OVERCOMING THE OLD NATURE WITHIN

We have to participate in the death of Christ if we are to participate in his resurrection life. We have to identify ourselves with the death of Jesus. Anything that I try to do by myself is a dead work, it’s dead because it has not been empowered or energised by the Holy Spirit. I cannot change myself, I am totally dependent on the Lord to change me, and I can’t do it. When I try to change myself things get worse, that’s what Paul describes in Romans 7. The more you try to stop, the more bound you become.

The key to overcoming the old nature is renunciation. If I were to renounce my son I would be cutting him off from my life and considering him to be dead. If you take as example the Hindu culture where when a person becomes a Christian, they take everything belonging to that person, put it on a funeral pyre and have a mock funeral and they consider that person to be dead. That’s what renounce means, it’s a repetitive word where I have to speak over and over again that that thing is dead to me, until there is a separation and that thing is no longer a part of me.

In Romans 6:2 Paul writes ‘how can we who are dead to sin live any longer therein’ so whatever weakness or habit that is binding you, you have to keep renouncing it until it no longer is any part of you. This is what we call entering into spiritual warfare. You see we are carrying around a dead body that wants to keep on doing the things it is used to doing. But it is only by the spirit that we can put off the misdeeds of the body. We have this new life within that wants to come forth and take over so that Jesus can be king and reign within and that’s why there is a war going on within. And if we do sin we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus the righteous Son and as we confess our sins He is just to forgive us and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

In (1 John 3:9) we read ‘No-one who is born of God will continue to sin, because God’s seed remains in him; he cannot go on sinning, because he has been born of God’. So as we renounce the things of the flesh and keep speaking them off the less hold they have on us and the life of Christ within gets stronger and stronger because ‘where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And we, with our unveiled faces all reflect the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into his likeness with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit’.(2 Cor 3:18)  

He whom the Son sets free is free indeed.