The Conception of Lust

One of the most important things a Christian must learn after coming to a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ is how to control the activity of his mind. A person may have a correct understanding of the love of God and the power of Christ’s blood to restore and redeem, but if the mind is left unruly and allowed to wander in unsupervised thought and fantasy, the believer will be overcome by the flesh again and again.

The unsupervised mind is like a promiscuous teenager. If left alone, it will sneak out a window to commit fornication with the first available idol it finds. There is a constant pull of lust within man which is always seeking to draw him out of God’s presence and into some enticement. Scripture teaches that every man is tempted when he is “drawn away of his own lust” (James 1:14). This means that lust is already in man, inbred into the flesh and seeking an opportunity to be “drawn out” by some kind of stimulus. The stimuli that draw our lusts out either come from within our own thoughts, from unlawful images and experiences previously uploaded and which are now resurfacing, or from an outside force injecting them in.

These enticements are the magnets which “draw” our indwelling lusts out into the open to be awakened and stirred. If our fleshly lusts make contact with these enticements, a conception can occur – an illegitimate spiritual pregnancy which brings forth sin (James 1:15), and then death. Our minds are like the wild donkey in Jeremiah, constantly sniffing the wind to find a mate, and available to any passerby who propositions her (Jer. 2:23). She must therefore be girded (I Peter 1:13). It is absolutely imperative that the believer in Christ recognize and regulate the harlotry of his mind. She must not be left alone in her room with strange men. They must driven out of her presence with the fiery sword of God’s Word, and her purity must be upheld and guarded. Shielding your mind from spiritual adultery is the responsibility of you, the donkey’s master. If you do not call on God for restraining grace and make a determinate effort to gird your thinking, your ship will always be wrecking on the tempestuous sea of Satan’s allurements.

Temptation arises when a troubadour comes to your mind’s window, with his mandolins and love songs and tries to draw her out into an illicit affair with him. These enticements may come through an invitation to sexually fantasize; to explode in anger; to assassinate someone’s character; to grab the biggest and best piece of food; to exaggerate a detail for some personal gain; to lose your patience; to whitewash a motive; to criticize a flaw of your neighbor; to be discontent with your wages or salary; to tell an off-color joke; to complain about an inconvenience, etc. “Come out to me,” the troubadour invites your lust’s ear. “Come out and let me embrace you; let me fulfill your deep cravings. Let us come together for a night of passion, and then you can return home. Your husband will forgive you!”

If your mind succumbs to temptation and leaps into her lover’s bosom, she conceives and becomes pregnant with sin. This is the clear teaching of God’s Word. This is why God’s Word says, “blessed is the man who endures temptation, for when he is tried he shall receive the crown of life…” (James 1:12). Beloved, we are called to remain sober and endure these songs. We are called by God to resist the impure advances and corrupt charms; to mortify the flesh’s lust; to shut the window and shield the music; to divert the attention. It is not merely enough to resist and divert, however; we must now train our mind’s attention upon a new Object of Affection.

I want to show you how you can drive the troubadour from the window every night. The next time you hear music outside the window, the next time you hear promises of ecstasy and passion waft up from the courtyard of your mind, you must call immediately upon the Lord. You must be able to say, “I reject these thoughts,” and then call instantly upon the Lord Jesus Christ for grace to overcome the seduction. This is mortification at its purest level.

As the promises of pleasure and delight echo from the lover in the shadows, fix your eyes upon Jesus and recall that the true “fullness of joy” is in His presence alone, and that in His right hand are the true “pleasures forevermore” (Psalm 16:11). All else is vanity, a smokescreen. In the moment of need, call upon the Lord God for the grace to overcome through the holy blood of your Deliverer. He will manifest His glory and shield your mind from every fiery arrow. This is the Word of God. It is God’s promise written in His Son’s blood – the promise to sanctify you wholly, to keep you from falling and preserve you; to elevate you like an eagle above all seductions and deceits of lust. His is a transcending power! It is power which has already defeated Satan and has overcome the entire world and all the angelic armies of darkness. Do you wonder now how Paul could say, “Thanks be to God who always leads us in triumph in Christ” (II Corinthians 2:14)? What I am sharing with you is the secret.

