Kill ‘em all

“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.” - Romans 8v13

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if there were some magic moment in the Christian life when we could just pray and prayer or make a decision to no longer battle the flesh? Wouldn’t be nice if we could just turn it all over to Him and let Christ deal with it all? Can you imagine the joy of a sin free life, where the “deeds of the body” would stop jumping up and attacking us?

I wish I could say that was the case. I wish I could say, “Pray this prayer and the fight is over.” The problem is it is just not biblical. Here in particular and in many other places we are warned of the battle. Paul wrote a whole chapter to the Colossians instructing them how to kill off the various deeds and attitudes.

We don’t have a present active indicative tense in English that I know of. If we need it this verse would read something like this, from what my miniscule knowledge of Greek tells me – “…if by the Spirit you constantly keep putting to death the deeds of the body, you will live.”

The man who lives according to the flesh faces death. If he lives according to the flesh is has no part with God and his he faces a future without hope. The one who has the Spirit will be killing off the deeds of the flesh, and he will have life.

The sense is that the flesh is going to keep on fighting. The new me doesn’t have the pleasure of sitting back and resting. As the flesh keeps fighting back I must keep killing off its deeds. I fight, empowered by the Holy Spirit, to keep killing of the opposition.

One word of comfort for us. We don’t fight the deeds of the flesh, but we do so empowered by the Spirit and therefore we have victory as we slay those deeds!