Path to Peace 3 - Less Me, the Divine Will

This is a continuation from Path to Peace 2 - Living the Divine Will 

Self-peace comes when I do what I love and zealously avoid what I do not (“to thine own self be true”) - and this is "good." Truth-peace comes when I am content with what God calls truth and I do that which He loves and avoids and abhors what He does not; and this is God. When the Prince of Peace is the ruler of my heart, His presence is the rule within my heart, and I then know Soul-peace - and this is the Will of God and it it His purpose for my life.

Peace without a standard is a truce waiting to be broken. It is why the standard, the objective, the all-defining goal must be not the ideals of Christ, but nothing less than the very person of Christ, in submitted obedience to His desire:

...those whom He foreknew [of whom He was aware and loved beforehand], He also destined from the beginning [foreordaining them] to be molded into the image of His Son [and share inwardly His likeness], that He might become the firstborn among many brethren. Rom 8:29 AMPC

God is transforming us into His way of being while we are stuck with our humanity. This duality causes manifested warfare within our souls, and our flesh, our desperate, deceitful hearts, want nothing to do with it. And so we wrestle.

I have discovered this principle of life—that when I want to do what is right, I inevitably do what is wrong. I love God’s law with all my heart. But there is another power within me that is at war with my mind. This power makes me a slave to the sin that is still within me. (Rom 7.21-23 NLT)

[This] sinful nature wants to do evil, which is just the opposite of what the Spirit wants. And the Spirit gives us desires that are the opposite of what the sinful nature desires. These two forces are constantly fighting each other, so you are not free to carry out your good intentions. (Rom 8.28-30)

Yet surrendering our unwise and unprofitable ways, habits, and attitudes is death because they have courted us patiently and we have loved them so: they have framed our sense and understanding of life. But coming into peace with God is of unparalleled profit in every way. We become sons and daughters of God by dying to what we (our flesh natures) want and by living for what He died for, allowing His thoughts to become our will.

Learning to love the divine will is this lifetime journey. It's my lifetime journey.

It takes patience and agreement with the Word of God to learn and accept His divine will, and just as importantly, time alone with Him, communing on which of our thoughts are acceptable to Him and what is not. In time, we discover what we must learn and accept and let go in order to fill the lack which will cause us to love His divine will.

This article continues in Path to Peace 4 - Humility, the Divine Will

This post is based upon my original Path to Peace series posted in 2018. 

Path to Peace 2 - Living the Divine Will

This is a continuation from Path to Peace 1 - Learning the Divine Will 

The essential "me," the spirit me - you cannot destroy it; you cannot kill it. I will live on forever. God has designed a body to carry the essential “me” around. But we must live in the understanding that we have a flesh-nature while we live in this mortal coil.

The sin principle, working through the flesh-nature, wants to stay alive and keep on kicking. My irrepressible flesh-nature still wants to do things “my way.” I do what I do because I like to do it (for pleasure) or I feel that I must (for fear - to avoid the penalty).

The flesh nature is armed, empowered, and in agreement with the sin principle; it has a processing system which has been armed by The (World) System. Good news: we can undo the thing before all is done.

Love the sinner (me), hate the sin (the affect of my actions). And let me state for those who say that once I am saved I am no longer a sinner: why then do I still sin? Let he who does not ask for forgiveness in his prayers to the Father cast the first Rock. I did not say that I love to sin, but there is something within me that certainly is continuing this horrific process. 

Put another way, Burger King is still open for business but we have to decide whether it will receive our business. If we decide to allow it, then the carnal-mind - the flesh-nature, enabled by the laxity of correct spiritual response - will drive traffic and produce evil. We must re-direct that traffic by a process called the renewal of the mind.

 For all who are led by the Spirit of God are the sons of God. For if you live according to [the dictates of] the flesh, you will surely die. But if through the power of the [Holy] Spirit you are [habitually] putting to death (making extinct, deadening) the [evil] deeds prompted by the body, you shall [really and genuinely] live forever. (Rom 8:13 AMP)

You must mortify not the flesh (our sin producing machinery), but mortify the deeds (actions). The flesh is a foregone conclusion: it shall return to the dust, and like a spoiled child who knows it will not get its way, it strives by the principle, "If I must suffer and perish then so should everyone and everything around me." If there is any doubt that this occurring, simply blink twice and look at the state of most affairs within and around us. Even the sham and mockery of what is called love is unraveling as people inexorably take an "I'm getting mine, to hell with you" attitude (note: Christians should flee this mindset).

