Transformative Power of Scripture and Spiritual Warfare

In Paul’s letter to the church at Rome in the thirteenth chapter he makes this comment: “The night is far spent, and the day is at hand. Let us therefore cast off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light. Let us walk honestly, as in the day, not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying; but put on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the flesh to fulfill the lusts thereof.” [00:00:02]

And this man who was walking by stopped in his tracks and had this overwhelming sense of the intrusion into his life of divine providence. For there in the garden he saw a copy of the New Testament, and he had just heard these children shouting, “Pick up and read. Pick up and read.” And so he walked over, and he picked up the Scriptures and allowed the text to fall open wherever it did. [00:02:07]

And when it did, his eyes fell upon these words: “…Not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying; but put on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the flesh to fulfill the lusts thereof.” And when he read those words, it was as if each word of that text were an arrow that pierced his soul, and his conscience was so agitated by it that on the spot he was converted to Christianity. [00:02:39]

Augustine was converted by a passage that spoke directly to the conflict in life between the flesh and the spirit. I remember just a few years ago that Rod Serling, who was the creator of “The Twilight Zone,” entered into a business relationship with Bennett Cerf and a group of other men who were trying to find ways to discover new talent in the literary world, and they tried – they set up different contests to get young writers to become involved in this particular enterprise. [00:03:43]

But Augustine explained what it was that made him feel so remorseful. It wasn’t the bare act of stealing this fruit, but he said, “As I consider my life, and I consider the things that I have done that were evil, I can see that there were certain sins I fell into that though they were not excusable, they were certainly understandable.” [00:07:48]

He said, “But I stole pears when I didn’t like pears. That is, there is nothing that would stimulate my passions to steal those pears except one thing, and that was the sheer joy in doing something that I knew was wrong.” What Augustine was lamenting was the exercise of his fallen nature, of his flesh for the sheer joy of doing it. [00:09:06]

But ladies and gentlemen, that’s not something that is done simply by wild, unbridled, evil people. This last night I was reading once again the history of the holocaust in World War II, and I was particularly reading about what happened in Poland just prior to the establishment of the Warsaw ghetto and the creation of the Camp of Treblinka where the beginning stages of the final solution of genocide was being worked out. [00:11:01]

Paul speaks of a state of humanity that he calls “the flesh,” and we’ve already noticed that Luther said that the three – the great triad of enemies for the Christian growth contain the world, the flesh, and the devil. Now when we’re talking about the flesh I want us to understand, without getting into the technicalities of it, that when the Bible talks about the struggle that we go through with the flesh, it is not simply talking about the body. [00:13:06]

So that the whole struggle and process of sanctification involves what Paul calls ”warfare.” There’s a war going on, and it’s a war between the flesh of man and the Spirit of God. Now, I get so irritated when I hear preachers stand up and say, you know, “Come to Jesus and all your problems will be over,” because that’s just simply a lie. My life didn’t get complicated until I became a Christian. [00:14:22]

Though the power of the flesh is broken, and the power of the flesh is now subordinate to the Spirit to a very real measure in regeneration, the flesh, ladies and gentlemen, is not totally annihilated at conversion. The war goes on. Now, listen to what the apostle says in chapter eight of Romans. He says in verse four “…that the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in us who walk not after the flesh but after the Spirit. [00:16:10]

But some people have devised from that and from others the theories that there are different kinds of Christians – a carnal Christian who doesn’t have the Spirit of God and spiritual Christian who’s no longer carnal. Ladies and gentlemen, anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ is not a carnal Christian. He’s a carnal non-Christian, okay? So in that sense, “carnal Christian” is a contradiction in terms. [00:25:26]

A person who pleases God is a person who seeks the fruit of the Spirit in his life. [00:26:30]