A Call To The Remnant

There are foods I used to eat in my youth growing up in Scotland that seemed to carry very little consequence. Rich foods. Greasy foods. Things deep fried in oil and soaked with heart clogging grease. They tasted very good going down, and for many many years I was “strong,” enough to bear the effects.

As I got older I compensated. I kept medicines nearby. Tums, Pepto Bismal and so on. I would take something before the meal and then something afterward to manage the indigestion which was getting worse. I learned to manage the consequences while still indulging the appetite.

But time has a way of exposing reality.

Eventually my body no longer tolerated what once seemed harmless. The medications lost their power to shield my system from the effects. I had my Gall Bladder taken out. What once brought pleasure began to bring immediate distress. I came at last to a simple conclusion: “I cannot eat this food anymore.” Not because the food ceased to taste good, but because the cost became too great and was often immediate.

So it is with the flesh.

There are indulgences of the old nature that I may have tolerated in earlier years of spiritual life. Words spoken in pride. Reactions born of self. Ambition clothed in spirituality. Vanity. Bitterness. The subtle and oftentimes less than subtle exaltation of self. For many seasons these things may have appeared manageable. The conscience was disturbed, yet not deeply enough to produce true abandonment. I continued indulging the flesh to one degree or another while attempting to quiet the inward consequences through religious activity, self delusion, explanations, emotion, or outward devotion.

But the Holy Spirit is faithful.

As Christ gained ground within me, the inward man become increasingly sensitive. What once scarcely registered now grieved my soul almost immediately. A wrong spirit leaves an inward bitterness. A spiritual indegestion. A careless word clouds fellowship with God. A movement of pride becomes unbearable to the heart that longs for Christ alone.

This is one of the marks of true spiritual growth.

The worldly man sins freely because he feels little. The immature believer can still indulge the flesh while imagining recovery will come easily. But the man who walks with God discovers something terrible and wonderful at once: the flesh and the spirit can never dwell together in peace. Quenching the Holy Spirit has real consequences in our lives.

The deeper life…. is not learning how to better manage the flesh. It is coming to the Cross concerning it.

There comes a point where I no longer ask, “How far may I go and still recover?” but rather, “How may Christ be fully formed within me?” And to be honest, I never once thought “how far may I go,” but in practice it amounted to the same thing.

For the Spirit of God does not merely oppose the outward acts of the flesh; He wars against its very principle. Self-life in all its forms must eventually come under the sentence of the Cross.

And thus I have learned, often painfully, that some things simply cannot continue. Not because they are no longer pleasurable to the natural man, but because they now wound the inward fellowship with Christ too deeply to be tolerated. The pleasure one gets out of indulging the flesh, has ever diminishing rates of return for the man or woman who is determined to walk in the depths with the Lord.

“For the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh: and these are contrary the one to the other.”
— Galatians 5:17