Spiritual battlegrounds

Here’s more on the “Christian Workout” from yesterday's post:

You’re free from the power of the flesh as well as the past of the flesh. Someone will say, “What about these flashbacks that come into my mind about the past?”

If the flashbacks come and they do, your old flesh takes advantage of you. The Adversary takes advantage of you. When the flashback comes right now, don’t be problem-centered. Don’t be flashback-centered, says Richard Jordan.

Use that flashback as the motivation, as the impetus to turn toward the Word of God and the Lord Jesus Christ, and the new life you have in Him, and remember who He’s made you and remember that nothing in your past can touch who you are now in Him.

Just draw the line and say, “This is who I am and the past is under the blood,” and when it comes up in your mind, instead of sitting there thinking about it, say, “Wait a minute, that’s the past. That’s not who I am now. That’s over. That’s the old me. That’s the ‘Adam me.’ Here’s the new me in Christ.”

Instead of focusing on the problem and letting the problem embed itself and get another grip on you, say, “It’s under the blood. The Lord Jesus Christ dealt with my past at Calvary.”

Trying to heal the hurts of the past, you’re just fighting a futile battle because you can’t heal things that God says you’re to reckon as dead. They’re not meant to be healed; they’re meant to be reckoned to be dead.

You see why I say, “Don’t focus on problems”? Focusing on the problems is completely counteractive to who you are in Christ, and it immobilizes who you are in Christ.

Another way to focus on the problems is by playing the victim. Tail-bearing, blaming the past, playing the victim, saying, “It’s really not my fault,” and blaming someone else. You try to wash away responsibility and push the guilt on someone else.

As soon as you quit fleeing personal responsibility for what you think and what you do and what you say and how you interact--that’s called “real guilt,” by the way.

Someone has offended me, done me wrong, hurt me--shame on them. My responsibility is, “How did I react to it?” And that’s what we don’t like, because 99.9 percent of the time we react how? In our flesh. And now we have failures to account for in ourselves.

Now, if you’re a victim today, and you don’t have the Cross to go to, I don’t know what to tell you to do. Because there’s no real means for you to put it in the past and get it over with and settle the issue and come away whole.

What playing the victim does is it diverts you away from the problem and the life that’s yours in Christ Jesus. You need to be rooted in gratitude to God for His unspeakable gift that He’s given you in His Son. You need to “stand fast in the liberty where Christ has set you free.”

You need to do as Paul says in Colossians 3: [1] If ye then be risen with Christ, seek those things which are above, where Christ sitteth on the right hand of God.
[2] Set your affection on things above, not on things on the earth.
[3] For ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God.

You don’t need to be living in the gall of victimhood, where you’re trying to push the responsibility for failure on others. That just immobilizes you from dealing with it.

Real guilt means I can look at it and say, “I made the mistake. I was wrong in the way I thought, the way I reacted, what I said, what I did. No matter what they did, I’m responsible for me and I will be responsible for me and realize, ‘This is what Jesus Christ went to Calvary to die for and He paid the debt for it and He’s given me life to be different in these circumstances,’ and I’ll respond to these things the way He’s equipped me to respond.”

When I tell you not to focus on your problems I’m trying to tell you that you’re equipped in Christ Jesus to handle every problem you have already simply by who He’s made you in Him.

We have this sneaky little deceitful nature—we call it the flesh—that doesn’t want to be left out! And it’s so easy to slide back and focus on our problems. And I know sometimes those problems are bigger than what the day seems to be. I think about the verse:

II Corinthians 4:16: [16] For which cause we faint not; but though our outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day.

You experience that and you say, “Woe is me, I’m undone; I’m coming apart!” If you focus on that, you’re going to say, “Whew, woe IS me.” But if you relax and say, “Like I didn’t expect stuff to happen . . . ”

Dr. Henry Grooby used to call this verse “the soft pillow of the Bible.” Romans 8:28: [28] And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.

There’s the way to think about the present sufferings. They’re the perfect place for you to draw nearer to the Lord and to come to know Him more deeply and more intimately and to love Him more fully than you ever could without the challenges.

Rather than changing other people and circumstances, to focus our attention on our relationship with the Lord, and to look to having His Word working in our inner man and giving us the spiritual strength and the stamina, and to identify our failures for what they are . . .

All of a sudden, the details of our life, the problems of life, are really spiritual battlegrounds; they’re challenges to your faith. Are you going to focus on the problems or are you going to believe what God says about who He’s made you in Christ?

Are you going to focus on your resources to handle them or are you going to go find out what God says His resources are and rest in them? They’re opportunities for Christ to be formed in you; to be centered in Him and occupied with Him.

All of a sudden you appreciate when Paul says in Romans 5: [3] And not only so, but we glory in tribulations also: knowing that tribulation worketh patience.

Or in II Corinthians 4: [17] For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory;

You know what a worker is? That’s somebody producing something. The problems don’t do that.