As Americans we have some unique problems that others do not in other countries. We believe we have rights: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. To those, we have added the rights of privacy, fairness, prosperity, opportunity, freedom of religion, weapons, fair trials, grand juries, reasonable treatment, and much more.
We expect these things. They are our right! The marketing world would have us believe that we have a right to respect, sex, beauty, fast cars, and on and on. Worldly politicians would have us believe we have the right to fairness, health care, good wages, and the rest of the entitlements.
The flesh loves to tout its rights. In truth, the only things the flesh can do well are feel, think, and sin. All of these are either highly suspect or downright evil. The problem is the flesh’s focus on self. We know that the flesh is desperately evil looking to be the center of our lives.
Feelings
These can be good or bad, but it is extremely difficult to tell as they occur. The main thing is that they are untrustworthy as far as the Kingdom is concerned. “I have the right to my feelings!” This is something I have heard countless times over the years.
It is true you have the right to your feelings. What is not ever said is that you also have the responsibility to discern your feelings to see if they have any basis in reality.
Thoughts
We have covered (in the 4-part series on finding intimacy with God) the three sources of thoughts in your mind. The mind is an amazing thing. It is the only interface between the spirit and the flesh. For the spirit to direct your life it requires permission from your mind.
But our minds are so limited as far as data input is concerned that they are virtually useless to determine truth, good, or anything that really matters. Left to its own devices, the mind can at best react well to worldly input. It gets no spiritual input from good until you meet Jesus and are born again from God.
The only right the flesh really has is payment for our personal manner of living. And the payment for this is death. That is what we have earned and what we deserve. See Romans 1–6.
None of these so-called rights mentioned above are Biblical. We don’t even have the right to life. Scripture clearly states that the wages of sin are death and that we are all sinners. We have earned death. If you think you haven’t we really need to talk. All we can do is throw ourselves on the mercy of a loving, kind, generous, gentle, patient King. Thank God we have one. Thank God He is our fiancée and we can absolutely trust Him.
The key to coming to know the Lord is giving up our life itself. Jesus said this many times in the Gospels. Here’s one example from Matthew that I read this morning.
Jesus said to his disciples, “If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. 25 For whoever would save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. [Matthew 16: 24–25 rsv]
Many are confused by the phrase “take up your cross”. It’s simple. A cross is not putting up with a nagging wife, a lazy dictatorial husband, a nosy neighbor, an overbearing boss. A cross is a tool of execution—a method of killing. When Jesus asks us to take up our cross, he is saying that we must die.
We must be willing to lay down any part of our old self to be replaced with the new life welling up from inside. The problem is that this is not taught very often. I should be able to assume that when you were baptized you were taught that you were laying down your life—allowing it to be killed. That you were going to die. That you would be resurrected by the power of the Holy Spirit that raised Jesus. Right?
Our death is what Paul told us in Romans 6: 3–8 actually happens in our baptism.
Or have you forgotten that when we were joined with Christ Jesus in baptism, we joined him in his death? For we died and were buried with Christ by baptism. And just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glorious power of the Father, now we also may live new lives.
For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. We know that our old self was crucified with him so that the sinful body might be destroyed, and we might no longer be enslaved to sin. For he who has died is freed from sin. But if we have died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with him.
There’s a marvelous story told about Martin Luther that he (at least once)
responded to a knock on the door like this.
A man stood there and asked if Martin Luther lived there.
Martin replied, “No, he died. Christ lives here now.”
As usual this is all based on the phrases in Christ and with Christ. Remember, Christ is not Jesus’ last name. Messiah might be a better translation, though it just means the anointed one. In English it’s Joshua the Anointed One; in Greek—Jesus Christ; in Hebrew—Yeshua Messiah.
The point is that we, the Body of the Messiah, are all one. Jesus is the head and we are the body, but the whole organism of which we are a part has been raised from the dead. That is what we are baptized into.
I believe that it is literally true that if the Holy Spirit left me right now, my flesh would drop dead. It is only alive because of the presence of the Holy Spirit in my spirit giving life to my flesh. My only problem with that is that my flesh keeps trying to resurrect itself.
For many of us this is all clouded by the fact that we were baptized as infants. The result is that we need some defining moment after we are actually born again to accept our death as reality.
Let’s not be religious
Baptism is required. Jesus showed us that. John asked him why he was being baptized and Jesus replied,
“It should be done, for we must carry out all that God requires.” [Matthew 3:15 nlt}
The alternative translation is we must fulfill all righteousness.
Originally, I just accepted my infant baptism as reality. But as Dad told me and I tell you—what’s good enough for Jesus is good enough for me. Later on [somewhere around 1983] our daughter decided she wanted to be baptized by immersion. Pat and I joined her in this. We did it not because we felt any need but simply because Jesus did it so we wanted to. Plus it fulfilled religious requirements for some of the churches within which we were ministering at that time. It was a purely religious event for both of us.
The point is that you must be baptized. Scripture does not specify the religious service necessary to accomplish this. It is between you and the Lord. If you have any doubts, get dunked and settle it in your mind. One advantage of an adult dunking is that you have an event to throw up to Satan when he tries to tell you that you cannot escape your flesh and its lusts. I see it as an execution of the old man—my carnal nature.
In part two, I’ll continue by sharing how it happened to me to show you that the Lord is not hung up on religious methodology. There is no way it should have worked for me—but the Lord…
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