” The one with the nail-scarred hand inserts the key into the lock to the protective hedge and says, “You may do thus and so, but you may not do this and that.” He gives the Evil One permission to attack the flesh. God allows him to undermine the “righteousness” (acceptance) in which you formerly trusted so that you can learn to opt for the righteousness from above based on faith in Jesus Christ.

Please do not recoil from this teaching. Don’t sell out to today’s popular “prosperity gospel.” That is such error. It falls so far short of the true riches that God has for all who are in Christ. Don’t kick against your loving Father’s refining process. He is allowing your circumstances to chip away all your dependence on your own flesh and instead opt for your identity in Christ. You are so beautiful as the new person you truly are in Christ! See it! Get the vision of it from God’s Word to you. Believe it and appropriate it as your own. As my friend Jack Taylor says, “Don’t be afraid. When you see who you actually are down deep in your heart as a new creation in Christ—you will like what you see!” And as you allow Christ to express His life through you, you will attain a self-esteem that will be unsinkable.

Godspeed, dear friend. I don’t know you. I have never seen you, but I’m proud with a godly joy that you are my relative in Christ. I’m praying for you as you read this book. I pray you will experience great victory in this life to the glory of our lovely Jesus. I want our eyes to meet at the Judgment Seat of Christ as we both hear our Lord say, “Well done.” There will be tears of joy in my eyes for you as I see Christ honor you as they do the young people who stand erect on the champions’ podium at the Olympics. I’ll be so proud of you if you have appropriated Him as your life to glorify Him. “If one member is honored, all the members rejoice with it” (1 Corinthians 12:26). I’m pulling for you! Keep pressing on! By His grace You can do it. God is faithful. “And stand [you] will, for the Lord is able to make [you] stand” (Romans 14:4b, emphasis added).

To Him who is able to do exceeding abundantly beyond all that we ask or think, according to the power that works within us, to Him be the glory (Ephesians 3:20,21, emphasis added).

Look at the “Death/Life Certificate”. My prayer is that you will sign it as an indication of the intent of your heart. God bless you.

Death/Life Certificate

My dear Jesus,

I confess that I have occupied a throne that is rightfully Yours. I drew a circle around myself and declared myself “Lord of the Ring.” I have tried to control the variables in my life, pursuing the goal of getting my needs met.

I now see that when You died, I died, my old sin nature who refused to let You be Lord of my Ring. When you were raised, You enabled a brand-new me to be born, a new me who loves You and is holy, righteous, and blameless in You. I now submit myself totally to You to express Your life through me to do Your will on earth. I have no rights. I own nothing. Even I have been bought with Your blood and body, and I have been set aside for Your purpose and delight.

I mean this, Jesus. I claim by faith that the old me is extinct and that as the new me, the real me, I have everything I need in You to face life. I know You will permit this commitment to be tested, but I trust You in that as well. I have no hidden agenda or deals up my sleeve. I know You have my best interests at heart. You are a fantastic Savior, and I trust You.

I love you,

Name

Date

Questions for Further Study

1. Explain how God’s love can allow tough circumstances to come into the walk of one of His children.

2. Spend a few minutes reflecting on your struggles and hardships. How are they being used by God to conform you to the image of Christ?

3. Has there been a point of total commitment in your life where God shut the door behind you?

4. Has there been a point where you appropriated the cross, your death, burial, and resurrection in Christ, and God slammed a door behind you? If so, let me encourage you to recount these experiences in your mind, then write down a brief summary as a personal reminder. If you haven’t made these imperative decisions, please do so right now.

Answers in “Answers to Questions for Further Study”.

Summary

It would be an excellent and beneficial summary to return to the questions at the end of each chapter, reviewing them and your answers. The truths in this book will only become yours through study, prayer, and repetition as you trust the Lord to teach you.

To taste of the grace of God is one thing; to be established in it and manifest it in character, habit, and regular life, is another.

—MILES STANFORD

Appendixes

Answers to Questions for Further Study

Flesh Inventory

One Last Note…

Bibliography

Appendix A

(See Chapter 4) Jesus said, “Greater works than these shall he do” (John 14:12). Christ is the Vine, we are the branches. There is no qualitative difference in the life of the vine and the life of the branch. It is not “vine life” and “branch life,” but the life. It’s not the duty of the branch to try its hardest to produce fruit. Branches simply abide in the vine, and the fruit-bearing takes place as a normal process. Which can produce the greater works: a vine alone with one branch or that same vine with millions of branches abiding in the vine? You see, it’s not greater quality Christ made reference to, but greater quantity.

Appendix B

(See Chapter 5)

God exempts small children from being responsible for their condition as Adam’s heirs. He considers them innocent. Jesus makes their condition very clear in Matthew 18:10: “I say to you, that their [small children’s] angels in heaven continually behold the face of My Father who is in heaven.” Do you know of any biblical teaching that indicates lost people have a personal angel? No, children belong to God until such time as they become responsible for their condition; then they become lost.

Jesus goes on to say that they’ll “fall into sin,” and He warns those who lead them into sin that they are accountable for misleading them. Then He tells the parable of the lost sheep. This is a portrayal of the Holy Spirit’s searching for someone who is lost. Tell me, what is the definition of “lost”? It means “I used to own it, but I lost it.”

Do you see it? All little children belong to God initially, then subsequently through the maturation process get lost, then they have the opportunity to get saved as a choice of their will by accepting Jesus’ atonement.

Appendix C

(See Chapter 5)

Many of you reading this book have already accepted Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord. If you haven’t, it is my sincere prayer that you will very soon. For those of you who have, as you journeyed along on your Main Street, one day you came to the building marked “S” (for salvation) and accepted Christ as your Savior. As previously stated, this didn’t surprise God, since He saw your whole street before the world began. True, you made the choice with your will to accept Christ, but it didn’t surprise God when you did it. He’s omniscient and not limited to the time dimension like you. He knows the future.

This in no way means that certain lost people have no option to get saved. That’s confusing the issue by attempting to mix the helicopter view with the Main Street view. You can’t consider time and non-time simultaneously. It seems to me we must reflect on but one of these views at a time in our human state or we’ll end up with fatalism, believing that we have no choice; that if your number is not on God’s list it’s tough luck for you. I don’t see that in the Word. God doesn’t manipulate us against our will. To do so would make us robots and give Him no pleasure.

Appendix D

(See Chapter 6) The Bible teaches that the believer battles against an inner power called sin: “But I see a different law in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind, and making me a prisoner of the law of sin which is in my members” (Romans 7:23). Notice this power is not in the believer’s mind where his thoughts are generated, but in his body. The verse says your mind wars against this power.

