Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.
Galatians 5:24
I belong to Jesus now. My full self, my faith, everything to do with me belongs to him. But it doesn’t stop there. The second part of that verse says if I belong to Christ, my flesh with its passions and desires have been crucified.
I don’t remember that part happening, the crucifixion. Did it happen already? Did it happen overnight? Was it that easy? Unfortunately it wasn’t. The crucifixion was the next step.
“You don’t cast out flesh, you crucify it” – John Bevere
This next step brought me face to face with a lot of insecurities, continued questions about God, and it was bringing me to the point of making the decision for full submission to God (or not).
Ever since I was a little child, I’ve had this strong will. I do not like people telling me what to do (even my parents…) and I want to be in control, of everything. This spirit has gotten me into a LOT of trouble throughout my life.
But as I was walking through the questioning from my last blog, God revealed to me that the biggest problem of my flesh was my unwillingness to fully submit to God. Wow. I never knew it went that deep.
Worse yet, I did not even know what it was that I was not willing to submit. I just knew there was something inside of me, something I was still holding onto. That last thing that I needed to surrender in order to fully submit to God and follow him with all my heart was still in there.
But I did not know what it was or how to get rid of it. So again I had to just sit and let God.
Just in case you were wondering, crucifixion is not fun. No, it is not the crucifixion that Christ endured on the cross. That was victory over death. That was something only he could do, and he bore that burden for us.
But, I believe we must still go through crucifixion of the flesh. Crucifixion of all that nasty stuff inside us that is not from God. All of the attitudes, and gossip, and selfishness, and anything that is not the Fruit of the Spirit. God brought a lot of that up in my life during the last few months. It was not fun.
I struggled through a lot of things that have controlled me much of my life. Comparison, the need to control, finding my worth in others instead of Jesus, etc. I hated feeling those things again and having my mind centered on them. But in order for God to dig them out and scrape them off, he had to bring them to the surface first.
So I sat in the struggle, in the pain, in the uncomfortableness. Most of the time all I wanted to do was go home. But I knew that was my flesh talking. If I was at home, it would be a lot easier to avoid this refinement. And deep down I really wanted this. I wanted the next level of intimacy with Jesus. I wanted God to change me. I’ve always wanted these things. So I stayed. I pressed in. I let God.
