The Shiny Foil Wrappers

10 October 2023

Many times here in Englewood, I’ve seen Christians practicing so-called “Christian charity” by giving warm burritos to homeless folks. They’re doing exactly the same thing as when our local pagans give out burritos. Exactly. Right down to the delicious bacon crumbles and those shiny foil wrappers.

The parallels are really quite disturbing. Satan disguises himself as an angel of light, people! Don’t be deceived!

***

“Pagans do something that looks like this” isn’t a valid means of discernment. Pagans pray, perform acts of charity, eat apple pie, go to work, wear clothes, make love, raise children. Pagans turn water into blood and staffs into snakes, and yet Moses is one of the good guys. We have to learn to pay attention to the difference that makes a difference.

An American soldier from WWII and a German soldier from WWII look an awful lot alike in dress and equipment. Suppose we have those two men in a lineup, along with a Minuteman and a Navy SEAL with the latest equipment. Which ones look most alike? The two guys from WWII, of course–but that doesn’t tell you which side they’re on.

We want discernment to be easier than it is. We want the good guys to look entirely unlike the bad guys. We want criteria we can photograph from across the street, and very often, it just doesn’t work that way. If we’re to believe the examples furnished to us in Scripture itself, God regularly steps over lines we wouldn’t. We need a discernment in the church that’s willing to reckon with the kinds of surprises God likes to give us.

  • There was no biblical precedent for God revealing Himself in a burning bush or a wet fleece…and yet He did.
  • Touching bones makes you unclean, and yet the guy who touched Elisha’s bones was raised from the dead.
  • Touching lepers makes you unclean too, but Jesus did–and they didn’t make Him unclean; He made them well! He let an immoral woman touch Him, too.

The key in all these things is not “does this look like something the pagans might do?” The key is “What has God given us permission to do? Is He in this?”

If the answer is yes, then get to it.

Comments Off on The Shiny Foil Wrappers | Discernment, Functioning Supernaturalism | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Whose Faith Follow

12 September 2023

Once upon a time, I was a doctrine wonk. I honestly believed that if we just got the doctrine right, we would live well. My community valued correct exegesis and theology, and invested enormous effort in doing them well. As one of their fair-haired sons, and I got paid to research, write, and teach at seminary. It was a geek’s dream job, and I loved it….  

<cue spooky music>

…then the whole community tore itself apart. Some of the best exegetes and theologians I knew went for each other’s throats. I’d love to say that I stayed above the fray, but I didn’t. My personal loyalties were with one side, but I also thought they were exegetically and theologically more correct…at first.

I quickly began to realize that the conflict wasn’t actually about doctrine. That’s a big claim, but it’s true. The doctrinal differences were not entirely insignificant, but there was ample room for everyone involved to continue working together. A number of close observers and secondary participants, myself included, suggested ways to move forward, but there was a problem we couldn’t solve: the principals didn’t want unity. The doctrinal difference was a smokescreen, a way to make the conflict respectable. The real problems were personal and relational: abundance of offense, lack of repentance and forgiveness, and lack of sufficient emotional maturity to address the personal conflicts.

I slowly began to realize that even if the problem were primarily doctrinal, we were handling it poorly. As I dug into Scripture looking for instructions and patterns for handling this kind of conflict, I kept coming back to Acts 15. This chapter is the first big doctrinal conflict in the Church, and the pattern that it sets upholds the unity of the Body of Christ as a cardinal doctrine and practice for Christians. I’ve written on this at great length elsewhere, so I’m not going to belabor the point here. Outward unity that is visible to observing unbelievers is Jesus’ prayer to the Father for us, it is the manner in which we win the world, and without unity right down to the practical level of seating arrangements at supper, we are not being straightforward about the gospel. It’s a big deal. 

Once I had gotten this far, God moved me to Englewood, Colorado, to see unity in practice. 

In Englewood, I met a group of pastors who got along. They prayed with and for each other. They blessed each other’s ministries. Every once in a while, they preached in each other’s churches. They gathered their churches once a year for a joint worship service. Were they all the same denomination? Not even close. We had Messianic Jews, Southern Baptists, Assemblies of God, Dutch Reformed, Anglican, Bible church guys, nondenominational, Missouri Synod Lutheran, and more. With far less common doctrinal basis than my seminary faculty had, the Englewood pastors created a far greater obedience than we had ever dreamed of. What was I to make of that?

