Pastor John,
This latest Blog is so good! Ben and I just finished a wonderful conversation after reading this blog and I wanted to share. I was telling Ben what I have heard you say many times that when you receive the holy Ghost, it’s like being nailed to the cross. You’ve told us that even though you may be nailed to the cross, that flesh is not willing to give up so easily. And there have even been some who survived the cross after they were taken down. You have told us that we must let that flesh (our carnal mind) die! And how many times when praying for us, have you laid hands on us and exhorted us to, “Let Him Live!” I told Ben that we have two choices: we can feed the flesh or we can feed the Spirit. How do we feed the flesh? It boils down to how we spend our free time: What we watch, what we listen to, what we read, where we go, who we spend time around. Are we feeding our flesh by mostly doing those things that our old carnal nature always loved, or are we feeding our Spirit by “taking time to be holy”. We have the choice. Are we going to feed the flesh and starve the Spirit, or will we starve the flesh and feed the Spirit? Only by feeding our Spirit, will we be able to develop the mind of Christ and have the strength we need to overcome this world.
It was so encouraging to read this line at the end of the blog, “But if we live according to the Spirit, even the weakest of us will overcome the world”. That says to me that anyone with the spirit of God can overcome this world, no matter how weak he may feel. We may be weak, but He is strong so let’s let Him live!
Hurry home, we all miss you!!
Lee Ann
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The Danger of a Carnal Mind
Immediately, while he was yet speaking, Judas appeared, who was one of the twelve, and with him a large multitude with swords and clubs sent by the chief priests, and the scribes, and the elders. Now, the one who betrayed him had given them a cue, saying, “Whoever I kiss is the man. Arrest him, and lead him away under guard.” And when he had come, he went up at once to him, and said to him, “O Rabbi! Rabbi!” And he kissed him affectionately. Then they laid their hands on him and arrested him. . . . And then Jesus answered and said to them, “Did you come out as against a robber, with swords and clubs to capture me? I was with you every day, teaching in the temple, and you didn’t arrest me. But this has happened so that the scriptures might be fulfilled.” And then they all forsook him and fled. Mark 14:43–46, 48–50
God sent His Son to the best people on earth, Israel, whom He had chosen and blessed with His law and with His prophets. They were the best people, not because they were in themselves better than others, but because God had given them His law and His prophets to prepare them for the coming of His Son, their Messiah. No other nation was even close to being prepared for the Son because no other nation had been given the blessings that God had given to Israel. Had God sent His Son to any other nation on earth, the people there would have ridiculed him more viciously, abused him cruelly, and killed him much sooner than the Jews did. Jesus survived as long as he did in Israel only because the human nature in Israelites had been tamed, to an extent, even within those who did not honor God’s law and prophets.
Paul listed some of God’s blessings on Israel in his letter to Roman believers:
Romans 9:
- There have even been times I prayed to be accursed from Christ for my brothers, my kinsmen according to the flesh,
- who are the Israelites, whose are the adoption, and the glory, and the covenants, and the giving of the law, and the service of God, and the promises,
- whose are the fathers, and from whom, according to the flesh, is Christ, who is above all. God be blessed forever. Amen.
The Bible makes it very clear that most of the people in Israel failed to take advantage of those blessings and be prepared for the Son. But some did; some were thankful for God’s mercy, and they obeyed His law and believed His prophets. Jesus’ disciples were among them. They were among the best of the best.
At the same time, before the day of Pentecost in Acts 2, the disciples were without the Spirit (Jn. 14:17) and were still carnally minded. They still had hope for a worldly kingdom (cf. Acts 1:6), and sometimes, even during the Last Supper, they bickered over who would occupy the most exalted offices in that kingdom (Lk. 22:24). They were still, as Paul would later say it, “in the flesh”, instead of in the Spirit. That is why in the Garden of Gethsemane, “they all forsook him and fled.”
The disciples had done very well to stay with Jesus until they arrested him at Gethsemane; they did the best that carnally minded men could do. Nobody on earth could have done any better. But they needed more power than they possessed at that time to go with Jesus all the way to the cross. That is the point that we do not want to miss.
The best that any of us can do as long as we have a carnal mind is to make it to the garden with Jesus; we cannot go all the way with him to the cross. The disciples loved Jesus, but they loved their own lives more. They feared God, but when the hardest trial came, they feared men more and forsook Jesus and fled quickly into the night. Jesus kept his disciples from falling as long as he was with them; he said so in his prayer to the Father at the Last Supper: “While I was with them in the world, I kept them in your name. Those you gave me, I watched over, and not one of them has been lost except the son of damnation so that the scripture might be fulfilled” (Jn 17:12). But Jesus could not keep them from deserting him in the end. They didn’t have the spiritual strength to go with him all the way, and there was nothing Jesus could do to change that except to die for them and offer himself to God as a sacrifice for their sin so that God would give them the same strength He had given to Jesus.
David was moved by the Spirit to say that man, even in his very best state, is altogether vanity (Ps. 39:5). The disciples proved how true that was when they forsook the Holy One they loved in order to save their own skin. But Jesus was not surprised or disappointed. He knew that even the best of the best people on earth could not go with him all the way to the cross and that they would desert him. Human nature cannot go all the way with Jesus.
In 1981, Jesus taught me that our greatest enemy is not Satan; it is our natural, carnal mind that does not and cannot know God or please Him. The natural, carnal mind with which we were born is more than just a hindrance to us; it is deadly. It is not just different from God’s ways and thoughts; it is contrary to them. “The flesh [that is, our fleshly nature] desires what is contrary to the Spirit, and the Spirit desires what is contrary to the flesh. These are opposed to one another,” Paul said.
If we who have the Spirit fail to develop the mind of Christ that is in the Spirit, if we remain carnally minded even after being given the Spirit, we may never see the face of God. Even the best of us will come short of the glory of God if we continue to think and live according to our fleshly nature after being made new creatures in Christ, partakers of God’s divine nature. But if we live according to the Spirit, even the weakest of us will overcome the world.
My friend, your night with Jesus in the garden surrounded by an angry mob is coming. Pray to escape your carnal mind, for the carnal mind will cause you to make the wrong choice, to forsake Jesus – and it will justify you for doing it – so that you, like his carnally minded disciples, flee into the darkness. No, our greatest enemy is not Satan; it is our own carnal nature, the old us that was without hope and without God in this world.