This power called sin entered the world at the fall (Romans 5:12). You inherited it through your dad, originally from Adam, not Eve. (You’ll notice that Jesus had no earthly dad because if He had, sin would have indwelt Him. He is the only person in Scripture spoken of as “seed of woman.”) Every war must have at least two opponents. In your inner battle, the power of sin sides with Satan. Since Romans 7:23 says your mind fights against this power, whose side does your mind have to support? God’s, else there would be no inner war. Your mind fights the power of sin because you have the law of God written on your mind (see Hebrews 10:16). God says, “I will put My Spirit within you and cause you to walk in My statutes, and you will be careful to observe My ordinances” (Ezekiel 36:27, emphasis added). That describes you, brother and sister. You have a deep inner longing to obey God. That’s God’s law which is written on your heart.

However, perhaps you have believed that your war within is a civil war. If so, you interpret verses which speak of your inner struggle as an “evil you” warring against a “good you.” Small wonder you lose so many battles. You fire your weapons at the wrong enemy.

Years ago, God showed me that the power of sin uses two techniques to “war against” your mind. One: It presents thoughts to your mind using first person singular pronouns (I, me, my, myself, etc.). Second: It uses your old flesh patterns as a channel through which to present thoughts to your mind. Is this biblical? Let’s check it out.

A Ph.D. from a well-known evangelical seminary once said to me, “Bill, you are personifying sin by stating that the believer has a foreign power in his body which gives thoughts to him, seeking to influence him to do evil. To my knowledge, this has never been taught by the church.” I tactfully responded that Paul taught it to the church, but because many ceased to teach it we now see defeated, impotent believers—a far cry from the first-century church.

W. E. Vine’s Expository Dictionary of New Testament Words explains that the Greek word hamartia (which translates to the English “sin”) is a noun, while hamartano (also translated “sin”) is a verb. In Romans 6:14 where Paul writes, “Sin shall not be master over you,” sin is a noun; while in verse 15, “Shall we sin…?” it is a verb. In Romans chapters 5–8 the word sin appears 41 times, once as a verb, forty times as a noun! Why the emphasis? Because if you interpret the word sin in Romans 5–8 as a verb, you will never understand these chapters, and they are vital to walking in victory. We have been conditioned to perceive the word sin as an action word. Thus, when we read it in the Bible we think, Yep, that’s when I stole the hubcaps.

In Romans 5:21; 6:12,14,17; 7:11,14,17,20,23,25; 8:2; 1 Corinthians 15:56; Hebrews 3:13; 11:25; 12:4; James 1:15b, Vine states of the noun hamartia, “This GOVERNING principle is PERSONIFIED” (represented as a person). It governs (controls) and it has a persona (the characteristics of a person). So what? Here’s what. The power of sin presents thoughts to your godly mind for consideration by making them seem like they’re your own thoughts! Misinterpreting sin as a verb is kind of like being a student who never learns his locker combination. Instead of growing to maturity, you’ll stand outside the classroom spinning the dial.

As you experience the thoughts which sin (the persona) feeds up to your mind with first-person pronouns (I, me, my), you’d swear on a stack of Bibles that the old man has been resurrected. You’ll think a monologue is going on in your mind (a conversation with yourself), when in fact it is a dialogue (a conversation with sin) (see Romans 7:17,20). This explains why many Christians teach that the old man is still alive. They cite isolated verses attempting to explain their experience. This is called “proof texting” and is not legitimate biblical interpretation. No one can accurately interpret chapters 5–8 of Romans, verse by verse, and prove the old man lives. It states categorically that he died in Romans 6:2,4, 5,6,7,8,11,13, et al. Since only Christ has resurrection power, the old man has not been resurrected. We must, therefore, search the Word to see what God identifies as our opponent in our inner battle. Romans 5–8 says it is a power called sin (the noun).

Second Corinthians 10:5 says, “We are [to take] every thought captive to the obedience of Christ” (emphasis added). There are three sources for the thoughts you experience: your mind, the Holy Spirit, and the power of sin. The thoughts from the Holy Spirit and your mind are godly (1 Corinthians 2:16b). Your mind no longer generates sinful thoughts (1John 3:9; 5:18); it receives sinful thoughts from the power of sin and your will puts them into action. To prevent this, you must “take [sin’s] thoughts captive to the obedience of Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:5) by acting like you are dead to them but “alive to God” (Romans 6:11). By employing this battle tactic, “sin [the persona] shall not be master over you” (Romans 6:14).

Sin is a persona. It has intelligence. It obeys its master, Satan. It can put thoughts into your mind. It seeks to control you. But, by Christ’s life through you, you do not have to give in to sin’s urgings: “For sin [the persona] shall not be master over you” (Romans 6:14); “He who has died is freed from sin [the persona]” (Romans 6:7, emphasis added); “So consider yourselves to be dead to sin [the persona], but alive to God” (Romans 6:11). It is only in following the imperative of these verses that you can realize consistent victory over sinning (the verb).

Appendix E

(See Chapter 7) There is a good deal of confusion about what constitutes “Christian” counseling. One woman wrote, “I heard you refer to obsessive/compulsive disorders on your radio program. That’s a problem I have. I feel that I must spin around precisely three times and flip the light switch once before leaving the house, especially when I’m nervous about something. Do you think you can help me? Do I need counseling?”

Would you send her to a “professional”? That’s what I would have felt like doing, even after I’d completed my doctoral studies in counseling. I knew what the textbooks said, the techniques and procedures to use, but I also knew that the success rate for treating folks who were struggling with this behavior was far from encouraging. I would have felt helpless, hopeless, inadequate.

Her problem is not uncommon. Many of you know someone who is troubled by obsessive/compulsive behavior, though it may not be incapacitating. It could be as harmless as a baseball player who feels that he must step on second base, heading for his position. Should he fail to do so, it would interfere with his concentration. He would feel insecure, as though something were missing, and worrisome thoughts would plague him. Next inning, he’d make sure to step on that base.

So what would you do with the woman who wrote us the letter? Would you see her problem as light years beyond the abilities of a pastor or plain-vanilla layman in the church?

Okay, let’s say we decide to refer her to a therapist who is a believer. Since he knows Jesus, is even perhaps on the church staff, the therapy will be Christian…or will it? Tell me, does a Christian mechanic use Christian oil and grease? When we use the word Christian as an adjective, we imply that the skills and techniques—even the results—of the practitioner are Christian. This is a mistake. Ever used a “Christian mechanic” who left a lot to be desired as a craftsman? It’s better to describe him as a “mechanic who is a Christian.”

