The Battle

So I noticed that we were changing the hymn a little bit. So I thought I'd share with you. I got a letter this week from the American Evangelical Laodicean Church. They announced the publication of a new hymnal. It's a collection of hymns that capture the essence of our tradition, said Presiding Bishop Luke Armand. People in today's society get uncomfortable with too much talk about commitment and dedication. He continued, they'd rather have a religion that they can turn on and off at will. So here's a listing of some of the hymns they recommend. A comfy mattress is our God. I surrender some. Blessed be the tie that doesn't cramp my style. My hope is built on nothing much. And there's a lot more, I'll share them later. So, I got to thinking about the verses.

Last week, Roger talked about, but I say, walk in the Spirit. and you will not fulfill the lusts of the flesh or the desires of the flesh. For the flesh sets its desires against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh, and these are in opposition to one another, so that you may not do the things that you please."

So, I find it interesting, how well do we really understand what he's talking about here? I mean, how much time have you spent thinking about Well, what is it to walk in the Spirit? How do I do that? What am I going to be doing when I'm walking in the Spirit? And do I even have the capacity to distinguish in my heart the difference between what walking in the Spirit is and what the desires of my flesh are?

And so I think that verse 17 begins to expand on the issue. And so he says, sets its desires against the Spirit, sets its desires against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh, they're in opposition to one another. And what happens? So that I can't do the things that I want to do, the things that I please.

So we're talking about two powers here. The Holy Spirit's one power. And the flesh is another power. And a lot of times we don't even recognize within ourselves that these two powers are going on. And that they are at war with each other. The Spirit, as Roger so persuasively talked about last week, is the Holy Spirit Himself. Every believer is indwelt by the Spirit, the Holy Spirit.

And to walk in the Spirit, or by the Spirit, that verse says we don't carry out the desires of the flesh. The desires are there. We taught, I think it's been six or seven years ago, we did a class on the person and work of the Holy Spirit. And what's interesting about when you study the Holy Spirit, you find out that some of the things I thought He was, isn't, and some of the things that I didn't know really what He was, He is. And so, the first thing is that He's not an all-pervading divine influence. That's not what he is. And he's not just a power. And he certainly isn't the force from Star Wars. He's not the force.

But he is a person, number one. It's helpful for us to think about God, the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit, all three of them. They are persons. He's God with the attributes of God. And those attributes, He's omniscient, He's omnipresent, He's eternal. He is all of those things that the Lord Jesus is and that the Father is. Omnipresence means He's everywhere. Eternal means He always was and always existed. Omniscience means He knows everything. He's got all knowledge in play right now. And he's powerful. He's all-powerful. There isn't anything he can't do. So, he has works attributed to him such as he regenerates. He does that.

He indwells each one of us as believers and he indwelled people in the Old Testament for certain works. He seals us. Sealing is a really important thing for us as believers. He's the guarantee. of your salvation. He is. Not you. He is. And He's the one that baptizes us. He takes us out of Adam and He baptizes us into Christ. He does that. He is the divine life that's in us. That's Him. With all the characteristics of that divine life. So that's what the Spirit is.

On the other side, We're really at this point talking about two men. The two men in us. Because we all come from Adam to begin with, right? Every one of us can trace our lineage back to Adam, and we get everything that Adam is. We get all of his sinfulness, we get all of his standing before God, which is nothing. And so we're talking about two men. The first man we're going to talk about is Adam himself.

He sinned and he died. Death meaning separation. He was separated from God in terms of his unity with Him being a creature. He died in spirit. He died in soul and he also, 950 years later, he died in his body. So, he's totally dead to God. This is our boy Adam. He has a position as shown in his condition. He began to die experientially. Why? Because he was dead already spiritually and his soul was separated from God. So in God's mercy, it was 930 years later that he died physically, but he fully experienced the inevitable outcome of his position of death. He is in a position of death. So as the head of the human race now, He took all of humanity with him when he died. The whole concept that we talk about here of federal headship of in Adam all die.