Dear Christian, do you believe this? Are you now prepared to mortify? Is preserving the chastity of your mind worth putting to death all impulses of spiritual fornication and satanic solicitations? Cry out to God then in your time of need. Approach the throne of Jesus for the grace to drive out the enticements from your mind. Endure the trial and God’s grace will soon grant the victory! You need never lose joy; you need never complain; you need never succumb to a fiery dart; your lust need never commit adultery with temptation and conceive sin. Our Forerunner Jesus Christ endured the same temptations of the flesh and hell, for he was tempted on all points such as we are – yet without ever conceiving (Hebrews 4:15).

Behold your birthright! His purity can be yours by calling upon God the same way He did: by putting to death self; by faith in the promises of God’s Word; by faith in the sanctifying power of Christ’s blood; by the enablement of grace through the Holy Spirit. At the very moment of temptation, Christ is praying that you will stand fast and resist, that you will endure, that you will conquer and overcome through His life. That you may never doubt God’s love. Knowing this, dear Christian, may you stand in victory throughout all your trials, and be part of the conceptionless virgin bride the Father seeks for His Son.

Resist the Intrusions

Resist ungodly intrusions that seek to enter your mind and stir your flesh to action. God will call for a cease fire and reward you greatly if you continue to stand fast in Christ. The only way the powers of darkness can get you to yield to temptation is if you ungird your mind and let them in. This resistance is the responsibility God has given to all His children, and the reason why we are exhorted to abide in Jesus Christ and depend each moment on the power of His grace.

The loosening of the mind is a habit. Spiritual forces wait to attack when they know the girding is down. They are watching you. They don’t know your thoughts, but they can observe your activity and listen to your speech and make inferential judgments based on what they find. Keep filling yourself with scripture. Keep notes on the activity of your mind. Don’t let it wander aimlessly and indulge itself too heavily on worthless subjects that will not strengthen your inner man. Keep yourself fortified.

It becomes very encouraging when you suddenly see these precepts working! Where you once lost your tempter, now you begin overcoming. The things that once caused you to become discouraged and lose your peace now hit a a shield in your mind and are countered with an appropriate verse. The fight is over before it’s begun and you’re still standing! What happened! You got a small taste of victory – the victory promised by God in His Word which is the birthright for all New Covenant believers. Can it be repeated, you wonder? After all, this was just one skirmish in a war that must be fought daily.

When you’re attacked the next day and again overcome, you’ll begin to see a pattern. Think of Moses’ arms being held up by Joshua and Hurr: As long as his arms were lifted, God’s children prevailed in the war. As Moses sat on the rock and rested, his arms were propped up by two helpers. For the believer in Christ, we can see these two helpers as the Word of God and the Holy Spirit. As long as we rest upon Christ and allow the Holy Spirit and Word of God to lift our inner men, no enemy in hell can prevail against our minds or infiltrate our hearts. But as soon as we allow our inner men to sink, the power of the flesh and the weapons of the enemy begin to prevail upon us and inflict damage.

Keep your mind well-girded, therefore, and feed your spirit with God’s Word. Extend your inner man’s arms as a shield against the forces of darkness, and you will experience the victory God wills for your life. For such is your birthright in Christ.

The Essentials of Mortification: Soul and Spirit

Would you live this day before the face of God in unbroken communion? Resolve then not to judge the integrity of your relationship with Him by the dictates of soul. If you gauge your communion with Him by the soul, you will invariably receive inaccurate readings and be tempted unto depression. It is essential that a child of God know the difference between the leading of the soul and the voice of the spirit in mortification. As with everything concerning our growth in Jesus Christ, familiarity with the Word of God is a safeguard for the believer. The double-edged blade of Holy Scripture is able to separate soul from spirit, the same way a knife separates the bone from meat when filleting a fish. If we allow God to steadily transform us in matters of heart-purity an eventual awareness between soul and spirit will manifest to our understanding.

The soul is the seat of emotion, intelligence, visceral heightening, of transient pleasure and pain. When unsaved people (and many regenerate people) speak of having a “spiritual” experience, what they usually mean to say is that they had a powerful soul experience. Unbeknownst to them, the soul and spirit are on two different levels. A person might have had a soul experience, while his spirit lay dead in trespasses and sins. The soul reacts to aesthetical stimuli: music, art, touch and taste. The spirit, however, responds exclusively to God’s quickening grace. This being said, the soul’s weather condition can often be an accurate barometer reading of the spirit’s temperature, but this comes with a disclaimer: the soul is within Satan’s reach and can be manipulated and commandeered by the enemy to bring a sense of condemnation and dejection to the child of God.