“Remember those who rule over you, who have spoken the word of God to you, whose faith follow, considering the outcome of their conduct.” The author of Hebrews 13:7 is talking specifically about our relationship to our local church leaders, but the principle applies. Pay attention to the outcome of your leaders’ conduct. Follow the faith of those whose fruit is good; do not follow the faith of those whose fruit is bad. 

So what did the Englewood pastors have that my seminary faculty did not? There actually are some relevant doctrinal pieces here, but that’s another post. The first and most important common element wasn’t doctrinal at all. It was obedience, straight up the middle. Jesus wanted us to be one, and they set out to find a way. They knew they weren’t going to be able to iron out every little doctrinal difference, and they were looking for ways to obey anyhow. Turns out, when we start looking for ways to obey instead of reasons not to, a lot of things are possible.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Wearing the Old Jacket?

22 August 2023

I was raised with a particular picture of what the terms “old man” and “new man” mean in the Bible. We took them to refer respectively to our continuing proclivity for sin, and our new nature in Christ. We would illustrate this (literally) as two tiny people fighting it out for dominance in the human heart. As it turns out, that picture was entirely wrong.

Colossians 3:9-10 says you already have put off the old man and put on the new. Ephesians 4:20-24 says the same thing: you already put off the old man, you are being renewed in the spirit of your mind, and you already put on the new man. (The grammar in Ephesians 4 is arguable, and it would be difficult to nail down if that were the only passage we had, but the grammar in Colossians is very clear, as is Romans, and Ephesians 2:15 nails it down nicely, as we’ll see below.) Romans 6:6 says the old man was crucified with Christ.

The renewing of your mind is an ongoing process, but the old man/new man transaction is not. Moreover, the old man and the new man are not inside of you; you are inside of them. Think of it like a jacket: when you take an old jacket off and put a new one on, you aren’t still wearing the old jacket. You were in the old man, but he was crucified with Christ and you put him off, and now you have put on the New Man, and you are in Him. It is helpful here to remember that “Adam” literally means “man.” You were in the old Adam, and now you are in the new Adam, Christ. The old man is your corporate identity in Adam, and the new man is the Body of Christ, as Ephesians 2:15 pointedly says.

So if I have put off the old man, Adam, and have put on the new man Christ, why I am still drawn to sin, and I still sin regularly? Ephesians 4:20-24 gives us a hint already — our mind is being renewed. Some part of the process is still under way, which means it’s not done yet. Romans fleshes it out a little more, and the best way to see it is to start with a puzzle. At the end of Romans 7, Paul–already a believer–cries out, “Wretched man that I am — who will deliver me from this dead body?” In the beginning of Romans 12, Paul challenges us to present our bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God. So the question is, what happens between these two passages that transforms the dead body into a holy and acceptable sacrifice?

The answer is in Romans 8:10-11. Your body is dead, which is to say, unresurrected. The world still waits for the redemption of our bodies. Christ paid for it at the cross, but the reality for which He paid has not yet come to fruition. But in the meantime, the Holy Spirit is alive in you, and so God does something which is fundamentally impossible: He gives life (now!) to your dead body through the Holy Spirit. So you are a hybrid being. Your inner man is redeemed (“I delight in the law of God according to the inward man”), but your body is not yet redeemed. Your inner man is alive, and your body is dead. Therefore there is a struggle between the two. The struggle will one day be resolved by the resurrection of your body. Until then, your mind is being renewed, and God is working a miracle in your body, to allow your dead body to be a living instrument of righteousness. It makes no sense and it shouldn’t be possible, but there it is — a continual miracle.

The ascetics grasped the death of the body and the life of the spirit, but rushed to the wrong practical solution. Instead of trusting God to work the miracle of life, they attempted to be sanctified through what they could do, which was bring death. Unable to strengthen the spirit, they decided to weaken the body. But that is not the solution that Paul presents to us in the passage. The passage doesn’t say to put the body to death; it says to put the body’s deeds to death. And Colossians 2:16-23 tells us that the various artificial restrictions designed to weaken the body are actually of no value in our struggle against sin.