We mortify the deeds of the flesh when we agree with God that He's right, when we stand still within the presence and grace of God and look at it and say, "that is wrong, and I surrender it, and especially my desire to do it, to you, My Lord, Healer, and Saving Grace." And when it takes us off of our course again, away from the direction of seeking shalom - peace with God - we turn our faces to Him and looking at Him we say, "that is wrong, and I surrender it, and my desire to do it, to you, My Lord, Healer and Saving Grace." And little by little our love for Him will break our hearts... and the attachment of the sin to our heart, and it will lose its power over us, overwhelmed by the gentle, burning love of a kind and beautiful creator God.

Self-peace comes when I do what I love and zealously avoid what I do not (“to thine own self be true”). Truth-peace comes when I am content with what God calls truth and I do that that which He loves and avoids and abhors what He does not. The Prince of Peace is the ruler of my heart, and I then know shalom, Soul-peace.

Continued in Path to Peace 3 - Less Me, the Divine Will 

Originally Posted Oct 25, 2018, revised July 19, 2021

Path to Peace 1 - Learning the Divine Will

Slowing. Things. Down.

The path to peace leads inward. Inner Conflict Management isn’t about learning a set of techniques, it’s about developing a way of life.

Things in life attempt to knock you “off of your square” because it’s in the things that you incorporate as routine that you find the most room to stretch, grow, move. Paradoxicaly, it's also the source of your confinement.

Routine is the intellectual space of your boxed activities, the “I do” drawn from your “I can”.

This morning, propelled by these thoughts, I meditated and prayed. Doing both: inner reflections, musings, weaving with conversation. Questions, some unwanted, answers, some unbidden, flowing in and out, touching, hanging, fleeing.

Slowing. Things. Down.

Self-mortification, what is it? It’s the “I” dying daily. But where some preach crucifying of self, Paul helps us to understand the process.

So then, brothers and sisters, we are under obligation, not to the flesh, to live according to the flesh (for if you live according to the flesh, you will die), but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body you will live. For all who are led by the Spirit of God are the sons of God. (Rom 8:12-14 NET)

This is pretty important stuff because it’s tied to one of my favorite promises.

Blessed are the peacemakers, For they shall be called sons of God. (Mat 5:9 NKJV)

My thoughts looped around in this direction because my heart’s desire, my hope, is to be a peacemaker. Hard to do with so much conflict on the inside, though. Meditating on these things bought these two particular pieces of scripture into focus.

The sons of God are peacemakers because they have put to death the deeds of the body.

Self mortification isn’t about seeing the body, the flesh nature, as bad, but understanding it as evil. You may say, "Brother, you have just gone off on the deep end. What’s the difference?"

Bad describes the condition of an object. It’s often good for little or nothing. Evil describes the disposition of a being capable of action. This one has chosen to oppose the sovereign will of God, and this is because of self-will. The body or flesh-nature is opposed to God, and why is that important in this conversation anyway?

In Romans 7, Paul helps us to understand that evil stems from both the reality and principle of sin - the desire for self action and rule based upon our own sense of right and wrong (and indifference). For the renewed believer, there is constant warfare between the new, developing enlightenment of the spiritual mind and the fault-filled, base nature of the natural man, or the flesh aka the carnal mind. The flesh-state is energized by the reality and affect (pronounced a (as in bad) -fect = persistent recurring impactful events) of sin’s existence. Paul states that the flesh-state is one of death (leading to operational separation from the zoe or God-energized-life) but goes on to state that there is an answer. The flesh-state - the willful desires and parody of life of an individual un-energized by the presence and power of God - is weak to answer the problem of personal evil (the unregenerated thought process which still operates in antithesis to the will of God and is an enemy of the state of God's presence), and is essentially impotent versus the influence of sin.

In short, we can not merely will our faults and sinful nature away, because we are bound by a law that is at least as strong (and most likely stronger than) the Law of Fire which burns regardless of our will concerning the matter: no matter how we plead or beg or wish otherwise, without concern of law passed or decree uttered, fire burns. So, then, only a Creator-Law can overcome a Universal-Law (sin is sin, just like fire is fire, regardless of where or who you are).

The “law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has made me free from the law of sin and death.” Free from the penalty of such. Free from the power of such. In short, the sin reality is dead (for me), the sin affect is powerless (against me) when I accept the liberty granted by the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus.

Why, then, do I still sin?