If you come from Adam, and we all do, we're born into the same condition that he was. Every one of us. In Adam all die. In Adam we all have his life. We all by nature are the children of wrath. That's what we show up as when we come on the planet. The Adamic life is the source of my sin, whether I'm saved or unsaved. The unsaved people may not even understand that the Adamic life in them is the source of their sin, but lots of believers think, well, Adam is the same source of your sin too.

So, now, in Adam, there's this thing called the flesh. Well, it isn't that he's just got this thing called flesh. He became the thing flesh. Not only in his body, but also in his soul and in his spirit. And in Genesis 6-3, the Spirit talks about, My spirit shall not always strive with man, because he is also flesh. That's what he is. So, every human being on the planet, whether saved or not saved, is a person of the flesh. Okay? The race that was spawned by Adam and Eve is flesh.

That which is born of the flesh is flesh in John 3.6. It is not that the natural man has flesh or in the condition of flesh. That's what he is. He is flesh.

So the Apostle Paul writes in Romans 7.18, as a believer, as being saved, as being able to understand identification truths, his position in Christ. After all of that, he says, For I know that in me that is in my flesh dwells no good thing. Notice whose flesh it is. It's his. You and I can say the same thing. We can say, I know that in me, in my flesh, nothing good dwells.

As a believer, Paul recognized that he was in love by the Adamic Adam sinful flesh, which we would refer to sometimes as the old man. That he had that flesh and he assumed responsibility for it, my flesh. But you have to ask yourself, in his position, was Paul in the flesh or was he in Christ? Was the flesh in him or not?

Here's the interesting difference. If you're a non-believer, you are in the flesh and the flesh is in you. You can't distinguish the two. A believer is in Christ and that's his new identity, but the flesh is still in him. He's just not in it anymore. It's in him, but that isn't what his identity is anymore. And that's a really critical point for us to understand. In his condition and his Adamic life, Paul owns full responsibility of the flesh being in him, but he also recognizes that he is in Christ. Whatever a man sows, then, he's going to reap. So if you sow from the flesh, what do you reap? Flesh. If you sow from the Spirit, what do you reap? Life. The flesh reaps corruption. reaps life.

And this is not going to be exposed maybe is the way to say it for the believer until we get to the beam of judgment. I'm convinced that I'm going to stand at the beam of judgment and I'm going to contribute mightily to that blaze. If you understand what I mean. Our sins are going to get burned, right? I'm going to have a lot of contribution to that fire. I'm going too fast.

In the condition of his flesh, he also said the believer at the Bema, and we talked about that, it's not that the natural man is flesh, it's that he has flesh now. Interesting. Let's compare. If you take a look at a non-believer and a believer, you can say that in the non-believer, he's in the flesh. The believer's in Christ. A non-believer has a flesh in him, so does the Christian. The fallen Adam is the old man, indwelt by the new, and the believer still has that old man in him. He's in the flesh. We take ownership for our own flesh. The non-believer possesses a sinful nature. We have a sinful nature in me that is in my flesh. But the non-believer is one complete man, just like you see on the side of a non-believer. He's a complete man.

He has things in Him like the will of the flesh, the desires of the flesh, the workings of the flesh. I don't know if I have that there. He has the wisdom of the flesh. He has purposes of the flesh. He wars in the flesh. And He glories in the flesh. The Bible also refers to the man in the flesh. He walks according to the flesh, after the flesh, and he makes a fair show of the flesh. That's the natural man, and that's the flesh that's in each one of us.

So, we almost have a personification of what the old man looks like. He identically manifested before and after his salvation. Your flesh didn't get any better when you got saved. And I know we spend an awful lot of time putting holy water on our flesh, trying to get it to look and act like Christian for our own benefit and so that others will see that we really are cool Christians because we've got the flesh that sort of took a bath. No, your flesh is no better than it was the day you were saved. And so hence the war, hence the struggle.

