Greetings!
“But everything exposed by the light becomes visible, for it is light that makes everything visible” (Ephesians 5:13–14).
“The true light that gives light to every man was coming into the world” (John 1:9). Because He wants you to live in the power of His resurrection, God is working in your life strategically according to a plan that will bring your flesh out into the open and expose it. He is allowing and engineering events so that, at determined intervals, your flesh will be exposed. Why? So you can confront it, and surrender it to crucifixion.
Does it seem to you that certain situations repeatedly bring out the same reactions in you? Do you often find yourself repeating destructive behavior patterns? Do you find that numerous situations arouse in you familiar emotions like anger, fear, envy, or shame?
Your flesh has developed a pattern. The expression of how you try to be your own source and of your flesh’s way of making you the center of its universe has evolved over your lifetime into a predictable pattern. Your flesh and my flesh may be very different, but they are still flesh.
When we react in the flesh, it is the tendency of our human nature to blame circumstances or to blame people around us. You may be able to pinpoint an outside cause, but that outside cause is not the ultimate source. God is always in the process of breaking the patterns established by your flesh. He allows you to be confronted with the same weaknesses over and over again. See these incidents for what they are; crucifixion moments.
At a crucifixion moment you are offered two choices: to react in the old way of your human nature or to react in the new way of the Spirit. When you choose place blame on others, or feel martyred by circumstances beyond your control, you resuscitate your self-life. When, on the other hand, you choose to look away from the outside cause and accept the crucifying work of the Spirit, you begin, little-by-little, to let the old nature die and resurrection power emerges.
Do you see why the very arrangement of your circumstances and relationships, even those that seem to add to your problems, is the context in which crucifixion has to occur? We have to be confronted with our flesh so we can altar it. If our flesh is hidden and disguised, then it is left to work in us, producing dead fruit.
When circumstances come into your experience that engage flesh, flesh will try to talk you into rationalizing your reaction. And, indeed you might have every right to respond as you have, and the precipitating incident might have been wrong, but if you want the radical cleansing life of the present Jesus to flow, your focus has to be on what flesh is there to be engaged. Altar it. Lay it down. Let Him respond. You stay out of it.
Sometimes flesh is passive and afraid. Some flesh says, “If you confront this situation, then no one will like you any more. You will lose all value. Every one will think badly of you.” So you seethe inwardly and grow bitter, but outwardly you are always agreeable and likeable. And it works. People do like you. So the flesh holds on tighter.
God may be telling you not to respond, but that doesn’t mean let the response be inside. If He is telling you to hold back response, He is saying “Let the flesh that wants to respond and fix everything and straighten everyone out be altar’d. Let Me handle the situation and you let your flesh die.”
Sometimes, He will call you to a response that is loving and life-giving. Your flesh might fear rejection and so resist. You might hear the living Jesus say, “Do as I tell you to do and die to your need to be liked. Let Me handle the response and don’t fear the consequences.”
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Jennifer Kennedy Dean 2019© | Legacy Writings