I would have no problem using the services of an unsaved, skilled, orthopedic surgeon to set my fractured hip. When I submit myself to his knife, I’m more interested in his surgical skill than his theology. But submitting yourself to a counselor who uses therapy developed by the minds of lost mentors is dramatically different. “Christian” counseling must counsel the soul with techniques generated by the Spirit of God; counseling which is not Christian counsels the soul with techniques generated by the spirit of this world. Attaching Scripture to such techniques does not make them “Christian” because the goals of these two therapies are diametrically opposed. Holy Spirit-led therapy seeks to lead the soul to abandon all hope in personal strength unto total reliance upon Christ’s strength, while secular therapy seeks to lead the soul to greater autonomy. (Alas, even with “God’s help”!) I don’t question the sincerity or integrity of any counselor who is a committed Christian, assuming his desire is to help people overcome their problems in a Christ-honoring manner. But my concern is this: Does this counselor use Christian counseling or man’s best wisdom? Let’s face it. While both saved and lost plumbers may do an adequate job using identical wrenches, there is a world of difference between counseling with a biblically-based “tool” and with the best the world can offer. While biblical counseling seeks to lovingly cut the believer’s fleshly water supply off and lead him to tap into the “rivers of living water” (the Holy Spirit) within, the world’s therapy seeks to prime the flesh’s pump to get it “flowing” again.

Notice that I referred to counseling the soul. You’ll recall that the word soul and the word psychology come from the same root, meaning personality. World system counseling uses techniques developed by unregenerate minds to “treat” man’s soul. The Christian who takes his soul to such a therapist for service is like the man who takes his car to the florist to be overhauled. Psychotherapy is not God’s plan for ministering to the soul, especially the Christian’s soul, regardless of whether the practitioner is saved or lost. To reiterate: I do not question the Christian counselor’s motive; I question his method.

I’ve taken my stand, now let me back it up by discussing how a biblical counselor can lead our hurting sister into God’s “rest” (Hebrews 4:1). The world seeks self-reliance, but God hates it. This is the sin Adam and Eve committed: They were the first ones to hum the tune “I Did It My Way.” That’s what got our friend into the mess she’s in. The instant she was born she began to hum that tune, to live to get her needs satisfied her way. She drew a circle around herself and set up her own private little kingdom, and she declared herself, “Lord of the Ring.” Her goal: to be in control. Her attitude: “This is my life, and I have my rights.”

We’re no different. All of us entered the world striving to develop skills in ruling our kingdom. Our goal was control, our attitude “my way.” If screaming and kicking got good results, we used that technique to control others. If we were uncomfortable or simply bored, we screamed until they made us content. We tried to control everything in every way: when we went to bed, when we got up, when we ate, when we played, how to keep from taking a bath, how to eat out of the dog’s dish without Mom seeing, ad infinitum. We stuffed the ballot box, elected ourselves god, and sat down in the King’s chair. And most folks are still at it. Jack Taylor says, “If you want to get along with God, stay out of His chair.”

Count on it: God opposes every independent work of man. He yearns to be intimately involved! Bizarre as it may seem, our friend is manifesting habitual behavior that makes her feel as though she were in control, that her circle is in order. She’s like the ball player who feels he has to step on second base, only her behavior has become embarrassing, even incapacitating. On a scale of one to ten, her emotions are stuck on a 9.5! Her feelings are dictating her behavior, and though she can learn from world-system therapy how she developed this behavior pattern, the obsessive thoughts will persist and her stuck feeler will continue to demand that she “keep on dancin’.”

Biblical counseling is simply a matter of discipleship. She must sell out, give up trying to be in control, and “walk in [the] newness of life” which is hers in Christ Jesus (Romans 6:4, emphasis added); she must learn to experience her new identity, that she is a “new creature” in Christ (2 Corinthians 5:17). And who is best equipped to help her discover this? Who is competent to counsel her? The “professional” who seeks to help her “stand on her own two feet”? No. This dear, hurting woman needs to discover the marvelous truth that Paul discovered: “When I am weak, then I am strong” (2 Corinthians 12:10, emphasis added). God’s strength through her weakness can be hers by appropriating the “life [that is] hidden with Christ in God” (Colossians 3:3). A “discipler” with no world-system training, but who experiences and is able to disciple others into experiencing God’s rest, is the therapist who can lead her, by God’s grace, into this victory.

It grieves me that many young men and women, with a heart and a calling to serve the Lord in Christian counseling, are being trained by well-meaning mentors in Christian institutions to use world-system counseling techniques. While the Holy Spirit strives to conform believers to the image of Christ through the “fellowship of His sufferings,” to the abandoning of all self-reliance for living life, these folks are learning techniques to strengthen the hurting believer’s flesh.

If you, or someone you know, sense God’s call to counseling, our ministry and certain others can equip you to lead counselees into appropriating the biblical truths taught in this book. We also have trained counselors who are called by God to help you understand how to appropriate your true identity in Christ. For more information, please contact our office: Lifetime Ministries, 131 Village Pkwy. NE Bldg. 4, Marietta, GA 30067; 888-395-LIFE. www.lifetime.org

Appendix F

(See Chapter 9)

First Corinthians 12:9 states that some are given the spiritual gift of faith. These folks have been singled out by the Lord and given this spiritual gift for building up the body of Christ, not for “believing God for a Jaguar.” The rest of us Christians have simply been given what the Bible calls “a measure of faith” (Romans 12:3). It is my conviction that some Christian teachers do not comprehend that they’ve been given the gift of faith. Thus, mistakenly assuming they have ordinary faith like every other Christian, they build a ministry around exhorting believers to get more faith to acquire Rolex watches and guaranteed health.

They mean well. I don’t intend to fault their motives, just their message. Many times, I have had the experience of counseling those whose lives were shipwrecked from striving to generate more faith as a result of listening to this teaching. You don’t need to beg for more faith. You have all the faith you need to walk in the fullness of the Spirit.

Appendix G

(See Chapter 9) Do you recall when King David sinned by numbering Israel in 1 Chronicles 21? Verse one says, “Satan stood up against Israel and moved David to number Israel.” How did Satan do that? Did he say, “Well, David, it looks like a good, clear day for counting heads. Why not go ahead and do it?” Oh, no, it couldn’t have been done so overtly to this man who had a heart to do God’s will. He had to deceive him into doing it.

It’s my conviction that Satan gave David the idea through his brain with first-person-singular pronouns and an Israeli accent. David swallowed the idea because he had man-o-war flesh, and that sort of flesh always feels more comfortable when he knows what his “strength” is. God was his strength, but he was deceived into placing his faith in the wrong object—numbers. That’s why God told him not to take a census.

Appendix H

(See Chapter 9)

A Christian whom I greatly respect commented concerning the use of the illustration, “This example of cooking eggs seems so trivial. How about an example of struggling with some habitual sin? Your example may produce a lot of guilt such as, ‘You mean every little detail of my life is a spiritual test? Good grief! Don’t I ever get to relax?’”

Dear people, independent living is what sin is all about. An independent lifestyle is trusting in the arm of the flesh. Jesus never struck off on His own as if He needed a breather from intimacy with the Father. We, too, were created for intimate union and are being conformed to His image, lovingly drawn into the net of living “in vital union with Him” (Colossians 2:6b TLB).

The Christian who feels he needs daily spiritual coffee breaks is experiencing religion, not relationship. Religion is a chore; relationship is a wellspring of living water within.

