It is the will of God that everyone makes it to Heaven. “…not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance” (2 Pet. 3:9).
To make it to Heaven, you must be sanctified. This keeps your garment of righteousness white, and to make Heaven, this garment must remainwhite.
To keep your garment of righteousness always white (Eccl. 9:8), you must go to the Cross – you must be crucified.
This is why everyone that wants to go to Heaven should pay attention to consecration, sanctification, and the Crucified Life.
Just as consecration demands sanctification, consecration also demands a Crucified Life. Consecration is necessary because God cannot use anything that is not consecrated to Him. God cannot afford to share you with the devil. You must belong totally to God or to the devil.
That means that another spirit (anger, lying, etc.) cannot use you because you are God’s property, you belong to Him alone.
For your consecration to have any impact, you must go to the Cross. The Cross is not for those who are not ready to die. You go to the Cross to surrender Mr. “Self.”
For instance, if you feel offended because someone below you have not greeted you, you have a problem and you still need to go to the Cross.
You know what? The reason why you have been struggling as a Christian is because you have not gone to the Cross yet. You need to die to “Self” daily.
If you don’t go to the Cross to nail Mr. Flesh there, you will still remain a servant of sin. If you don’t go to the Cross, you will never be able to walk in the Spirit, and it is only when you walk in the Spirit that you will not fulfill the lusts of the flesh (Gal. 5:16).
Death is the only solution to Mr. Flesh. And the Cross is the only place Mr. Flesh can die. The Bible says, “And they that are Christ's have crucified the flesh with the affections and lusts” (Gal. 5:24).
If you don’t carry your Cross daily so as to nail Mr. Flesh constantly to the Cross, you cannot maintain your holiness.
Carrying your Cross daily means that you daily lay aside your own desires to follow Him, putting all your energy and resources at His disposal and trusting Him to guide you. You do this out of gratitude because of what He has done for us.
What does living sacrifice mean in Romans 12:1? Paul was calling believers everywhere to surrender their physical bodies to the service of God – to put their bodies on the altar and dedicate them to God as “a living sacrifice.”
This is usually quite a task because the human body, by its very nature, does not want to be laid on the altar.
Look at Romans 6:12-13, “Let not sin therefore, reign in your mortal (physical) body, that ye should obey it in the lusts thereof. Neither yield ye your members as instruments of unrighteousness unto sin: but yield yourselves unto God, as those that are alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness unto God” (Rom. 6:12-13).
To understand the crucified life, we must first of all understand the meaning of “The Flesh.” What is the flesh? Is it your physical body – the house in which your spirit-man lives? No!
The flesh is a life-style. The flesh is a way of reasoning that is contrary to the Word of God. It is the nature we inherited from our human parents.
The “flesh” is “self.” The flesh is that way of life handed down to us by our fore-fathers (1 Pet. 1:18).
However good a person is, however virtuous he may be, whatever talents he may have, or however kind and intelligent he may be, he is said to be carnal.
What does it mean to be Carnal? To be carnal means to be under the control of the flesh. It means to be ruled by the flesh and not by the Word of God. It means to do things not according to the Word of God (Rom. 8:6-8).
That which is born of man is man. In John 3:6 Jesus declared, “That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.”
NIV calls the flesh “the sinful nature” or “the empty way of life handed down to you from your fore-fathers.” Good News Bible calls it “the human nature.” Remember that a person is born physically by human parents. NEB calls it “the lower nature.” NLT calls it “the human life.” Men can only reproduce human life. But the Holy Spirit gives new life from Heaven above. Others call the flesh “the carnal man.” The Living Bible calls it “the impossible road to Heaven.”
Romans 8:3-8 calls it “the one who dwells within and who controls the mind and the physical body of a man to accomplish his own desires.” In Romans 6, “the flesh” is referred to as “the old man or the indwelling sin.”
We all inherited “the flesh” by birth: As soon as a child is born, he is born with that nature; he is born with the self-life.
That is why the Bible declares, “The wicked (unbelievers) are estranged from the womb: they go astray as soon as they be born, speaking lies. 4 Their poison is like the poison of a serpent: they are like the deaf adder that stoppeth her ear; 5 Which will not hearken to the voice of charmers, charming never so wisely” (Ps 58:3-5).
In Psalm 51:5 David said, “Behold, I was shapen in iniquity; and in sin did my mother conceive me.”
The self-life is the nature of every man born of a woman. You don’t have to teach a child how to be wicked, or how to tell lies to cover up sin. It is in-built and it comes up quite naturally.
“Self” is like a person that dwells within.
Where does it dwell? “Self” dwells within the soul of man, essentially, in the mind.
What does it do? “The flesh” whispers, dictates, controls, enforces, insists, occupies and actually fights, but all within.
Galatians 5:16-18 reveals that “the flesh” has its own set desires. It ever seeks to lord it over the Spirit that indwells the spirit-man of a believer.
The flesh is in constant rivalry and struggle with the Spirit concerning who will control the soul of man, the soul being the battlefield (Gal. 5:17).
What a man does or manifests actually depends on who gains control over his soul, the Spirit or the flesh.
Fasting, praying, giving, preaching notwithstanding, John 3:6 says, “That which is born of the flesh is flesh……; and “…. they that are in the flesh cannot please God” (Rom. 8:8).
Why are you what you are? You are “what you are” because of “who you are.”
Why do you do what you do? You do what you do because of “who you are – you are born of the flesh.”
Therefore, when you see certain actions, certain behaviours, in the life of somebody, you will easily know who is doing them, and it shows who is in control of that person’s life.
Self is like a fruit bearing tree. It brings forth its fruit in season. Even if there is no fruit on it now, when the season comes, it brings forth its fruit without struggles.
The flesh grows naturally and manifests with little or no effort. Contrarily, you need to cultivate the fruit of the Spirit.
The flesh or the self-life is therefore, an empty way of life, a worthless manner of life, an impossible road to Heaven. It is totally different from Christ’s way of life.
If you do things according to the dictates of the flesh, you can never maintain your garment of holiness, and you’ll never see God face to face.But if you do things according to the dictates of the Spirit, Heaven will surely be your eternal home! It is possible to do things according to the Word of God when “Mr. Self” is crucified.
Watch out for the next edition of Good News from the Pulpit!
Your friend: I. I. MADUBUNYI (Senior Pastor)
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