So let's talk about what a man is. A man, and I know Vern talked about this quite a bit, Miles Stanford says a man is a substantive or an essential entity. He is a person. He's a person. And the traits and characteristics of a man are non-substantive or they comprise his nature.

So as a person, you can be a believer who at one point was in Adam and now is in Christ, but you're still the same person. I used to have this argument with Miles, Hey Miles, if I'm crucified with Christ, everything has become new, don't I become a new person? And he would argue back, no. And then finally he stopped arguing with me because I wouldn't quit. And he said, well, does God possess the power to recreate the same person? I said, yeah, I guess he does. So that sort of solved the argument.

The traits and characteristics of the man are non-substantive. A nature is a composition of attributes, and it's not to be considered a substantive essential entity. Your human nature, or your old man, or your new man in Christ, that alone is not who you are as a person. It manifests itself as your person. It looks like it's your person, but that isn't who you are. characteristics of the old man.

It's very interesting. He has a lot of positiveness going for him. Do you think the old man can do what I've listed on the left side? Can he be loving? Can he be joyful? Can he demonstrate peace, long-suffering, gentleness, kindness, meekness, faithfulness, and self-control? Can he do all of those things? Answer, yes, he can.

The problem is he's got this negative side that Kirk read this morning and which we'll get into in a couple of weeks. He's also immoral. He's also impure. He has sensibilities. He's an idolater, a sorcerer. He's at enmity with everything. He's jealous. He's strifeful. On and on it goes. That's who he is. positive and negative. As a person in the flesh, this is true of what he can manifest. He can be very loving. Beautiful, beneficial as the positive characteristics are, the problem is they're of the flesh.

And if they're of the flesh, God rejects them. In my mind, though, I think, well, gee, I was joyful the other day. two minutes, three minutes, whatever it was, before I became idolatrous again. And isn't God going to accept that? What do you think? He can't accept anything from the flesh. He rejects it. So where the source of what you do has to be clear in your mind where it's coming from. You have to understand. Why is that man rejected? Why is the Adamic old man rejected? It's because of the source of the condemned Adamic life that is in me, in my flesh dwells no good thing, nothing. Second man, the last Adam, the Lord Jesus Christ.

You have to agree that he has two natures also, doesn't he? He has the nature of God, and he has the nature of man. He is the Son of God, But he's also the son of man. He is perfectly God and he's perfectly man. In Christian doctrine, the essential nature of Jesus Christ, in which the divine and human nature are believed to be combined, some people call that the hypostatic union. He's 100% God and he's 100% man. But you know what the difference is in terms of character? When you start to look at the aspects of the divine human nature, you find out that it's His love.

And it's His joy. And it's His peace. And it's His long-suffering. His gentleness and His goodness. They're all positive. There aren't any negatives. It was and is and shall ever be impeccable. So when you're walking in the Spirit, His love comes out of you.

His joy. His peace. So you have to be able, I think, in order to understand this verse, understand where is the source of what's coming out of me? Where is it? If it's His love or His peace or His long-suffering, then you have nothing to be proud about. You have everything to be thankful about. Because the Spirit of God is manifesting the very nature of the Lord Jesus through you. Let's talk a little bit about the position factor. It's important that we understand the positional history of a believer. We talked about this a little bit in Sunday School this morning.

Before anything was brought into being in the universe, in the world, Adam, before God did anything creatively, He chose, He elected, and He called you. and conceived you in the Father's heart and purpose." Those are the verses where you can, in Ephesians and 2 Timothy and Psalms, you can see that. My father called the world into being and created Adam to be the head of the human race for that first creation. That's how he planned it.

I was identified positionally, you and I as believers, with the source of humanity. When Adam sinned thereby, positionally died, I died because he died. Now a lot of times people will say to me, well that doesn't, that's, you know, why am I counted by God as a sinner because Adam sinned? I didn't do it. He did it. But I did do it because I was in him doing it when he did it.