It falls within the Christian’s duty, therefore, to detect and mortify certain harmful impulses from the soul. The soul is subject to lust (I Peter 2:11; Revelation 18:14), and finding comfort in the excess of money and material possession (Luke 12:19); yet at the same time soul-prosperity can be of a godly source (III John 2), and of godly fear (Acts 2:43). It is able to be anchored in Christ (Hebrews 6:19) to keep from drifting into uncharted waters. The Christian must be able to identify this drifting and mortify it to the obedience of God.

Like an unruly and idle mind, the unanchored soul is a prime target for Satanic acquisition. The relationship between the soul and spirit is unique, for Satan’s great tactic is to usurp the latter with the former. Multitudes of churches are unable to identify this usurpation through their music and preaching. If the spirit is dead in sin, the soul garbed in religiosity can provide a very convincing replacement. Immature believers easily fall for this deception. Praise and worship leaders, for example, will sometimes employ a mantra-like chorus to galvanize the soul, believing they are stirring the spirit unto exhaltion. The music and singing will recite the same phrase, steadily building in intensity and volume, until a frenzied atmosphere is achieved. This is almost always the power of soul, and we should be able to recognize this phenomenon and put it to death upon discernment.

Every mature believer in Christ should be able to discern whether his or her emotions are being pandered to and manipulated. It is important to mortify these occurrences in the soul to preserve our sobriety. God rewards sobriety with grace. The spirit usurped by the soul yields no grace to overcome sin and mortify fleshly temptation. The most dynamic preaching and music predicated upon soul will do nothing for you in terms of victory, because they cannot reach beyond the emotional sector of your psyche. Victory over sin belongs to the exclusive realm of spirit which God alone is able to access and quicken.

The Mortifying Power of Scripture

Scripture, when hid in the heart by faith, is the sole weapon ordained by God for the diffusion of temptation in the flesh. It is a sword that grows with the soldier. A babe is able to slay a giant with it; a seasoned believer wielding the Word of God can banish a legion of devils and tread over all of Satan’s schemes. The Bible has a power to mortify that this world cannot comprehend, for the object of its mortification is not the flesh and blood citizens of this physical world but the angelic powers and sinister principalities of another realm.

The unregenerate blind professors ridicule this book; religious cults tamper with it; the doctrinally-biased dull its blade to no effect; liberal theologians place a safety scabbard upon it. All these efforts are done in the flesh and are the outcroppings of a deeper campaign occuring in the spiritual realm. The powers of darkness know that the Bible is God’s weapon to the believer to withstand Satan’s influence and captivate the lusts of the flesh. They therefore induce men in the flesh to destroy it, persecute it, repudiate it, tamper with it, inoculate it.

The purity of the Word is such that if any component of it is adulterated or twisted, the whole is rendered ineffective. In spite of this, many believers play with the Word of God as though it were a toy. They wave it menacingly at each other in fruitless debates; they use it as a club to enforce their agendas; they indiscreetly wield it against fellow soldiers to make a show of their technique. But when it comes time to use it for its real purpose, they find it totally useless against the prevailing powers of hell.

When standing against spiritual wickedness, most believers are soon vanquished by a darling lust: they lose their tempter, they burn with passion after women, they chase after money and worldly position and prestige, they covet the vain applause and religious acceptance of men. Inwardly they have never come to learn the value of God’s Word as a sin-destroying weapon for their own walk.

Used for its original purpose, the Word of God is Spirit, and as such it gives abundant life to the believer when hid in the heart. When misused, however, it becomes a razor of death and condemnation to all who toy with its double blade. While scripture is profitable for the establishment of healthy doctrine and the reproof of heresies, the great truth that has been largely forgotten by the church is the usage of the Word of God as a weapon to defeat Satan’s attacks.

The New Testament was never meant to be intellectually dissected and dissertated in universities; it was meant to combat spiritual evil and shield you from succumbing to temptation. It has a very practical purpose in revealing the Son of God to us, our Great Deliverer, to rescue us from this present evil world. It exhorts us to walk in Him, rooted and built up and established in the faith, allowing no provision for the flesh to exercise its deceitful lusts within our hearts and minds. God’s Word was never intended for dogma wars among the dissenting denominations of Christendom; it was given rather that the believer might triumph over all unrighteousness, and be perfected in holiness, magnifying God’s love through the mind of Christ.