Appendix I

(See Chapter 9)

There is one thing all believers can do equally well as we begin each day. That is to offer all that we are to Christ to express His life through us, to use us to do His will. Our ability to do this is not related to how many spiritual gifts we have or our talent, IQ, appearance, wealth, charisma, wisdom, or circumstances. True, we’re stewards of all these, but we begin each day having an equal opportunity with all believers, including those with the highest and the lowest exposure in the church.

The believer who suffers great trial due to political persecution, marital stress, and so on finds that God simply makes greater grace available to him to allow Christ to handle it through him.

Believing you have no worthwhile opportunity because you have a low profile when compared to world-renowned Christians is a lie. You can perhaps gain more rewards than the world’s highest-profile Christian leader. The ground is level at the beginning of each day.

The housewife who yields herself to Christ to develop a happy home, husband, and children will receive the “Well done” not because the results are perfect, but because the method was perfect. The work will be identical to the Foundation: Christ’s life as she collaborated with Him.

Appendix J

(See Chapter 12)

God is God, and He runs the universe, which in one sense is simply a big laboratory. He is carefully controlling all the variables here, and they’re designed to bring people to salvation and conform them to Christ’s image. Even the devil has a role in this process. It was no shock to God when Lucifer rebelled. He didn’t say, “Oh, My soul! How did that happen.” When God finishes using Satan as a part of the whole refining process for Christians, He’ll end his activity in a split second.

Look at Job 1. The Lord and Satan were having one of their daily conversations when God brought up the subject of Job. If He’d never mentioned Job’s situation, the book of Job would never have occurred. God did not cause Job’s misery, as He is not the instigator of evil. But He surely gave His permission for it to happen, and its purpose was to conform Job to the image of Christ.

The Father began by saying, “Have you considered My servant Job?” (paraphrasing). “What a fine man he is! I wish I had a whole world full of people like him! He loves Me and submits to My authority over him.”

Whereupon Satan responded (Just as God knew he would), “Well, the only reason Job responds to Your authority over him is that it pays off for him. You’ve got a hedge [protective angels] built around him so nothing bad can happen to him. But You let it stop paying dividends and watch how fast he stops praising and submitting. Job has You on a performance-based acceptance; so long as You keep performing the way he wants, he’ll ‘pay You off’ with praise. He is in control of You, not vice versa. You give me permission to wipe out what You’ve done for him and watch how fast he stops praising You.”

God said, “Okay, you can do thus and so to him, but you can’t do this and that.” Note that God still maintained control. He simply moved the limits Satan could not transgress. He didn’t let Satan touch Job.

God was about to do something beautiful in Job. He was bringing Job to the end of himself—of his rights, of self-justification, of milking his acceptance out of the community, and of self-esteem based on his ability. It would be a painful experience for Job, but when you get to talk to him about it one day, he will assure you that he wouldn’t take anything for having gone through it.

Once given the opportunity, Satan utterly wiped out Job’s family and possessions. (Note that he could have killed his wife, too, as she was not included in God’s “exclusions,” but he didn’t because he desired to use her later on. He knew he could control her when the time was ripe.)

Chapter 1 ends by stating that Job praised the Lord through it all. He came through like gangbusters. Even though praising the Lord was not “paying dividends” as before, he continued to submit.

You’d think the Lord would have rested His case, but in the second chapter He did it again. “Well, what do you think of Job now?” He might have said. “There’s no one like him on the earth, a blameless and upright man who reveres Me and turns away from evil. And he still holds fast his integrity, although you incited Me against him, to ruin him without cause.”

The devil replied, “Yes, but You didn’t let me touch his body. Put Your hand out and touch his bone and his flesh, and I’ll bet he’s soon cursing You.” Note that in all this time, Satan never said, “I’ll do thus and so,” because he is helpless to act outside of God’s authority. He knows that, which is saying a lot more for him than one can say about some Christians. Again God gave him permission to carry out the dirty work, but He established more limits beyond which Satan could not transgress (he was told he couldn’t kill Job). God’s goal is to attack the flesh, the old ways to which the Christian clings. The believer must be brought to the point of releasing those things, no matter how darling they may be to him. So, for forty more chapters, Satan attacked Job’s flesh in which he trusted.

Beware of falling into the trap of heeding the Evil One’s accusations against God when it looks as though He is allowing circumstances that aren’t for your best interests. Never forget that the hand holding the key to the hedge has a great scar in its palm, put there for you. He has proved His commitment to you. I may not fully understand every trial in my life, but one thing I know: My Father is using this to conform me to the image of Jesus. I cannot only live with that, but I can even find rest in it.

Job lost everything, including the respect of the community, his friends, and his wife. For forty chapters he kept maintaining that it was a bum rap, ultimately enticing God to debate him. He felt he deserved better treatment than he was getting. If he were God, he would never treat such a good person so poorly. He epitomized the epitaph on an old tombstone:

Herein lies Martin Elginbrod.

Have mercy on my soul, oh God,

As I would do if I were God,

And you were Martin Elginbrod.

Finally, Job came to his senses when God straightened out his perspective in chapters 38–41. He saw that he had been trying to justify himself before God due to his yeoman performance, and he said in 42:6: “I retract, and I repent in dust and ashes.”

When Job acknowledged the sinfulness of his self-justification and turned from it, God said, “Enough!” The goal was accomplished. The flesh’s hold on Job was broken. Satan was rebuked (the hedge was repaired), Job was comforted, and his possessions were restored to him double. He was even given ten more children to go with the ten he already had in heaven! Job had attained a point of brokenness, never to be the same again.

Peter’s experience is another example of this breaking process. He was a “hoss,” as we’d call him in Oklahoma. All the guys admired his courage. He was the kid in the fourth grade who was a head taller than the rest of us, remember? He carried the bat outside every recess and took “first bats.” Sometimes he’d take four strikes, and we were powerless to stop him.

Through all this success at getting his needs met, Peter developed great confidence in his strength. Part of his personal code by which he maintained self-esteem was never to chicken out in a tough spot. Not only could he get his own chestnuts out of any fire, but often those of others as well. He felt he couldn’t always trust others, but he could always count on himself. He would never let himself down. He would die first!

“Lord, You can count on me! I’ll never let you down,” Peter said. “They might try to take You, but it’ll be over my dead body!” His motto was, “Better dead than Rhode Island Red!”

“Peter, you’re going to deny you even know Me before daylight,” Jesus answered. “You’re going to turn state’s witness to save your hide.” And here comes a powerful revelation: “Satan has obtained by asking permission to sift you [plural] like wheat; but I have prayed for you [singular], that your [singular] faith may not fail; and you, when once you have turned again, strengthen your brothers” (Luke 22:31,32, emphasis added; see nasb margin).

This statement was the outgrowth of another of those daily conversations God has with the devil in which He discusses His children and says how proud He is of them. His purpose is to instigate Satan into accusing them. The devil then accuses the believer in his most vulnerable fleshly pattern that correlates with the situation, hoping to prove God wrong. God grants the permission, but He limits Satan to attack only the flesh from which He wishes to free the Christian.