And that's an important principle for us to understand. Because when we get over to the side of being in Christ and we begin to study about Christ, we begin to find out, oh wait a minute, just as it was in Adam, so it is in Christ. Whatever is true of Him now is true of me. And that's the way God looks at it.

But initially I was identified positionally with the source of humanity. I died to God. I died in Adam. I became flesh. I became flesh in Adam. And when he was condemned, guess what? I was condemned too. So the rejected old Adam was replaced now by the accepted new man who is called the last Adam. There is going to be another one. And the reason Adam is so important is that these men, these two men, constitute the entire history of the human race.

And it determines, who do you come from? Do I come from Adam the first? Or do I come from the last Adam? What's the source of my nature? If you have never believed in the person and work of Christ, you're stuck in the first Adam. And that's your nature, and that's who you come from. And guess what?

God has condemned that man. But if you're in Christ Jesus, then you have all of the blessings that He has. When the Father sent His only begotten Son into the world, He subjected Him to death of the cross in order to rescue me from the Adamic death, because He loved me and He chose me from all eternity. We're going to do a Christmas program in a few weeks, and I've been thinking a lot lately, why did Christ come? You know what the answer is? He came for one purpose only, and that's to die.

And to end forever the entire sinful creation. The people who are the sinners and the whole thing that's under the penalty of death. Without Him dying as the Son of God, it continues. It continues. While the Lamb of God was on the cross, my Father laid on all my yet as uncondemned sins on Him. His death for those sins freed me from the penalty. Everybody in this room, your sins were future at the time of the cross, and they were all paid for then. By the way, even the sins of the Adamic man have been paid for. Did you know that? Because the issue of sin is between the Father and the Son. were beneficiaries of the work of the cross, but all sin, because it was an insult to God, had to be satisfied.

And I think about insult. I'm not sure we understand a lot about insult, but it's kind of like this. Say Ralph came up on the stage and he slapped me across the face as hard as he could. Did he insult me? Yeah, he did. When Adam sinned, did he walk up in front of God and slap Him in the face as hard as he could? Yes, he did.

Does somebody need to pay for that? If God is righteous and holy, does someone need to make recompense for that slap in the face? Yeah, they do. But the problem is, nobody as a creature could make recompense for that. It had to be God Himself to do it. So when Christ died on the cross, He took care of every slap. every sin for all time. And it had to be done that way because it was a transaction between the Father and the Son. It had to be that way. While the Lord Jesus was on that same cross, here's another interesting thing, or probably the critical thing that He did. He identified you and me in my Adamic life of sin with His Son, the Lord Jesus. I was identified with Him. He was made to be sin. I already was sin. But I'm identified with Him.

So what happens? When He dies, I die. So if Christ is on that cross, and the Spirit of God lays all of our sin natures on Him, who are believers, when Christ dies, He separates Himself from all of those sin natures, doesn't He? Were you in Him when He died on that cross?

Yeah, you were. Did you get separated from your sin nature? From a positional standpoint, you did. You still have it conditionally, but you're not identified with it anymore because you were in Christ at the point at which He died. That's why this is such an important point about identification. That's why we spend so much time talking about identification. You know, my sinful nature and your sinful nature was not forgiven. Your sins and the penalty for them were forgiven, but you, the sinner, wasn't forgiven.

What happened? You were condemned. And did that condemnation take place? Yes, it did. It took place. It took place in the source of sin, God sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, what did He do? He condemned sin in the flesh. He didn't forgive it. He condemned it. Your sin nature was condemned at that cross. I was not forgiven in order to start all over as the first Adam person.

Now, I was crucified. I died, and I died unto sin in Christ. In that death I was positionally separated from my Adamic life, which is the source of my sin. The Lord Jesus' death for me redeemed me from the penalty of my sins, and my positional death in Him freed me from the condemned Adamic life and its reign." I am God's workmanship. You are God's workmanship, newly created in Christ Jesus. That's who we are. I may be progressively freed from the reign of indwelling Adamic sin in my condition, but why? Because I found out about it. I know it's true.