Of course there is a bodily discipline that profits, but it is discipline, not destruction. The ascetics got it fundamentally wrong. But we’re trying the same thing anyway — and I believe that’s why the two nature view is so popular. It gives us something to do: fight that sin nature! The only difference is, we have “spiritualized” the struggle by making it against an immaterial “sin nature” rather than our material flesh. But making the enemy less visible doesn’t change the fundamental nature of the error.

The thing most necessary for us is something which we cannot do for ourselves: for God to give life to our bodies, for God to work the continuing miracle in us that makes it possible for us to present our bodies to Him as a holy and acceptable sacrifice.

It is easier to fight against sin than it is to lean on God. (Actually, it’s not easier — it’s impossible. But it’s easier on our pride, which is the point.) We can fight against sin without involving God in any immediate way. Rather than admit my helplessness and cry out to God to deliver me right now, I can struggle, trying to whip my sins from sheer force of will. It’s a doomed effort, but it’s that or admit I can’t do it and become a mystic.

The miracle we’re talking about is not just an arrangement of mental furniture or a set of secret principles that I can choose to live by. Someone Who is not me shows up and does things in my heart that make it possible for me to live righteously, when otherwise I could not. That offends us. We hunger for the illusion that we can do it, that we have it under control. In the Protestant world, we’re more than happy to admit that we would be powerless to resist sin without the finished work of Christ in the past, so long as we are spared the humbling experience of moment-by-moment dependence on Him. But that is what we are called to: we put off Adam and put on Christ.

Only He can save us.

***

Editorial note: if the discussion in the comments below intrigues you and you’d like to hear more, read Portraits of Righteousness.

7 Comments | Functioning Supernaturalism, Mystical Union | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Donovan’s Dumb Idea

15 August 2023

Aaron Renn’s most recent newsletter reviews two popular books on manhood that approach the subject from a neopagan outlook: Jack Donovan’s The Way of Men and Ryan Landry’s Masculinity Amid Madness. Renn’s treatment is solid, and I commend it to you; this is a supplementary observation.

One of Donovan’s big points is that historically speaking, men have functioned in small, single-sex groups: hunting parties, construction crews, military squads, and so on. He’s right about that, and although contemporary male single-sex spaces are rapidly being overrun, it still happens to some extent in all the above examples, plus more modern expressions like sports teams or musical bands. Donovan argues that setting continues to be the best environment for men, proffers various prescriptions for regaining such an environment in the present day (which we should, somehow), and–here’s the howler–longs for the collapse of civilization so that roving bands of men might once again flourish on the landscape. Which is to say, he misses the whole point of all the sacrifices his ancestors made.

What those small bands of men have done, for thousands of years, is build. They built lives and homes and farms, won and married women, raised families, built towns and cities. The society that presently surrounds us is the fruit of their labors over thousands of years. That society is presently doing its best to kill its men, pursuant to killing itself, true enough. But so what?

Once upon a time–not too long ago, actually–the killers were starvation, contaminated water, large predators, infected wounds, etc. Our ancestors solved those problems. Today’s killer is a different problem entirely: a cultural autoimmune disorder. Facing a danger he doesn’t know how to navigate, Donovan’s best idea is to wipe out the accumulated contributions of generations of his ancestors, in hopes that he can spend his life going over the same familiar ground, working problems they had already solved for us. This is why you can’t trust pagans with history; they keep trying to act like it’s a circle. But the timeline is a line. History is written by God Himself, and it’s going somewhere.

The past certainly has a wealth of lessons to teach us, but the cutting edge of masculinity will never be back there in the rearview mirror. It’s here, now. The job isn’t to go back and fight hungry bears or bust sod; it’s to wrest our dying young men from the tentacles of legal weed and highly available porn, to snatch them from gears of the secularist sausage grinder that’s trying to crush them into androgynous units of consumption. Our challenge is to disciple them, to be makers and doers and inspire them to join us, to strengthen their hands in building what is true, good and beautiful–to be lights in a darkening time. We can’t do that by ignoring the past, but we can’t do that by repeating it, either.

Comments Off on Donovan’s Dumb Idea | Equality and Difference of Man and Woman, New Fundamentals | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Break Their Teeth? Really?

18 July 2023

Regular readers here know I’m a big advocate of singing the Psalms. On the (unfortunately rare) occasions that believers seriously engage in that project, a question comes up pretty quickly: “What do I do with these psalms?”