Each holy verse has its own special mortifying power. Each verse is authenticated by the Holy Spirit and has the ability to dissolve any obstacle you face – and yet each verse is a dead letter until divinely vivified. If you would experience this miraculous power, this supernatural grace of the Holy Spirit that always leads to victory and joy, you must allow God’s Spirit to bring upon you the conviction of necessity for prevailing grace.

Dear saint, confess that you are an undone creature without the very life of Christ empowering your spirit to abide in His glorious victory. Depend on Him daily to renew and refresh your inner man to face Satan’s onslaughts as they arise to buffet your mind. Depend on the grace of God to thwart each wave of fleshly rebellion in your mind against God’s law. Such a life is wrought according to your faith in the power of God; may you taste of this all-victorious life, of the excellence of unbroken fellowship with your Heavenly Father through the blood of Christ Jesus and mortification by His Spirit.

Mortify the World

The world we live in has an invisible system behind it. This system is governed by spiritual rulers in high places that are the embodiment of perfect evil. These powers and principalities have infiltrated the earth and have exacted their diabolical influence upon all the progeny of humankind since Adam’s initial transgression against God in Eden. Since Adam’s fall, these spirits have ruled the air with uncontested legal authority: they control the media, the latest fashion statements and vogue, world politics, the educational system, commercialism, the organized religious structures of the world, the militaries, the entertainment and popular music sectors.

These dark powers are pyramidal in structure and are ruled by Satan, their supreme commander and chief and god of this world. When Jesus Christ was manifested in Palestine some 2,000 years ago, these invisible legions were the driving force behind His crucifixion. If they could, they would murder their own Creator and establish the tyrannical throne of Satan upon the earth for all eternity. It is within this ruined realm that men are born into, bearing the fallen nature of devils; it is also within this realm where God has sent His Holy Spirit to convict the world of sin, righteousness and judgment.

The Christian is called today to mortify the alluring power of this spiritual system. The world is like a dark ocean with a tide that continually pulls you toward its center. The moment you cease to mortify its advancements, you begin to drift. As you continue to drift, you soon find yourself in water too deep to handle and unable to get back to the shore. This is an accurate picture of backsliding: the undertow of the world slowly pulling a disciple of Christ out to drown him in the depths.

When we mortify the world we resist this undertow. We fearlessly proclaim that the system, the evil tides have no pull over us. As others are sucked out into a sea of flesh, we are called to stand upon the dry rock of Christ and shine the light of eternal salvation and victory to those who are perishing. Dear believer, will you be such a lighthouse for Christ Jesus?  Will you stand fast as beacon of uncompromised truth and righteousness, as a stalwart child of God?

If so, make it your life’s holy ambition to mortify the pull of those waves, the sin of the storms, the undertows of lust and selfishness that grip your soul with deceitful pleasure. Ask God for the grace to mortify the world to your flesh no matter the cost. Let no Satanic undertow grasp your mind to drown your heart. Have faith that even in the midst of the fiercest typhoon, Jesus is able to keep you from drifting and present you clean and dry before His Father’s presence with exceeding joy (Jude 1:24).

Surprise Examinations

The Lord’s tests often come upon us suddenly, at times when our minds are lax and reclining. The dart fired at David as he looked upon Bathsheba was strategically timed. The enemy will also fire darts at you at the most opportune time. When it comes time for a test, the Lord will permit the powers of darkness to drill you with a volley of flaming arrows. If you are not prepared for the examination, the enemy’s attack will catch you off guard and wound your soul. Most Christians are unaware of God’s surprise examinations until after the tests are over and the failing scores are made known to the conscience.

It was a fiery arrow of temptation which struck David and enflamed the lust which was already in his heart. One spark is all it takes to ignite a towering inferno of sin within us. Beloved Christian, make sure your mind and heart are washed clean with the water of the Word of God. Prepare for God’s surprise exams by soaking yourself in scripture and thus fireproofing your mind. Learn to attune your spiritual ear to the tutelage of Holy Spirit, be sober and vigilant and instant in all seasons so that you can face one of God’s sudden exams with the grace to overcome.

