There is a wonderful discovery God wants you to make, one that is absolutely basic to an intelligent understanding of the Christian life. This discovery is not only charged with comfort and encouragement for your soul, but is calculated to deliver you from heartbreak, frustration, and despair which are the unhappy lot of so many sincere Christians in their earnest endeavours to please God in the energy of the flesh.
It is not a question of improving or being reformed, but of substitution, receiving a God-given Life, a life for which we have nothing to offer to God in exchange. God tells us that the old Adamic nature within you, called the flesh, has no redeeming feature about it. It is entirely without remedy. For your own spiritual well-being, it is absolutely essential that you recognize the fact that this old nature will never change it's character. All the wickedness of which it is capable today, it will be capable of tomorrow, or fifty years from now if you are still alive. There is absolutely no salvageable content within it.
What a relief it must be for you to discover that in all your attempts to harness the flesh in the service of Jesus Christ, and in all your painful endeavours to introduce it to godly principles of life and conduct, God has never expected anything of you but the hopeless failure you have been ! You have been trying to do the impossible ! The Galatian Christians had made the same mistake, for they had been trying to achieve holiness in their own strength. Outward form and ritualistic patterns had become a substitute for the spontaneous expression of the Life of Christ within. Paul therefore addressed them as " foolish."
The flesh (human effort) within you has never ceased to love sin, and never will. Given half a chance, it will always manifest it's corruption and depravity. This is why the godliest of men and women still have latent within them the most terrible potential for evil. It is the godliest of people who know it best, for it is the acknowledgement of this very fact which is the secret of their godliness. They have learned, often by bitter experience, that character does not change for the better by improving the flesh, but only by allowing it to be replaced by the Holy Spirit. Only He can render it's pernicious appetites inoperative.
"The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked" (Jeremiah 17: 9). Be persuaded therefore of the wickedness of your own heart, and humbly confess it before God. Never be shocked or dismayed at the amazing capacity for sin that lies within you, for this is the nature of your case. It is only when you are honest enough to face up to these facts that you will have, on the one hand, a big enough view of what the Lord Jesus came into this world to do for you; and on the other hand, the desire to let Him do it !
Christ........is our life. Colossians 1: 4
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