Every Christian who genuinely tries to follow Christ fights a war on three battlefronts. This war fighting is in no way limited to race, or sex, or status, or education, or age, or any other factors which separate us into groups. All Christians fight this war on the same three fronts, and only those three fronts. First, we fight a war against our own flesh. Second, we fight a war against the world in which we live. Third, we fight a war against the devil and his spiritual forces. These three fronts often converge in the battlespace of our minds.
Our flesh is the material part of us that became corrupted at the fall of mankind (Genesis 3, Genesis 6:12). It hates God’s ways and lives to satisfy only itself. In fact, when it occasionally appears to submit to God’s ways, it generally does so out of fear rather than out of love for his goodness. After the fall it became self-destructive, unbridled, and partially unintegrated from the human mind and spirit with which it was originally divinely harmonized. It strives only to integrate mind and spirit when they submit to its desires. Its bent toward assuming supremacy accounts for uncontrolled urges toward gluttony, lust, sexual gratification, aggression, selfishness, greed, and all manner of other self-serving instinctual survival states of being. To win on this front as a follower of Christ, you must set your mind toward spiritual realities – training it to prefer spiritual things over transient fleshly things (Romans 8:5-6). The world, on the other hand, is the organized integration of all individual human flesh. It is the civilization of men and women built to serve the needs and desires of the flesh (James 1:14, 4:14 ). It is restrained only by the spirit of God, and the godly men and women who exist within it. The world will sell things to your lusts and gluttonies. It is always tempting you and trying to bend your mind to justify the desires and needs of your fallen flesh. It will tell you whatever you want to hear so that you will desire to buy what it is selling. Do you want to destroy your opponents? Then it will sell you skills to hurt the people who oppose you. Do you want a sexual experience? Then it will sell you pornography, prostitution, perversion, and infidelity. Do you want culinary pleasure? Then it will tell you its ok to enjoy as many doughnuts as you like. It sells you I, I, I, and Me, Me, Me, so that those who are doing the selling can in the same way please themselves. You combat the world by not conforming your pattern of life to its ways – and you do that by renewing your mind toward the will of God and the goodness of his ways (Romans 12:1-2). Further, whenever you use your renewed mind and your submitted body to do mission work, then you bring the world a little more into alignment with God’s ways. This makes it a better place that properly bridles flesh instead of tempting it toward wrong.
Finally, the devil is a real spiritual being with his dirty spiritual fingers in everybody’s pies, but especially in the structures of the world (Ephesians 6:12). He has an army of cosmic rulers and authorities on his side. His desire is to kill, steal and to destroy, and to keep you from integrating your flesh, your spirit, and your mind in submission to God’s goodness. In fact, he wants you separated from the goodness of God because he wants you enslaved to himself. Resist him by submitting to God, and he will flee from you (James 4:7).
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