Mortification is the process by which the flaming arrows of Satan are shielded from our minds and hearts. The victorious life in God arises when Satan’s arrows find nothing to ignite within us. The Spirit of God leads us to put to death all combustible material which comes through spiritual wickedness and our rebellious flesh. This is the true definition of being led by the Spirit, the true representation of a child of God: he is directed by God to be fireproof and clean in all areas of his life. True religion is keeping oneself unspotted from the world. All the spots of the world are soaked in kerosene and pose a fire hazard when united with one of Satan’s fiery darts. God’s examinations unmask these dangerous hazards; His flaming trials draw them to the surface for extinguishing.

Confession and repentance bring the holy water of grace to put out these spot-fires. Part of being a mature Christian involves a more streamlined effort in extinguishing these fires before they spread. Though none of us can boast in a perpetually-free fire zone, we are all called to a greater effort of fire prevention through mortification. Dear believer, have you entered yet into this school?

When God Corrects You

When the Lord tests our hearts, there will be times when we fall short and miss the mark. Our response to the Lord’s chastening during these moments is very important. Conviction is used by God to foster within us a sense of value when we hear the voice of the Holy Spirit; when we fail to heed His voice, loving correction is in order. As God replaces the comfort and peace of His Spirit with a temporary wave of unrest after we disobey, it is imperative that we understand His purpose for us in the correction. His purpose is always for our good, for our spiritual advancement, and for His glory.

We will progress in stride if we but remember to always confess our faults openly and honestly. It doesn’t matter that you fall down repeatedly; God will change you, dear Christian, if you will be ruthlessly honest in blaming only yourself for your sin and crying for deliverance. God may allow you to go on like this for some time in order to develop a fierce hatred for your sin. Men who can only see your outward struggle and numerous failings in the flesh will misunderstand and judge you, but God sees your heart’s hatred for iniquity, and will begin to work quietly, slowly within your bosom with Christ-transforming grace.

And yet the rod will still continue to come down each time you fall. As it kisses your back in stinging soul-conviction, remember to look into the eyes of Jesus Christ. See His outstretched hands, allow Him to cradle you as you weep. Learn the powerful lesson that God’s love for you is not performance-based, but unconditional in the purest sense. He crafted you in your mother’s womb and saw all your failings, all your struggles, all your groanings while you were still an unborn fetus and yet chose to love you regardless. He still chose to remove Satan’s scales from your heart and reveal His Son in you at the appointed time. He allowed every trial, every upset, and every inconvenience in your life to drive you to the place where you are at this very moment.

Dear reader, do you believe this? Do you yearn to be set free from all besetting sin in your life? It is the perfect, unconditional love of God for you that extends such sin-conquering grace in your direction. If you have faith to receive it, it is yours for the asking. It is not earned; it is given freely only to the poor, the despised, the downtrodden, the despicable, the desperate, the deserted, to the most unworthy and undeserving sinners who at last take full blame for their crimes and dare believe God’s utmost deliverance is yet for them.

Spiritual Forensics

 

As we sojourn throughout this world as children of God, a battle to revert us back into our pre-conversion bondage is constantly being waged within our minds. The mind of a believer is like a computer database, with thousands of files surfacing within it throughout the day. Some of these files are components from old downloads flushed to the surface by something we see or hear that brings back a memory, while other times a rogue file may be injected from an outside malicious source. Although it is not necessary to determine whether a file is imported or exported to maintain an undefiled conscience, an accurate discernment of its nature is required if the Christian is to mortify it with effectiveness.

We’ve all done shameful things in our past lives while we lived for the lusts of our flesh according to the spirit of disobedience which works in all the children of Adam. Many of these past doings have become permanently embedded in our minds, the same way a computer keeps indelible tabs on someone’s browsing history and everything they’ve downloaded. The powers of the air that control the ebbing and flowing of the world-system are forensic experts at flushing out these old files from the reserve bank of our memory. They will whisper corrupt suggestions that seem to come from your core being; the tactic behind it is to get you to think the thoughts are yours. In order to prevent a spiritual virus from developing into a stronghold, you must be able to immediately “scan” the suggestion or thought, unmask its wicked genesis, and delete it from your system.

