Welcome to another episode. Today we're going to talk about dying to the flesh. What it actually is, why most of what we call spiritual discipline misses it completely.
And there are four practical ways to actually deal with it, the flesh. And I want to start with something that stopped me in my tracks the first time I saw it. In the book of Matthew chapter 16, Peter has one of the greatest moments in all of the gospel.
Jesus asks his disciples, "Who do people say I am? " And Peter stands up and says, "You are the Christ, the son of the living God. I know you probably know the story.
" And Jesus looks at him and says, "Flesh and blood did not reveal this, but my father in heaven did. " That is a man walking in the spirit. That is revelation.
That is God speaking through a human being. Jesus acknowledges that Peter has received revelation from God. Then just a few verses later, the same Peter, same chapter, Jesus begins to speak about his coming, his suffering and death.
And Peter pulls him aside and rebukes him. Lord, this shall not happen to you. And Jesus stands to him and says, get behind me, Satan.
the same chapter, same Peter, same man, minutes apart. One moment he is a vessel of divine revelation, the next he is a mouthpiece for the enemy. This is why I did this video because there is such a thin line between walking in the spirit and walking in the flesh.
And that should sober every one of us because the flesh does not always look dark and destructive. Sometimes it looks like concern. Sometimes it looks like loyalty.
Sometimes it looks like protecting the people you love. Peter was not trying to be evil. He was trying to protect Jesus.
But his reasoning was entirely human, entirely selfcentered in its instincts. And it was completely out of alignment with the purposes of God. So there is something I want you to realize that the flesh is not always ugly.
Sometimes it is well-dressed and well-intentioned and that's what makes it dangerous. You can be sincere and still be in the flesh. Now what is the flesh?
When we talk about being in the flesh, what are we talking about? Because I think we have made this more complicated than it needs to be. The flesh is not your physical body.
It is not your appetite for food or your need for rest. No, Paul was not telling you to hate the body. God gave you the flesh in the way scripture uses it is that inner desire that pull toward doing what is wrong even when you know better.
It is the part of you that has an agenda of its own that wants its own way that reacts before it thinks and justifies after the fact. In Romans chapter 7:24, the Bible says, "Oh wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death? " Paul wrote that the Apostle Paul, the man who wrote half the New Testament, who had been to the third heaven, who planted churches across the known world, and he sat down and wrote, "Who will deliver me from myself?
" That is not the cry of a backslider. That is the honest confession of a man who understood that the flesh is not something you graduate from. It is something you deal with daily.
See, the war is internal. It is not between you and your circumstances. It is between what the spirit of God is pulling you toward and what your flesh keeps defending.
And here is something many people don't talk about. Fasting alone does not deal with the flesh. I have seen people run into three-day fast, 21 days fasting and they come out same temperament, the same reactions, the same pride, the same patterns and they are confused because they did the work.
They gave up the food. They kept the schedule. But it was not the food that needed to go.
It was something deeper, the flesh. It is not removing the food that destroys the flesh. It is the revelation of the worthiness of Christ enthroned in your heart that changes everything.
When Jesus becomes genuinely more valuable to you than your comfort, your control, your reputation, your preferences, the flesh loses its grip. Not because you starved it, but because you found something worth more. Now Jesus is enthroned in your heart.
So a good example to help you understand, fasting is a tool. It creates space. It softens the ground.
But if all you're doing during a fast is being hungry, nothing changes. The purpose of fasting is to redirect your hunger toward the encounter to get you to the place where the presence of God becomes more real and more satisfying than whatever you give up. And when that happens, when you actually touch the weightiness of who Christ is, something shifts in you that no amount of willpower can produce.
So if you want to deal with the flesh, you must be aware of the worthiness of Christ. That is why two people can do the exact same fast and have completely different outcomes. One person spends those days pressing into God, reading slowly, praying honestly, waiting in silence.
The other person just skips meals and watches the clock. Same discipline on the outside, entirely different results because the fast was never the point. It is the encounter with Jesus that deals with the flesh.
Philippians 3:8 says, "Yet indeed I also count all things loss for the excellence of the knowledge of Christ, Jesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish that I may gain Christ. " We gain Christ. Paul did not white knuckle his way out of the flesh.
He found something so much better than the other. things lost their hold. That is the real work.
Pressing to see Jesus. So prayer you need to make is Lord let the revelation of your worthiness become louder in me than the noise of my flesh. I do not want to just manage myself.
I want to be genuinely transformed by encountering you. So how do you actually practically deal with the flesh? Here are four things that genuinely work.
The first is learning to delay gratification. The flesh is always agent. It wants what it wants now.
And sadly, society is teaching people if you want something, you can get it immediately. It cannot wait. The flesh does not reason well.
It just pushes. And one of the most practical ways to train yourself against the flesh is simply to practice not immediately satisfying every impulse. You feel the urge to open your phone.
The moment you wake up, wait. You feel the urge to say something sharp in an argument, pause. You feel the urge to give your opinion, to go shopping, to eat something you do not need to respond to the message with emotion, delay it.
Even by 10 minutes, even by 1 hour, even by a day. Now this sounds almost too simple, but it is training. Every time you delay a fleshly impulse, you are strengthening something.
You are proving to yourself that you are not a slave to every feeling that arises in you. And over time that muscle grows. So pause and reflect.
Where in your daily life do you immediately satisfy every impulse without pausing? That area is where the flesh is mostly in control. The second is spending real quality time in the presence of God.