“To be carnally minded is death, but to be spiritually minded is life and peace.” (Rom 8:6 NKJV)

Because the sin principle is still alive and kicking. My irrepressible flesh-nature still wants to do things “my way.” Burger King is still open for business but we have to decide whether it will receive any business. If we decide to allow it, then the carnal-mind - the flesh-nature, enabled by the lack of vitality of the spirit man - will drive traffic and produce evil. We must re-direct that traffic by a process called the renewal of the mind.

Let's talk more about this in Path to Peace 2 - Living the Divine Will.

Originally posted 10/18/18

Path to Peace Intro - Letting the Divine Will

Let this mind be in you that was also in Christ Jesus. (Phil 2.5 KJV)

Good morning self. Good morning God. It's been a strange journey - if I may use the word strange. It's hard to put it any other word. The standard church phraseology would be "It's been a good journey, praise God."

But I think I'm churched out; I'm pretty tired of me, too. To be clear, I'm tired of the false expectations that I put on myself and my church, and that church sometimes puts upon me; but I love God and His people and we have much growing to do together. I'm at a different place, a new place in my walk. It's hard to put directly into words. It's like looking into a cave and knowing what's in there. But the only way you're going to know what's in the cave is to search it out, to explore, to dig deep.

It's in the exploration - of ourselves, of others - that we make ourselves known, that we become known. A number of people know of me. There are very few that know me. While I know me, I barely know myself.

You're speaking in riddles, Mike, you're going in circles. Well, Yes, and No. Too many times, my life - our life - feels like it's going in circles.

The old saints used to say each round goes higher. It gets me to thinking. From God's perspective, are we going around in circles, or is He continuing to draw us higher, closer to Him? From a different perspective, that circle could be a spiral.

The Spiral of Grace

As we move along the spiral, we travel up in altitude. From one perspective, travelling in circles, from another, travelling while moving up or down. Good theory, right? Let's check it out.

We think that the earth is simply moving in an orbit around the sun. But the sun itself is moving, and so it's never in the same place. No matter how familiar the seasons look, we are spiraling along, moving further and further in our God-ordained destiny towards the promises that He has for us.

As often happens, the Children of Israel are very instructive for our own lives. We often relate to the children of Israel as just going in circles over the space of 40 years. I mean, yes, there's a lot of wilderness, but even walking slowly, one can cover a lot of ground in 40 years. And this was their punishment for their lack of faith, right?

But what happened over the 40 years?

During the time they were travelling around, they watched their children grow up, knowing that they wouldn't be able to enter into the Promised Land. Day after day, week after week, year after year they told their children of the exploits which led them to this state of affairs. And during they were fed with manna. Their shoes didn't run down. Their clothes didn't wear out. They were constantly reminded of the faithfulness of God, even in their unfavorable condition.

And then, they died.

Hundreds of thousands of people died over that forty year span of time. The faithless ones, the covenant breakers, those who failed to believe in the power of their God - which they had actually witnessed coming out of Egypt. But their hearts had been divided because they couldn't let Egypt go in their hearts. So God had to let Egypt die from among them. They had to let go and leave Egypt in order to trust God enough to let Him lead them to the Promised Land.

Each time they came back around to a familiar landmark, some would groan in despair. But many would nod in understanding and even contentment. As they grew older, and closer to the inevitable, watching their friends and family pass away because of their faithlessness, they did something remarkable. They passed the faith on to their children. Moses continued to speak and their testimonies became such that the children understood that God was a Great God who would keep his promises, all of them.

Every Round Went Higher 

Each round bought them closer to the Promised Land, once again. The faith of the children, now adults, was growing. It had to. Had they remained at the same level of faith as their parents, they would not have entered in. 

Even in what appears as our wandering, God is doing something in us because He is Faithful. He allows us to go through seasons and cycles in our lives to allow things to die in us, and as He does so, the weights and the sin that's so attractive to us fall off - or we throw them away, far away. So every round takes us higher. We often can't see it, but this is the necessity and the power of testimony. Testimony allows us to step back and see the vertical path of the spiral. It allows us to see that every round goes higher.

The journey is not overnight. Be content and be at peace,

[For] I am convinced and sure of this very thing, that He Who began a good work in you will continue until the day of Jesus Christ [right up to the time of His return], developing [that good work] and perfecting and bringing it to full completion in you. (Phil 1.6 AMPC)

Let go and let God; every round goes higher. Welcome to the Intro article to the Path to Peace, a 5 article treatise on coming to a place of true peace.

Previously published May 4, 2018