I used to put Peter down as a blowhard. But one day I was reading John’s account of Jesus’ arrest. The text said that Judas “received the Roman cohort” (John 18:3). Not knowing what a cohort was (I didn’t even know what a “hort” was), I looked it up. Judas brought six hundred soldiers with him to arrest Jesus! I had always thought it was just a few old men in sheets and a couple of soldiers. The Sunday school quarterly even had a picture of them.

Here they came through the bushes with swords, torches, and armor. I don’t know about you, but I’d have counted those odds and headed south! Not Peter. He did exactly what he bragged he would do. He pulled his sword, ignored the odds, and waded in, one against six hundred. That dear brother committed suicide for Jesus Christ!

Jesus, however, knowing the plan, told Peter to sheath his sword, then picked up the ear Peter had cut off and put it back on the slave’s head. The soldiers led Jesus away, with Peter “following from afar.” He was a very confused follower. He was about to get enlightened.

The scene switches to the patio of the high priest. The Matthew 26:69-75 account says that Peter’s denial statements were made when he was confronted by women and by unarmed bystanders. Could this be the same man who threw his body at the Roman army? That doesn’t make sense. Oh, but it makes glorious sense when we understand what God was up to in Peter’s life. He had set out to free Peter from his personal strength.

God and Satan had their daily visit (see Revelation 12:10). I will take the liberty of generalizing from the Job account—that the Father had been telling Satan the disciples were a pretty neat group. “Just look at how well they’re coming along,” He may have said. “I’m so proud of them. See how loyal they are to Me?”

Whereupon the accuser may have said, “Why wouldn’t they serve You? You’ve provided an exciting life for them with future reward. They travel with Your Son performing miracles. They get three square meals a day with lots of prestige. You’ve got Your hedge around them so nothing bad can happen. But You let me touch that ‘darling spot’ in their lives, that thing they can’t possibly live without, and I’ll show You what they’re made of. The only reason they’re praising You is for what they can get out of it. You let me take Your Son out of the picture and see how long they stay hitched! Let me touch that darling thing in each of them, and they’ll bail out on You.”

That’s exactly the response the Father had set Satan up to make. So God said, “All right, you may attack their flesh. You may even murder My Son. But you may not kill the eleven.” And Satan sifted them when the permission was granted.

Thus, all of a sudden, as Peter was standing in the patio warming his hands, the Evil One supernaturally removed his spine and installed a yellow substitute. Peter’s courage evaporated! That thing by which he maintained self-acceptance and pride in himself—to maintain control in each situation—gone. He was proved a coward in the most humiliating way imaginable, by two women and the local “Spit and Whittle Club.”

That is the place, however, where all must arrive who would enter into God’s rest as spoken of in Hebrews. Peter came to the end of his resources, his self-justification, his self-acceptance, his integrity, his self-confidence, and his rights, all of which had been generated, choreographed, and maintained from years of becoming worldly-wise at getting his needs met. God was lovingly bringing him to a better kind of security.

After Peter responded properly to this experience of brokenness, God removed the yellow spine, gave him back his own, filled him with the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, and then said to him, “Now, your boldness will be My Spirit through you. It will be loving and gentle, not brazen and self-serving as it was. People are going to see Christ in you, and you will bring great glory and honor to My name” (see Romans 12:1,2).

Answers to Questions for Further Study

Preston H. Gillham, M.S.

Chapter 1: Why You Struggle

1. The Bible says that “God is love.” He (God) created you with a need for love so that you would need Him. If you didn’t have a need for love, you wouldn’t have a need for God.

2. Given the fact that a child learns primarily about himself during the early years, the environment of the home and society can be evaluated to find out what kind of learning took place. The message coming to the child will determine his beliefs about himself and his ability to get his needs met his way from the world around him. This will translate into thought, emotion, and behavior (the flesh). By the time the child is able to reason abstractly and see what the circumstances really were, it will be “too late.” The habit patterns will already have developed, and the individual will be looking for reinforcement of his feelings, thoughts, and behavior. This will only act to strengthen the fleshly habits.

3. Your answer to this question will be unique to you. The question is designed to help you determine what kind of acceptance methods you have employed independently from God and His provision through Christ. For some, your tools of the trade will be ugly and gross, such as manipulation, profanity, illicit sex, and so on. For others, your acceptance tools will be very socially acceptable. Examples might be service to others, giving gifts, hard work, achievement, and excellent physical condition. Note in regard to the last things mentioned that these characteristics, in and of themselves, are very good. The thing that makes them wrong is the motive for doing them: to gain acceptance independent of God’s provision. The “Flesh Inventory” at the end of this book (next section) will assist you in discerning your flesh’s traits.

4. The answers to this question and the previous question will be basically the same. This is not intended to be a trick or a redundant question. The emphasis is to be placed on understanding that the methods used to gain acceptance in the world are the same methods used to cut God out of the picture. If this is grasped, the purpose of the question will have been successful.

Chapter 2: How You Got into Your Fix

1. Paul’s flesh was primarily developed by Saul, the old, lost man. Prior to finding Jesus on the Damascus road, he was independent and rebellious toward God’s perfect plan. In order to gain an understanding of Paul’s flesh and its development, we need to look at Saul’s lifestyle. The same will hold true for you. In addition, all saved people can develop fleshly patterns after salvation simply by failing to walk in the Spirit, trusting the Lord Jesus Christ to meet their needs.

2. Your answer to this question will be similar to questions 3 and 4 in Chapter 1, except that this question is challenging you to go a step further in terms of understanding. You should recognize at this time the dynamics of how your flesh developed, as well as how it manifests itself from time to time. In addition, we trust you will experience a growing disdain and dissatisfaction for what you are seeing in your fleshly motives.

3. Salvation alone! You must be born again. There must have been the acknowledgment of sin, repentance, and an asking of Jesus to be your Savior and Lord. The ways in which this takes place in a person’s life are as diverse as God’s creative call can be. Trust the Lord to be your guide as you look at your personal relationship to the Lord Jesus. And remember, salvation is all that is required to be accepted by God.

Chapter 3: How Anabel and I Got into Our Fix

1. Now that you have come to recognize your fleshly patterns, you should be looking for specific ways in which God is choreographing circumstances, challenging you to deal with these areas of fleshly disobedience. He could be doing this in a variety of ways, from something you have read in His Word to a specific circumstance that is causing your flesh stress and pointing you to Christ as the answer.

2. The time that we live here on this earth is the only opportunity we’ll have to walk in trust and obedience to the Father. If He automatically erased the learning opportunities that we have (stemming from having to deal with our old, fleshly ways), we would have no chance to grow in the character and likeness of Jesus Christ. We must face these challenges in order to recognize the Lord Jesus’ sufficiency in our lives.

