“Crucifying The Flesh”

This phrase “Crucifying the flesh” is a common theme throughout the New Testament, and not the old. The reason is because this phrase came from Christ on the cross and how He was crucified. If you were with us at True North this weekend Bobby hit up on this theme a little bit in point number two which is

“Follow Christ by taking up your cross“

Bobby gave us the passage in scripture to go along with this point in 1 Peter 2:21

21To this you were called, because Christ suffered for you, leaving you an example, that you should follow in his steps.

If you are claimping to be a follower of Christ, you are also claiming that you have taken up your cross no doubt about it. You cannot be a follower of Christ if you haven’t. To be a true follower of Christ it requires crucifixion of the flesh. Christ says this Himself in passages for example as it says in Luke 9:23-24

23 Then he said to them all: “If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. 24 For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will save it.”

 Christ makes this very clear that if any one would go after Him they must turn away from themselves daily. Daily is no easy thing either, getting up in the morning thinking “How can I die to myself daily and let Christ reign in me?” What an amazing thought that would be in our every day lives! But I do know one man who does that for sure, or at least he declares it. This one man is the apostle Paul and he claims that he dies daily in 1 corinthians 15:31~

31″I die every day—I mean that, brothers…”

We as followers of Christ need to have the same mindset as Paul did back in the apostolic age, where we have the focus of dying daily to ourselves. What Paul did I can say bears fruit, what I mean is that when Paul says this, he has evidence to back it up. When we take a look at Paul we consider Him to be one of the most righteous men who have ever lived after Christ. He has suffered many ways for Christ. It says in the bible that he was phipped 40 less one times which is 39 times! The whips that these persecuters used were not the regular whips either, but they had something like little thorns on them so instead of a nive clean cut on his back it tore it up.  After 39 whips throughout his life can you even imagine what his back would look like… If he still had a back! I am not saying that in order to crucify ourselves we need to get whipped alot but I am saying that if we crucify our selves it would change the way we live. So there is now a question to ask your self.

“Have I completely died to myself?”

And if the answers is yes to that one, then ask yourself just one more

“If I have crucified myself, how have I changed?”

The bible makes it very clear that once you are crucified you are dead, and Christ is now living in and through you. Not meaning He is in you and you can’t control yourself but you will now become more and more like Him becuase you are dead. And the only thing we have in the flesh is faith in the son of God! This is spoken really well in Galations 2:20~

20 I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me.

 This is actually my favorite verse in the bible, and it is my favorite for a reason. This verse spells it our perfectly, what it means to crucify ourselves and how God now lives in us and we are not our own. And why are we doing this in the first place, why am I writing this blog, why is this such a necessity in our faith, why? There is a simple answer to that question and its at the end of that verse. It is because He was crucified for us… Because He died a horrible death on a cross and took up all of our sins, because He did that for the world when He didn’t have too, because He gives us eternal life even though we don’t deserve it, this is why we crucify our selves.

What an amazing thing He did! And what an awesome God we have! So let us continually crucify ourselves and follow Christ’s example, so that He may be pleased with us. Let us do it daily, each an every morning. It is dying to ourselves what makes salvation valid with faith, lets show our God how we have died to oursleves and how we live only by Him who strengthens us.