It ain’t all “As the deer panteth for the water” in the Psalter. There are also prayers that God would break the arm of the wicked (Psalm 10) or their teeth (Psalm 58), pursue and persecute them (Psalm 35), drive them away and kill them (Psalm 68) and so on. What’s a Christian to do with these prayers?

Sing them, that’s what. Three times the New Testament says we should sing psalms (Ephesians 5:19, Colossians 3:16, and James 5:13). The phrase “psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs” is possibly open-ended enough to include more than just the 150 biblical psalms, but it’s certainly not talking about singing less than what God gave us.

As to how we pray them appropriately, it’s important to read them in context. It’s easy for us to read these psalms in terms of middle-class North America, which is pretty tame by comparison to the times and places these psalms were actually written. You may wonder “When would I ever pray that?” because you’ve never faced the kind of adversity that the psalmist was facing. David has Saul trying to kill him, and murdering every man, woman, and child in the city of priests along the way. It’s not so hard to see how these prayers are appropriate in actual life-and-death struggle with genuinely murderous enemies who are killing innocent people.

In less dire situations, the prayers should reflect the reality at hand. You don’t ask God to break the teeth of your barista because she messed up your latte order. Not even if she did it on purpose. “Let the rich glory in his humiliation, for as a flower of the field he passes away.” If that’s what adversity looks like for you, you’d better milk it for all the spiritual benefit you can.

You don’t pray “let his wife be a widow; let his children be vagabonds and beggars” because someone is running a little mean-girl scheme to get your funding reduced. Asking God to cause their designs to come to nothing and their trap to return on their own head might be more appropriate.

That said, there’s one more thing to remember: “With what judgment you judge, you will be judged, and with what measure you measure, it will be measured back to you. That cashes out in two ways: first, the way you forgive other people in this life is how God’s gonna treat you in this life, so bear that in mind when you make your requests. When you ask God to permanently stop someone who’s killing innocent people, you’re effectively also asking Him to do the same to you if you’re ever killing innocent people. You can and should be fine with that, but if you’re not, don’t pray that prayer.

Second, remember that “in wrath remember mercy” is also a biblical prayer, and something we should take to heart. Jesus asked His Father to pardon His murderers. Stephen, following Jesus’ example, prayed a similar prayer, and God honored that prayer by taking the young man who ran the coat check at the murder and turning him into the most famous missionary and church planter in Christian history. Modern martyrs — the Stams, those killed by the Ayore and the Waorani, the persecuted Russian and Chinese saints who died in the gulags and camps — rightly continue the tradition.

Do those examples mean that imprecations should be a thing of the past in the New Testament? It’s a good question, but the answer is no. Imprecatory psalms are invoked in the New Testament. Jesus invokes an imprecatory psalm in John 15:5. The early church follows suit in Acts 4:25, as does Paul in Romans 11:9. Peter applies the threat of Psalm 110 immediately and directly to his audience, in order to provoke repentance in Acts 2:34. There are other examples, but those will suffice to demonstrate that at minimum, Christians should still be reading these psalms and putting them to use in prayer and preaching. Clearly, if you’re serious about following the examples set by Jesus and His early followers, you can’t just exclude the rougher psalms out of hand; they didn’t.

One could use these examples and others to construct a more nuanced argument about the way we use these psalms now. In making that argument, you’ll also have to account for the existence of fresh New Testament imprecations. 2 Timothy 4:14, 1 Corinthians 16:22, Galatians 1:8-9, and Matthew 23 come to mind offhand, and to cap the stack, Revelation 6:10, by saints who can’t possibly be sinning because they’re already dead. There’s a great conversation to be had about how to do this well, but that is a post for another day.

For today, the reason you shouldn’t be averse to imprecatory prayer is very simple: the Bible plainly isn’t. Evangelical culture is, and that aversion is driven by sentiment, not Scripture.