3. Although there are many reasons that you could be experiencing frustration at every turn, perhaps the primary point that should be focused on is this: Your loving heavenly Father may be trying to break your self-sufficiency, strength, and independence so that you can adequately and willfully cry out to Him as your sufficiency. Unless the Father helps you to realize your insufficiency, you might never recognize His sufficiency. This is often a difficult lesson to learn.

Chapter 4: An “Old Man” in a New Earthsuit

1. The Bible simply states in Romans 5:12 that all men died in Adam. This means that as a descendant of Adam, you are spiritually dead, separated from God, in desperate need of God’s salvation through Jesus Christ. There is no solution for this problem other than the execution of the old self and the birth of the new man in Christ. No amount of good works will have an effect as far as earning God’s favor on behalf of the old, dead self. This is only rectified through Jesus Christ.

2. Your basic nature is determined by who your spiritual father is. If you are a spirit-descendant of Adam, your basic nature is sinful, rebellious, and independent toward God. If you are a spirit-descendant of the Lord Jesus and a joint heir with Him, you have the laws of God written on your heart. You joyfully concur with the laws of God, and you desire to walk in obedience to the will of the Father.

3. Prior to knowing Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior, you were dead spiritually. With salvation, Jesus Christ literally became your life in the complete fullness of that meaning. He is your purpose. He is your source. He is eternal life. This in no way makes you a hollow tube, a nonentity, or a nonbeing. It simply means that Jesus Christ is wishing to use your personality and earthsuit to manifest His will, character, and nature. On the other hand, you do not become a Jesus clone, a little Jesus, or a god. Quite the contrary, you are not Christ, and Christ is not you. Christ is your life, and He wants to live and express His life through your personality, talents, and abilities. A good review of this point is the workshop tools illustration.

4. It is never a sin for a Christian to be tempted. Jesus “has been tempted in all things as we are, yet without sin” (Hebrews 4:15). Therefore, it is very normal for a Christian to be tempted to get his human needs met by rebelling against God’s perfect plan. However, it is not normal for the Christian to go ahead and sin, as sinning is contrary to the saved person’s new nature. The new person looks to Christ to supply all his needs as He promised. Temptation is not a sin until it is accepted by the mind. We aren’t saying that the Christian can obtain sinless perfection. As long as we are on this planet, in an earthsuit that is vulnerable to the law of sin, we will be faced constantly with failure to trust Christ’s life through us.

Chapter 5: A “New Man” in an Old Earthsuit

1. Side “B” truths pertain to your being “in” Christ. These principles are imperative to you when you’re facing an identity struggle. They will stress to you who you literally are in Christ, your total acceptance in Him by the Father, and what your situation really is.

2. The thing that died in Christ on the cross was the old, Adamic life. Some synonyms for this would be the old self, old man, and sin nature.

3. God never intended for you to live the Christian life. As a matter of fact, the Christian life is impossible for you to live. There is only one Person who ever lived the Christian life, and that is Jesus Christ. Now, God has placed Christ in you to live and express His life through you. Dependence, not independence, is His plan. Christ through you, not you for Christ.

4. In this chapter you will find a list of Scriptures entitled, “My True Identity in Christ.” As you review this list of Scriptures as well as track down the many, many more you will find in the Word of God, you should find unique passages that speak to you personally. For example, if you are struggling with feelings of inferiority, perhaps you would find Galatians 3:28 especially meaningful. If you find yourself struggling with guilt, Ephesians 1:7, Romans 3:24, and Romans 8:1 will speak to your being forgiven in Christ.

Chapter 6: You Can Keep a Good Man Down

1. Satan works through the law of sin, speaking to you with first-person-singular pronouns: I, me, myself, my, and so on. He uses a masculine or feminine “tone of voice,” depending on your gender, and he will accent his statements according to your personal accent. In other words, he impersonates you. Using this technique, he offers up a temptation that correlates with one of your fleshly patterns. Thus, the temptation sounds like you, it seems normal enough to you, and it is something you readily identify with and struggle against. He often tries to get the believer to opt to get a perfectly good human need satisfied via rebellion against God’s plan.

2. The original, sinful thoughts the Christian experiences are not generated by the Christian, but by the power of indwelling sin under Satan’s control. Sin serves temptation, deception, or accusation up to you, the new creation in Christ, via the flesh. This communication can come to you during your quiet time, a prayer time, or during a point of great vulnerability. You haven’t generated this sinful thought. It has been served up to you by the law of sin. However, the moment that you choose the thought as yours, you are covertly sinning in your thought life. Then if you take it for yourself and act upon it, you have overtly sinned. Only after choosing to accept the thought do you have sin to confess to the Lord and repent from, not before! The law of sin cannot make you sin.

3. This question is challenging you to take your understanding of question 1 from this chapter and personalize that information to your unique version of the flesh. For example, if one of your fleshly patterns is for self-condemnation, the law of sin might say to you, “I can’t believe I’m so stupid. What an idiot!” Notice the first-person pronouns that were used. Another example might be the person who struggles with inferiority: “If I only looked like she looks, I could feel better about myself.” Once you begin to get the hang of this, you will find that you recognize Satan’s temptations and accusations much more readily as you trust the Lord Jesus and walk in the Spirit. Make sure you use first-person pronouns in your answer to this question.

4. The emphasis of your answer to this question should be that if you are setting your mind on the fleshly perception you have of yourself, you will manifest the ungodly behavior that is characteristic of your flesh. On the other hand, if you are focusing your attention on your true identity in Christ, you will find that you begin to manifest behavior commensurate with who you are in Christ. The Scriptures refer to this as the fruit of the Spirit.

5. Your answer should contain something referring to understanding your true identity in Christ and how to cooperate with Jesus to let Him live the victorious Christian life through you. This reflects both sides of the principles we’ve discussed: Christ in you and you in Christ.

Chapter 7: Living Like a New Creation

1. To say that the old man died in Christ is to say that the part of you that was by nature and birth independent and rebellious toward God no longer exists as a result of its execution in Christ at the cross. You are no longer sinful by nature, separated from God by your heritage, and lost in your trespasses and sins. You are no longer the generator of sinful thoughts; these come from the law of sin. The significance of the death of the old man is evident: You are no longer separated from God by your old spirit, but have been reborn as a child of His, a joint heir with Jesus Christ, holy and blameless before Him. You have become a new creation in Christ Jesus.

2. On the surface, this question may appear to repeat question 4 in Chapter 5. But this question is challenging you to reiterate to yourself the truths of who you are in Christ. The list of verses given in Chapter 5 pertaining to your true identity in Christ is only a small sample of the vast number of verses that springboard off the verses that are given and illuminate who you really are. The clue to locating these verses will be the word “in” followed by Christ’s name or a reference to Him: “in Christ,” “in Him,” “in whom,” and so on. Remember, though, that these verses will do you absolutely no good unless you take them for your own personal use.