And the Lord said, look, I want you to reckon yourself dead indeed unto the sin nature. It's not dead, but you're dead to it. And I want you to reckon that to be so. And I also want you to reckon to be alive unto God in Christ Jesus. I want you to do that. And if you will do that, then I will progressively free you from the power of the sin.

So what's my essential identity? My Father in eternity past formed me positionally as an individual in His mind. He knew me, knew you, way back then. But He formed me actually in my condition at a later date in my mother's womb. The fall didn't unmake me as a man, a particular person. My new birth doesn't unmake me as that man. What is intrinsic to my personhood I never lose. My identity is never changed. I'm still the same person. But whatever changes I pass through in my new birth as to spirit and soul, whatever changes awaits my body at the rapture, I shall never lose my essential identity with what my father conceived me to be before the foundation of the world.

How did he conceive you and me? In Christ. My crucifixion with the Lord Jesus, just like yours, didn't affect your unique identity as newly created in Christ Jesus. But rather it destroyed positionally all that was in the fleshly Adam. Behold, all things have passed away positionally. All things are new.

How do I know this? Because He tells me in His Word. He says, look, as I'm cruising through Romans 6, I find out that my old man, your old man, was crucified with Him. Why? So that the whole entire body of sin might be rendered inoperative. put out of business, as my law used to say, taken offline, and that henceforth we shouldn't serve sin. Oh, serve? Yeah, serve sin.

I, the old Adamic man, was crucified with him that the body of sin in total might be put out of business, condemned in death, not forgiven, put away. I, the sinful one, was condemned in death at the cross in order that I might be recreated in the risen Christ, the last Adam. So positionally, I have been freed from the Adamic life through my death unto sin in the Lord Jesus. The Father was at liberty now to identify me essentially with his Son. In his resurrection, I was recreated alive unto God in Christ, and so were you.

When he rose, I rose, and you rose, the beginning of a new creation, Revelation 3.14. I arose, you arose in him to newness of life, a totally new creature, into a totally new creation. When the Lord Jesus, now head of the new creation, Ascended to the right hand of the Father, guess where you went? Guess where I went? We went with Him. So we are now seated in the heavenlies in Christ Jesus. I was separated, positionally from the first Adam, to be recreated in union with the last Adam and his crucifixion, burial, resurrection, and ascension.

All of that. In Him, I'm totally new in my position. But conditionally, slowly, ever so slowly, what my position is, is becoming my condition. And that's what our spiritual life is all about, is that our condition over time will start to line up with my position, who I am in Christ.

That's really what's going on. Now, that's why this verse is so critical to us, because we recognize that the Spirit of God and the Holy Spirit are at this incredible war. They are. They are. Where are you in that transaction? You ever think about that? Are you the flesh? Answer no. Are you the Holy Spirit? Answer no. But they, those two are fighting, desiring to do what?

To manifest their life, whichever one it is, through you. And what it happens is, what it causes me is not to do the things that I want to do. What I begin to find out is that what I really want to do as I grow in Christ is I want to walk with Him. I want to know the Lord Jesus. But there's this war going on. You could almost say, well, I'm a victim. No, I'm not a victim. But because I'm a willful human being, I get to choose who controls me. And they're fighting for control.

Either I'm going to believe what the Word of God says about who I am in Christ, or I'm going to buy into whatever the flesh is selling and let the flesh manifest it. If I begin to understand that I'm accepted in Christ, that I am complete in Him, that I'm entirely sanctified in Him, I'm perfect in Him, All of that and more has been held in spiritual escrow ever since the one who was my life ascended to the right hand of the Father. This is all true of me even though I may or may not manifest it to any different degree while I'm here. All had been completed positionally before a single Christian existed because Christianity is founded upon the finished work of the Lord Jesus. So your position And these attributes that you possess today were true of you at the time of the resurrection. Isn't that something? And in order for them to be applied to you, they had to be in place before you were ever saved, and I was ever saved.