Based on the many shameful things we’ve done before becoming Christians, there are pitfalls all over the road which we need to be aware of. It can be a song, a smell, or a photograph that pulls the computer file out from your mind’s reserve and into the forefront of your active recollection. If mortification is avoided, we can find ourselves suddenly reliving the past event in striking detail. These bouts of ghastly recollections increase over time to keep their corrupt files raw and near to the surface. Dear saints, we must be quick in our banishment of these impure ruminations. Paul himself exercised mental restraint in this area, as disclosed in the letter to the believers in Philippi: “Forgetting those things which are behind me…” (Phil. 3:13-14). One can only imagine the effort of mortification on Paul’s part to keep at bay the haunted memories of a man who once, by his own admission “breathed murder” against the followers of Christ.

There are pitfalls along the way as we follow Christ in this world, a myriad of ghosts rising to the surface to thwart our passage. The powers of hell are able to summon a thousand-and-one surmising impurities to steal your peace. If they cannot make a breach while you are awake, they will try to rape your mind while you sleep. This explains all those filthy dreams that leave you feeling so violated and sinful in the morning. The enemy knows his chances of infiltration without mortification increases significantly when the believer’s mind is wandering along in unsupervised dreamscape.

According to scripture, the mind renewed in Christ is likened as unto a weapon. “…arm yourselves likewise with the same mind…” (I Peter 4:1-2). Have you ever thought of your mind as a piece of armament, a weapon, as a means to mortify sinful impulses? The renewed mind in Christ is just that. It is with the Spirit-renewed mind that we dismantle satanic strongholds, take down ungodly imaginations and decimate anything that dare exalts itself against God’s Word (II Cor. 10:3-5).

Apart from being a mighty weapon when apprehended by the Spirit, the mind is also the channel by which scripture is transferred into the heart when it is obeyed. Once established in the heart, God’s Word becomes a fiery sword of protection. Being renewed in the spirit of your mind is akin to have a loaded cannon trained on the enemy. As soon as he attacks you with lust, a volley of living scripture explodes to repel his assualt. Remain therefore vigilant and sober and girded-up at all times. The forensic experts can surface as many files as they wish, but they will all dissolve in the face of God’s truth.

My dear Christian reader, fortify your mind with God’s Word and hide it well in your heart. Let God’s truth dwell within you richly with all wisdom each day. Wisdom obeyed is light conveyed.

How Your Ministry Can Become an Oasis

When we categorically mortify temptation and yield not to the urgings of our flesh by the grace of the Spirit, we enter into a blessed realm of God’s peace, joy and protection. If our conscience remains undefiled, our hearts can draw confidence to enter into God’s presence without any hindrance (I John 3:21). As we continue to walk in the light of the Holy Spirit, we receive more light and revelation on scripture that pertains to our sanctification. We gain precious insight on the cleansing and restorative power of the blood of Jesus Christ; insight impossible to obtain but by divine experience through a continuous obedience to the light God has already given you. This is a law, then, of God: to him who has (light), more will be given (as he obeys).

The Lord has given us all a measure of light. The reason some believers grow in grace and go on unto perfection, where other believers remain spiritually paralyzed is due to how they respond to light. When God gives a man light, the revelation often involves some form of mortification; that is, certain areas of his life to which God is calling him to surrender. The very word “surrender” denotes death by relinquishment. An area of self must die to whatever inner earthly habit or fleshly pleasure God has put a finger on. Though God has decreed that such a thing must go, He puts the responsibility of mortification in our power and observes how we respond. Our response determines if we continue to go on unto perfection (Hebrews 6:1), or if we remain where we are in the school of God. If we say “amen” to God’s will and collaborate with His Spirit in putting the thing to death, new light is automatically given and advancements made.

The blessings that spring from saying “amen” to God’s decrees of death are truly monumental. Through the putting to death of that which God commands, life-giving power bursts forth from our spirits to bless other believers. We find the very same seed that fell to the earth suddenly springing up into life as a living tree, giving edification to all those who sit beneath the coolness of its shade.

The way God works blessed mortification is by first purifying our hearts and then by showing us our part in maintaining the purity. He guides us through His Word with blessed instruction on how to take every thought captive in order to keep strongholds from re-invading our hearts; He shows us the substance with which we ought to keep our minds “busy”: with things that are true and honest, just and pure, of good report, things that are lovely and virtuous and praiseworthy; He shows us that mortification is a daily affair and not a one-time-fix occurrence, and He gives us a deeper understanding and a divine revelation on the cleansing power of the blood of Christ.