3. “Set your mind on the things above” (Colossians 3:2). This is important because God’s Word states it imperatively (with great urgency). It is vital in that it is only through setting your mind on things above that you will begin to see the victory of Christ and the characteristics of your true identity manifested in your daily life. Remember how the illustration concerning the rattlesnake demonstrates that the emotions respond to what the mind is set upon. If your mind is set on inadequacy, you will inevitably begin to feel inadequate. If your mind is set on the fact of your acceptance in Christ, given some time your emotions will begin to respond to this fact. Though you will never feel completely accepted lest you begin to walk by feel rather than faith, you will begin to experience more points on your emotional Richter Scale than you previously had. It is imperative that you set your mind on things above.

4. This exercise will be unique, of course, to the situation you have chosen in your life. You should have stressed in your answer two primary ideas: First, there should be an emphasis on the side “A” truth of Christ’s being your life, living and expressing His life through your personality and earthsuit, and your cooperating to allow Him to do this. Second, there should be some mention of the side “B” truth that you are resting in the security of your true identity in Christ within the situation. This is what the Word refers to in Hebrews as “entering into God’s rest.” This does not refer to salvation, but to walking in the fullness of the Spirit.

Chapter 8: Handling Your Emotions

1. It is of very little importance to consistently feel God in your life. There will be those times when you do feel the Lord and as a result realize He is at work. These periods are very enjoyable and reassuring. However, there will probably be far more times when there is very little feeling, if any at all, that God is anywhere close, let alone dwelling inside you. The loving Father has structured the Christian walk in this manner in an effort to wean us from walking by feel as opposed to faith, confidence, and dependence on Him. Even if your feelings should go in the opposite direction from the truth of God’s Word, it is imperative that you remain focused on what God has said rather than what you may or may not feel. Your emotions are not God’s barometer of truth; His Word is.

2. The man in the cabin was not being hypocritical when he began to act as a safe man in the cabin. It was imperative to his physical health that he do so. If he had failed to do this, he very well could have had a heart attack and died. He was merely acting on the truth in this situation. It is no different for a Christian who finds himself locked up in the cabin of life with the enemy of God clawing and scratching at the door. Obedience is the key for the Christian who walks according to what God has said in His Word in spite of his fluctuating feelings.

A hypocrite by definition is someone who pretends to be something he is not. Thus, for a Christian who pretends (acts like he is) to be fearful, inferior, insecure, self-reliant, and self-confident in spite of God’s Word, which speaks to the contrary, hypocrisy would be an apt description. He is acting like something he is not.

Satan’s definition of hypocrisy is someone who acts contrary to the way he feels. What a lie! Our feelings may be telling us the direct opposite of what God’s truth is. To obey Satan’s accusation would be to walk in hypocrisy. To stand our ground against any contrary feelings, looking to the Lord and His Word, is obedience, even though it doesn’t feel “right.”

3. There are many things that God’s Spirit may have shown you as you reflected on Jesus’ prayers in the garden. One of the things that stands out in my mind is that Jesus didn’t receive lighting-in-sky answers or handwriting on the wall as He prayed to God the Father. Quite the contrary! There was silence from the Father. Not silence showing disapproval, but rather silence indicating trust and comfort. Just because there is no obvious answer to the prayers you pray does not mean that God is ignoring you or is disinterested in you. He has your highest well-being in mind.

Second, Jesus’ inability to keep His emotions from soaring should comfort you that the “peace that passes understanding” is not a feeling, but a knowing—knowing that my Father has everything under control in my life as I submit to His will. It’s a function of the mind, not the emotions.

Chapter 9: Making Your Behavior Match Your Identity

1. The point this question intends to stress is one of acting on your faith. Perhaps you can more readily see how you effectively walked in faith and obedience or failed to walk by faith and why that failure occurred.

2. There is no way that everything started to go great after Bill began to trust the Lord and walk in the Spirit. Quite the contrary. There were still struggles, difficulties, and trials. Circumstances still closed in from time to time, and Satan continued to offer up his temptations. This reinforces the fact that hardships and trials are merely elements within the laboratory designed to help us learn how to walk in the Spirit. Bill would not have been able to recognize Christ’s sufficiency if he hadn’t had an opportunity to allow the Lord Jesus to work.

3. The essence of your answer for this question should center on methodology rather than results. Are you trusting the Lord Jesus to do the work through you as you do your best, or are you doing your best hoping that He will approve of your efforts?

Chapter 10: “Leftly” Dividing the Word of Truth

1. These polarized positions in God’s Word leave the devil an opportunity to use even God’s Word in an effort to deceive. These “apparent contradictions” are never to be perceived as an evidence that the Bible contains error, but as giving the believer the opportunity to trust the Lord God even when faced with apparent “proof” of His inconsistency. This is trusting the integrity of God and “rightly dividing” His Word.

2. The primary key for understanding and interpreting God’s Word correctly is to focus on Christ on the cross and what His sacrifice means to us and for us.

3. If you realize that you have made a wrong turn, the proper thing to do is turn around and go back the other direction. The Bible would call this repentance. It is a refocusing of your life on grace and Christ’s finished work on the cross instead of law and performance-based acceptance. This shouldn’t be thought of in terms of backtracking or losing ground. Rather, it is progress in the correct direction toward God’s grace. The measure of success in the Christian life is not who finishes the race first, but how the race is won.

4. To prevent making a turn toward law, Christ’s work on the cross and God’s grace should always be the central focus of your walk. As long as you are focusing on Jesus’ atonement for you to interpret God’s Word, you will be looking in the proper direction.

Chapter 11: Is God Trying to Tell You Something?

1. There are many reasons that God will use the wilderness in a person’s life: to break the Christian from relying on his own strength, to learn trust and obedience, to find rest in Him, and so on. In short, God seeks to break the hold that the flesh has on us during our earthwalk.

2. It isn’t feasible for a Christian to really know Christ as life and source without going through the wilderness. If you never experience a need, there would never be a reason for Christ to be the supply. God will lovingly lead you through the wilderness to intensify that need. The Christian can enter into a commitment with the Lord to know Him as life without having been motivated by stress, but the Father must allow the commitment to be tested if it is to be experiential reality for the believer.

3. Finding yourself in the valley of Achor can practically motivate you to look to the Lord as your sufficiency. Once you have begun to do this, you place yourself in the position of being in God’s hands. He is now free to remove you from the valley or to give you the grace to go through it. Either way, you are a winner as you understand God’s grace and focus yourself on Him and Him alone as your life.

Chapter 12: God’s Ultimate Purpose for You

1. God allows difficult circumstances in the Christian’s life in order to conform him into the image of His Son, Jesus Christ, who lived a life of total dependency on the Father. If God did not equip the Christian through these actions, He would rob the believer of the opportunity to grow in Christ, experiencing the fullness that knowing Him can bring. It is only through these means that the Christian experientially develops heavenly character traits.