Let's see, how am I doing on the time? So, but there's a condition factor. Born into this world in the life and image of the first Adam, I grew up as a condemned sinner, dead in trespass and sin. And oh, by the way, that's the guy I'm most familiar with. I'm really familiar with Adam.

I even function today to try to occupy my space in the planet based on whether Adam is occupied or not, or received or not. In his own time, though, the purpose of the Father called me affectionately, in my case, after 35 years, and by His grace I responded, responsibly accepting the Lord Jesus as my Savior, and so did you at some point. At that moment, the Holy Spirit, by His indwelling, brought the life of the Lord Jesus to be my and your Christian life. There and then I entered into my position, new creation, My old Adamic life is still abiding in my body and my mortal flesh is still there.

Interesting. If you remove that life, guess what happens? Your body dies. You ever think about that? Your old body is tied to your old Adamic nature. If you remove that old Adamic nature from your body, your body dies. They're interwoven. It's the same for the saved and unsaved alike. When that old man, that old source of life leaves the body, it stops functioning.

So, in the Spirit's time, I came to realize, you have come to realize the positional facts of the Word concerning yourself. All of us, sooner or later, come to realize that we saw that we had died unto the sin nature of the cross. We saw that, finally. And we only saw it because it's in the Word. Somebody showed it to us, or we happened on it. Really what happened is the Spirit of God led you to it.

And in time, I learned not to struggle against the old man within. Oh, really? Yeah, I've learned not to struggle, but to count by faith upon the positional truth of me and the cross. Did I die with Christ or didn't I? Answer, yeah I did. As a new creation, I've been taken out of the flesh and been recreated in union with the resurrected Christ seated at the Father's right hand. The Word of God says so. Gee, what do I do?

I reckon I reckon my new self positionally dead unto sin, and the Holy Spirit progressively applies that finished position to my growing condition. I accept, step by step, the freedom from the reign of indwelling sin that was produced for us at Calvary. My condition begins to conform to the source of my now new position. Likewise, reckoning upon my position alive unto God in Christ, the Holy Spirit centers my heart and mind upon the One in glory who is my Christian life.

I get to behold the glory of the Lord in 2 Corinthians 3.18. I get to have personal fellowship with Him. I get to worship Him just because I can behold Him.

And the Holy Spirit's job is to develop that complete life within an ever-increasing growth, slowly conforming me to the image of the Lord Jesus Christ. Slowly. At the rapture I'll receive a new body. You'll receive a new body. You'll be just like His. But not until then, this mortal body of flesh is going to be a problem.

And so therefore, when you begin to take a look at this verse. The Spirit lusts against the flesh and the flesh against the Spirit. You have the Holy Spirit who is strongly desiring for you to know and to reckon upon, believe and reckon upon, what He says He's done at the cross and where you are. We as believers need to know where we are, we need to know what we have, and we need to know that it's already done.

The other side is the flesh. The flesh has very strong desires. And what is the flesh trying to convince me? None of this is true. All of these desires that I'm getting you and trying to persuade you about, those are true. And I'm whipsawed back and forth.

Is there any rest in that kind of thing? There is in Christ. There is in resting and believing and reckoning of what He says. There is no rest in the flesh. And I don't have to tell you that. You already know all that. But the very fact that this war goes on proves that all of the identification truths that we study are lined up correctly, that it isn't instant.

Positionally, conditionally, I have to know my position, and I have to recognize that this work of Romans 5.17 is going on within me by the Holy Spirit. And oh, by the way, He's the only one that can control the power of your flesh, not you. He is the only one. And then you begin to do the thing that you really want to do, and that's to abide in Christ.

So let's pray. Father, my prayer today is that we would enter in more fully every single minute of every single day into the person and work of your Son, the Lord Jesus, that we might behold him face to face, that we might be able to rest by faith in all that he is. And we pray in his precious name. Amen.