As we walk in this constant state of mortification, and as we continuously abide in Christ by faith for the power to mortify, continuously under the blood, and continuously in a state of heart-confidence for prayer, rich blessings of grace and maturity immediately flow forth from our vessels to water other believers. Through the holy act mortification, our ministries become an oasis of life and deliverance to those in bondage and spiritual depression. Captives are set free, prayers are answered, Satan is vanquished, God is glorified.

Covet God’s Strict Dealings With You

God deals very strictly with His children in matters of mortification. The more mature a believer becomes, the more ruthless God is in detecting unchristlikeness within the believer’s vessel. His strictness begins to require immediate resolve. This is because there is a war going on that you and I cannot afford to lose. God has placed us in this war for our perfecting, but very often that which was meant for perfection becomes tragic when the battle is not fought within God’s order of fire. To maintain field sobriety and a readiness to be tactically instant in any season, God begins dealing with our sin in a ruthless way. There is a divine purpose behind His inflexibility: we have much things to do in His strength and for His glory…but we are only here on earth for a brief period. In a vapor’s time we will be gone.

In the meantime, there is a battle raging, the field of which is the mind. Fiery darts bombard our minds each day from the camp of Satan and our fleshly nature, seeking to enter our hearts for embracement by way of temptation. The discernment of the Holy Spirit exposes each flaming dart as it attempts to lodge into our minds. Mortification prevents this entry from beginning in the mind. God tells us that a person without mortification in this regard is like a city broken down and without walls (Proverbs 25:28). Every suggestion, every impulse needs to be discerned before we let it into our minds for rumination. The Spirit of God works in us the will to withstand evil and the enabling grace necessary to win the victory. Our task in the battle is to simply answer “amen” to His instruction and to keep looking onto Jesus Christ.

We are told to keep our minds strong and tight (I Peter 1:13); to keep our minds occupied by pure and wholesome things which are approved by God (Philippians 3:13-14); to scrutinize and arrest any and all unauthorized thoughts (II Corinthians 10:3-5); to keep our hearts and minds in peace by not worrying (Philippians 4:6-7); to diligently keep our hearts from being subverted (Proverbs 4:23); to protect our hearts by taking on the very mind of Christ (Philippians 2:5); to be renewed in the spirit of our minds (Ephesians 4:23); to be transformed by the renewing of our minds to know the perfect will of God (Romans 12:2); to have rule over our own spirits (Proverbs 16:32; 25:28); to not allow past failings to torment us (Philippians 3:13,14); to mortify by “putting on” the Lord Jesus Christ (Romans 13:14), so that by failing to provide the flesh with substance, the lusts of body will not be fulfilled; and to “arm” ourselves with the same mind Jesus Christ had, unto suffering in the flesh to the ceasing of sin (I Peter 4:1-2).

All these verses and many others speak in some way of mortification and the subsequent guardianship of the mind and heart. By the Word of God and faith, make it your business to put to death the deeds of the body and thus keep the gates of your mind girded and heart pure. This is an area of teaching in Christianity which remains conspicuously silent in the pulpits, because of what it involves and what it demands. Mortification is often considered legalistic because so very few believers actually understand and enter into the true experience. To those, however, who have been brought to the place of relinquishing all they have at the feet of Jesus Christ, mortification is a quiet, hidden death that begets a life of tremendous power and victory.

Dear saint, if you would be an ambassador of Christ and a fragrance of life to the world around you, make it your life’s ambition to mortify by the Holy Spirit any trace of unchristlikeness found in your members as soon as God graciously shines His light upon it. Covet God’s unswerving ruthlessness in your life in revealing any risings of the flesh against the inner man of your heart. This is the mark of sonship! Die daily to your flesh’s nature, deny yourself, accept the resulting pain as high honor, suffer temporarily in the flesh and thus cease from sin. Your Heavenly Father will reward you openly for that which you give in private. He will establish your heart in holiness and lead your feet in paths of righteousness for His glory. Render unto Him therefore truth in the inward parts; turn away from all inner idols and wait upon His strength to fill your spirit. Offer up sacrifices through Christ, and His high honor and pleasure will be upon your life.