You want to deal with the flesh, you must have devotion time. Not just a quiet time that is really just a box you tick before you get on with your day. I mean the kind of time where something actually happens to you.
Think about Jacob at the Jabok rivers in Genesis 32. He is alone at night and a man wrestles with him until the break of day and at a certain point the man touches the socket of Jacob's hip and it comes out of joint. Jacob is left with a limp for the rest of his life, but he walks away with a new name and a blessing.
In Genesis 32:28, he said, "Your name shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have struggled with God and with men, and have prevailed. " So Jacob's hip being touched was not an accident. It was the moment the flesh was dealt with.
He could no longer run. He could no longer uh scheme and maneuver the way he had his entire life. That was Jacob's whole story.
Manipulation and self-reliance. One touch from God and that was gone. He was slower after the encounter.
And he was also finally who God called him to be. That is what genuine time in God's presence does. It does not always feel comfortable.
Sometimes it dislocates something in you, but you come out of it changed in a way that effort alone could never produce. The flesh thrives on independence. Time in God's presence dismantles independence at the root, not by making you passive, by making you genuinely dependent on him rather than your own instinct.
So you pray, Father, I want the kind of encounter that changes me, not just comforts me, touch the places in me that are still operating on self-reliance. I want to walk differently after I meet with you. The third way you deal with the flesh is refusing to be impulsive.
Now remember, the flesh likes to react. The spirit responds. That is one of the clearest ways to tell which one is driving you in any given moment.
There is no way Jesus reacted to Satan, reacted to his circumstances. He always responded to his father. Think about a time you sent a message in anger and then you regretted it within the hour.
Think about the time you made a decision based on how you felt that morning and it cost you something. The flesh does not think ahead. It does not consider consequences.
It just moves quickly, emotionally, sometimes even loudly. I knew a young man in ministry who had a genuine calling. But every time someone questioned him or criticized his work, he reacted immediately online, in conversations, in meetings.
He could not let anything sit. He had to defend, explain, correct, and every reaction made him smaller. Not because he was always wrong, but because he was always flesh.
Learning to sit with an impulse before you act on it is one of the most underrated spiritual discipline there is. The urge to respond right now at that comment at that situation to that offense. That urge is almost always the flesh and you do not have to obey it.
In the book of James 1 19 to20. So then my beloved brethren, let every man be swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath, for the wrath of man does not produce the righteousness of God. The fourth way you deal with the flesh is submitting to authority.
This one might be the one that is the hardest to sell in the culture that praises independence, but hear me out. The flesh hates structure. It hates accountability.
It hates being told what to do by anyone it did not choose on its own terms. And that is exactly why placing yourself under legitimate spiritual authority is one of the most effective ways to deal with the flesh. Find a structured place, a local church, a community, a pastor who can genuinely follow up with you.
A covering where you genuinely submit and follow instructions. Not a place where you show up when it is convenient. Not a place where you leave the moment someone challenges you.
No. A place where you are known. A place where there is relationship.
Where your blind spots have a chance of being named. The flesh cannot survive sustained accountability. It needs secrecy, independence, and the freedom to make its own rules.
So take those away. And it has nowhere to hide. I want to be practical here.
Finding a structured place does not mean finding a perfect place. It means finding a real place, a local church, a disciplehip community, either virtual or practically, a small group with actual depth and choosing to stay even when it is uncomfortable, especially when it is uncomfortable. Because the moment it gets hard and you feel the urge to leave, that is the flesh talking.
And staying is the work. That's how the flesh is dealt with. Remember the Bible says in Hebrews 13:17, "Obey those who rule over you and be submissive.
For they watch out for your souls as those who must give account. Let them do so with joy, not with grief, for that will be unprofitable for you. " So every time you sit under structure, submission is not weakness.
It is actually one of the most fleshkilling decisions you can make because the flesh will always tell you that you do not need anyone that you can figure it out alone. That the people in authority over you are trying to control you or they do not understand you. Every one of those thoughts is the flesh protecting itself.
It wants to be untamed. So pause and reflect. Are you genuinely submitted to anyone?
Don't just say you are submitted to God. It is important. Is there a person or community in your life who has real access to you?
Who can hold you accountable? Who can speak to your blind spot and whose voice you actually take seriously? The line between the spirit and the flesh is thinner than we like to think.
Peter proved that you can be in the spirit one moment and be used by the enemy in the next. Not because you are bad, but because the flesh never stops having an opinion. Now, here's the good news.
You are not fighting this alone. This is our journey in Christianity. The same spirit that raised Christ from the dead lives in you.
And his job is not just to help you behave better. It is to transform you from the inside to make Christ so real and so central in your life that the flesh simply has less and less to work with. Start with one of these four things this week.
Delay one impulse. Spend real time in his presence. Let one reaction go unanswered.
Place yourself under one layer of genuine accountability. Small steps, consistent practice. That is how the flesh is dealt with.
Not in one dramatic moment, but in the daily and glamorous choice to let God be God in you. Not your opinions, not your emotions. So we pray, Father, I cannot deal with my flesh on my own.
I have tried and you know that. So I am asking by the revelation of who you are by the power of your spirit change what willpower could never change. Make me genuinely new in Jesus name.
Amen. You will not out discipline the flesh but you can outv value it. And that starts with seeing Christ clearly.
I hope this helps. Save, like and drop in the comment section. I have authority and power over my flesh in Jesus name.
God bless you.