2. Your answer to this question will be unique to you. As you ponder this question, ask the Lord to give you added insight into His unique plan for your life.

3. This question and the next one are asking you to evaluate your personal walk with the Lord. Is He calling you to walk closer, go deeper, trust more? You must be maturing. If you aren’t, stagnation has set in. Any time you “coast,” you are going downhill. Let me encourage you in the Lord.

When God wants to make an oak, He takes a hundred years, but when He wants to make a squash, He takes six months.

—DR. A. H. STRONG

4. See answer 3 above.

Flesh Inventory

Ask the Holy Spirit to use this inventory to assist you in identifying what your unique version of the flesh is like. Even though it is true that we are free in Christ, many believers have trouble identifying what it is they are free from.

Place a number (0 to 10, where 10 is greater) beside any of these traits with which you struggle.

_ Anger

_ Anxiety

_ Argumentative _ Astrology, Horoscopes, etc. (attracted to) _ Bigotry

_ Bitterness

_ Boastful

_ Bossy

_ Causing Dissension _ Conceited

_ Controlled by Emotions _ Controlled by Peer Pressure _ Covetousness

_ Critical Tongue _ Deceitfulness _ Depression

_ Dominance

_ Drug Dependency _ Drunkenness

_ Envy (depressed at the good _ fortune of others) _ False Modesty _ Fear

_ Feelings of Helplessness or Weakness _ Feelings of Rejection _ Feelings of Stupidity _ Feelings of Worthlessness _ Gluttony

_ Greed

_ Guilt

_ Hatred

_ Hostility

_ Homosexual Lust _ Idolatry

_ If It Feels Good, Go for It _ Impatience

_ Impulsiveness _ Impure Thoughts _ Inadequate

_ Indifference to Others’ Problems _ Inferiority Feelings _ Inhibited

_ Insecurity

_ Intemperance

_ Jealousy

_ Laziness

_ Loner

_ Low Self-Discipline _ Low Self-Worth _ Lust for Pleasure _ Materialistic _ Must Strive to Repay Any Kindness Shown You _ Negativism

_ Nervousness

_ Occult (involved in) _ Opinionated

_ Overly Quiet

_ Overly Sensitive to Criticism _ Overly Submissive _ Passivity

_ Perfectionist _ Prejudice

_ Pride

_ Profane

_ Projecting Blame _ Prone to Gossip _ Rebellion at Authority _ Resentment

_ Restlessness

_ Sadness

_ Self-Centered _ Self-Confidence _ Self-Depreciation _ Self-Gratification (obsessions) _ Self-Hatred

_ Self-Indulgence _ Self-Justification _ Self-Pity

_ Self-Reliant

_ Self-Righteousness _ Self-Sufficient _ Selfish Ambition _ Sensuality

_ Sexual Lust

_ Slow to Forgive _ Stubbornness

_ Temper

_ Too Quick to Speak _ Unlovely

_ Vanity

_ Withdrawal

_ Workaholic

_ Worrier

These patterns were generated by the “old man” (or sometimes by the new man walking in carnality) while striving to get your needs met. Though the old man died (Romans 6:6), the patterns you checked still remain in your brain. These constitute an approximation of your version of the flesh.

Remember now, this inventory is no longer you if you are born again. God says, “From now on we recognize no [one] according to the flesh” (2 Corinthians 5:16). He recognizes you by your new identity in Christ (see 2 Corinthians 5:17).

One Last Note

For more information regarding Lifetime Guarantee Ministries or personal counseling, please contact:

Lifetime Ministries 131 Village Pkw. NE Bldg. 4

Marietta, GA 30067

(888) 395-LIFE

www.lifetime.org

The Gillhams have produced audio tape albums on such subjects as Victorious Christian Living; Advanced Seminar on Victorious Christian Living; The Building Up and Tearing Down of Spiritual Strongholds; The Causes of and Biblical Answers for Depression; Overcoming the Flesh; Controlling Overeating; Defeating Sin; God’s Rest; Understanding Your Emotions; The Roles in Marriage; Twenty Ways to Love Your Wife (And Three Ways to Love Your Husband); Physical Oneness in Marriage; Divorce: Prevention, Recovery, Remarriage; Defusing the Self-Destruct Marriage; The Needs of Men and Women in Marriage; Making Your Christian Life Work; and more. Call or write for a catalog and prices.

The Gillhams’ Lifetime Guarantee Ministry Letter is available monthly, free of charge. It contains articles on your identity in Christ along with their speaking and radio schedules. If you wish to receive a newsletter, please contact Lifetime Guarantee Ministries.

The syndicated radio program Lifetime Guarantee, featuring the Gillhams, is heard daily across the USA. Albums of these are available monthly for your drive-time or personal study-time listening. Write or call for more information.

Bibliography

Billheimer, Paul. Don’t Waste Your Sorrows. Christian Literature Crusade, 1977.

George, Bob. Classic Christianity. Harvest House Publishers, 1989.

. Growing in Grace. Harvest House Publishers, 1991.

Gillham, Anabel. A Woman’s Value. Wolgemuth & Hyatt Publishers, 1991. (Revised edition to be released by Harvest House, Spring 1993.) Gillham, Bill and Anabel. Marriage Takes More Than Two. Wolgemuth & Hyatt Publishers, 1989. (Revised edition to be released by Harvest House, Spring 1993.) Lovett, C. S. Death: Graduation to Glory. Personal Christianity, 1974.

Nee, Watchman. The Normal Christian Life. Christian Literature Crusade, 1957.

Needham, David. Birthright. Multnomah Press, 1979.

Ortiz, Juan Carlos. Living with Jesus Today. Creation House, 1982.

Solomon, Charles. Handbook to Happiness. Tyndale House Publishers, 1982.

. The Rejection Syndrome. Tyndale House Publishers, 1982.

. Counseling with the Mind of Christ. Fleming H. Revell Company, 1977.

Stanford, Miles. Principles of Spiritual Growth. Zondervan Publishing House, 1975.

Taylor, Jack. The Key to Triumphant Living. Broadman Press, 1971.

Trumbull, Charles. The Life That Wins. Christian Literature Crusade, 1971.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Preface by Preston Gillham

Your Lifetime Guarantee

1. Why You Struggle

2. How You Got into Your Fix

3. How Anabel and I Got into Our Fix

4. An “Old Man” in a New Earthsuit

5. A “New Man” in an Old Earthsuit

6. You Can Keep a Good Man Down

7. Living Like a New Creation

8. Handling Your Emotions

9. Making Your Behavior Match Your Identity

Appendixes

Appendix A

Appendix B

Appendix C

Appendix D

Appendix E

Appendix F

Appendix G

Appendix H

Appendix I

Appendix J

Answers to Questions for Further Study

Flesh Inventory

One Last Note

Bibliography

10. “Leftly” Dividing the Word of Truth

11. Is God Trying to Tell You Something?

12. God’s Ultimate Purpose for You