Growing up, we use to burn
our garbage outside in a big metal drum. Sometimes the smells that came from
the burning garbage would be so bad that you would have to walk off and get
away from it in order to breathe. There were many times that I would stand
and watch the garbage as it burn. The odor would seem to attach itself to my
clothes, flesh and hair. Upon returning to the house I would have to change my
clothes and bathe because the odor would
become trapped deep in the fibers of my clothes and
in my hair and on my flesh and only a good washing would eliminate it. Had I continued
to wear those clothes and not make the effort to change them nor bathe, I am quite sure that over a period of time I could
have gotten used to it,
even to the point that it no longer bothered me. It’s kind of like going to someone’s house
and you notice a foul odor and wonder how the
people who live there are able to stand it. Yet they can
and if you ask them about it, they will say that they do
not smell it.
You see they have chosen to live with the odor so long
that they are unable to even notice it anymore. Often times our choices and
decisions in life can be like those odors. Both right and wrong decisions can
attach themselves to us and we feel helpless or even worse, our laziness keeps us
from doing anything about it. The result is, that others around us will notice as well.
We can make wrong choices so long, without doing anything about it until
we reach a point that we will not even see them as wrong anymore. The reason
for that goes as far back as the Garden of Eden. Since the fall of man, every
human is born with a sin nature. The Bible refers to our human or sin
natures as the flesh. The flesh is our natural
desires to obey that sinful nature. Upon salvation a person is regenerated and
receives a new nature whereby God begins the process of refining and changing
their desires to become His desires. As they respond to their new nature
and no longer listen to their fleshly nature, they begin to take on the
characteristics of God. They begin to act more like Him and less of their
sinful natures.
Many people do not understand this concept of the new
birth or nature because they have never received that new nature through
salvation. For those that have received salvation and yet choose to live in
their fleshly nature God will discipline them until they, understand that which
He is trying to teach them and they will not grow much spiritually until they have learn how to feed their spirit and starve
their flesh. The reason that many are unable to discern properly the things of
God is because most of the things of God are
only understood within the new nature, not the flesh. Some live in the flesh
because they have never been regenerated or ever received a new nature. They have only
one nature and that is their flesh. While they may be able reason between good
and evil, the difference is that they have no spiritual power to overcome what
the child of God is able to overcome and understand about God through their new
natures. This is why it is so very important to study the Bible and obey the
things therein. For the child of God,
Galatians 5:15-18 talks about whichever nature you feed or gratify will grow
and whichever nature you starve will die. Our fleshly
nature puts out an ungodly odor to the world, while they may not can see it in
themselves, they can sure see it in the child of God. We must bathe ourselves
in God’s Word and strive to obey what it says in order to wash off that which
our flesh produces in us as foul.
Loving on you today sweet friend,
Bren
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