2 Comments | liturgy, New Fundamentals, Prayer, Social Reality of the Fall, Speaking as God Speaks, Worship | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Niceness: A Unity-Breaking Disease

11 July 2023

I hang out in theology discussion groups some. In a particular (very doctrinally narrow) group, someone recently asked a question about non-theological issues in the group. “What things other than doctrine divide the group?” he wanted to know. As I mulled it over, it occurred to me that one of the biggest divides is our accepted modes of speech. Some of us seem to think that the speech norms of the faculty lounge should govern all Christians all the time; others of us don’t buy that. Now if you’re reading here, you probably already know that I am in the latter group. As far as I’m concerned, kindness is a virtue, but niceness is a disease. We should be willing to speak like Jesus did, and He didn’t say nice things and make everything smooth. He was willing to make things awkward and difficult for the sake of a jagged truth. Among brothers, of course, we have no business slinging a ‘truth bomb’ and then running away; Jesus never did that. We hang around for the whole conversation, and then move forward and work together regardless, because action for Jesus’ sake matters more than agreement on every little thing.

I’d made my defense for a more biblical mode of speech in that very group multiple times already (and mostly been rebuffed), so this particular question would hardly have been worth commenting on by itself. But it sparked another thought: many of the members of the group are also very, very specific about who they’ll fellowship with or collaborate with. “Is there a [___insert affiliation here___] church near my town?” is a frequent question in the group. The responses will always include tales of people who drive 60 miles to get to a church they can stomach, others who are listening to an internet broadcast from another state, and still others who’ve simply given up for lack of a local fellowship they can be satisfied with. Still others, having found a local church that meets their exacting specifications, are busy pretending that all the other local churches don’t exist.

The same people who upbraid me for being coarse and disagreeable — people vastly nicer than I am, who want me to be nicer too — are unable to get along with the majority of their fellow Christians. You’d think that the niceness would make it easier, but it doesn’t seem to. Meanwhile, as rough as I sometimes am with people, I’m deeply embedded in two local churches, we routinely join up with other groups for prayer and sometimes for shared worship services, and our working partnerships span Anglican, Messianic, Charismatic, Baptist, Reformed, and more.

This to say, adherence to faculty-lounge norms of smooth speech does not seem to be the difference that makes a difference. There’s a divide between people who value honest community and people who value niceness, and it shows up in the way we’re able to minister. In my experience, honesty makes you able to minister in ways niceness can’t touch, and gives you partnerships you couldn’t get by being nice. So don’t be nice; be like Jesus. The more you’re like Him, the more you’ll be able to share life with others who are like Him, despite your disagreements. Truth is, talking and being like Jesus is your best shot at getting the disagreements resolved anyway.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

(Not) Fencing the Table

27 June 2023

“How do you fence the Table?” my friend asked me.

We were talking about the church service I host for homeless folks every Saturday night. For those of you not familiar with the terminology, he was asking how I regulate who is allowed to partake in the communion service.

I had a simple answer: “I don’t.”

I’m very much in the minority here. Across the history of the Church, the vast majority of churches have felt that since the Lord’s Table is a sacred thing, the church leadership should carefully regulate who is allowed to participate, and under what terms. I used to think the same way, but I noticed a few things that changed my perspective.

First, the Bible never tasks church leadership with fencing the table. It never tasks anybody with fencing the Table. The one place it talks about examining someone with reference to coming to the Table, it says “let a man so examine himself.” If I were going to fence the Table, I would need authority to do so–after all, it’s not my table, it’s the Lord’s Table. He has not delegated that authority to me as a church leader; therefore I may not do it.

Second, I noticed that the historical pattern is out of step with Jesus’ own way of being in the world. We fence the Table lest someone profane the body and blood of the Lord by partaking unworthily. Jesus gave Himself recklessly to a world that constantly received Him in an unworthy manner, and in the end gave His very body and blood to His enemies. Is it blasphemous? Of course! But it’s not my blasphemy; Jesus did it Himself. If I’m following Him, then why would I be paranoid about some pagan getting away with a wafer?

Third, I noticed that we haven’t empowered people to examine themselves well. We’ve taken self-examination to mean that you need to descend into morbid introspection and confess all your sins before you partake, lest God strike you down. That’s just not what the passage is talking about: you will ransack that whole chapter in vain looking for a mention of confessing your sins before the Table.

Rather, the passage talks about correctly discerning the Lord’s Body, and that’s what we need to present so people can self-examine and decide whether to partake. We need to say what Scripture says about the Table: “This is the body of Christ,” “This is the blood of Christ.” We need to say what Scripture says about the Body that celebrates at the Table: “You are the Body of Christ.” And we need to let people decide on that basis whether this is something they want to be part of. If they do, then we should do what Jesus did, and give them His body and blood.

Comments Off on (Not) Fencing the Table | Ecclesiology, How To, Speaking as God Speaks, Unity and Community of Christ's Body | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Making Room

6 June 2023

In 1 Samuel 20, Jonathan confronts a dilemma. David, his best friend, comes to him and wants to know, “Why is your dad trying to kill me?” Consider the awkward position this puts Jonathan in. He either has to believe that his dad is plotting his best friend’s murder, or he has to believe that his best friend is paranoid (or lying outright). He protests that surely his dad wouldn’t do any such thing without telling him, but David insists.

Now, this is the kind of thing that breaks up a friendship, or at least becomes a topic we never speak about, a “dead spot” in the friendship where we can’t share what we’re thinking…but not for these guys. They don’t stop talking to each other, and they don’t just “agree to disagree” and never speak of it again, either. I’ll let you read it for yourself, but here’s what I want you to notice: David does not indignantly demand that Jonathan just take his word for it. Jonathan does not minimize David’s assessment and insist that he come to the feast anyway.

They’re both men of conviction; neither one backs down, and neither one tries to bully the other into backing down. Instead, they take each other seriously, make room for each other, and pursue the truth together. They agree on a valid way to test the claim, and God gives them an unambiguous result.

If we’re going to walk closely with one another as family—the “these are My mother and My brothers” sort of family—then we have to find ways to do this. Relationships predicated on agreeing all the time last about 15 minutes on a good day. But if we can make room for each other, hold the space for disagreement while we seek the truth together, then we can walk a long, long way together.

All the way to the New Jerusalem, in fact.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

No Coffee in Israel

14 March 2023

My latest article is up at Theopolis. Have a look!

Comments Off on No Coffee in Israel | Ecclesiology, Love of Generous Fruitfulness, Mentoring/Disciple-Making, New Fundamentals | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Overemphasizing God?

7 February 2023

In the run-up to the panel discussion on the Holy Spirit that my friend Chris hosted for Gulfside Ministries, I was mulling over a series of questions that he was planning to toss to the panel. I had a strong opinion about one particular question, but just for fun, I decided to toss the questions to my apprentice and see what she thought. I didn’t tell her any of what I was thinking; I just said “I have the list of talking points for that panel tomorrow — want to see it?” Like me, she’s a theology nerd, so of course she did.

She looked them over, and pinged on the same question I had. “There seems to be on one hand an over-intellectualizing of the faith that minimizes the HS as well as an overly-mystical approach to the faith that overemphasizes the HS. Perhaps not minimizing or overemphasizing but something else. In terms of major errors, is this a proper framing?” She read the question, pondered for a moment, and then asked, “How does one overemphasize a person of the Godhead?”

How, indeed. I made my case for reframing the question in that discussion, which you’re welcome to watch, but there’s a piece of it I want to develop here.

What is it that we think the Holy Spirit does? Do we think that He tries to get us to do irresponsible, disorderly things? Is it the case that we need to hem the Spirit in with Scriptures to get him to behave?

No. Holy Spirit is not some slightly better behaved Bacchus who’s going to drive us mad for His own personal amusement. He is the God of the universe. It is He who inspired the Scriptures to start with. When an assembly (like Corinth) goes completely bananas to the point that those who are outside the church come in and it seems that everyone’s lost their minds (you can read about this in 1 Cor. 12-15), it is not because they “overemphasize the Holy Spirit.”

It is because they are far from Him. In their theologizing, they may talk about the Holy Spirit all the time, but they’re liars, aren’t they? The Spirit does not lead you to commit sin. The Spirit is a God of order, not confusion. What they are doing, these people who “overemphasize the Spirit,” is blaming their own stupid and irresponsible excesses on the Spirit. It is precisely because they are failing to follow the Spirit’s leading that their excesses have a chance to creep in: “I say then, walk in the Spirit, and you will not fulfill the lusts of the flesh, for the flesh lusts against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh….”

The Spirit lusts against the flesh. The Spirit is at war; He wants all the territory for Himself. And He’ll take it, if we let Him. When we insist on going our own way, all manner of disobedience creeps in as a knock-on consequence. We cannot avoid being the puppets of our lusts apart from the Spirit.

So walk in the Spirit, and you will not fulfill the lusts of the flesh.

Comments Off on Overemphasizing God? | Functioning Supernaturalism, Mystical Union, New Fundamentals | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

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