Feeding our flesh makes the things bad for us stronger than us.
A Willing Spirit
The spirit is willing. That is my message for today.
A grandfather wanted to teach his young grandson an important lesson about life. He said to the young boy, “I have a fight going on in me. It’s taking place between two wolves. One wolf is evil – he is anger, envy, greed, arrogance, superiority, and ego.” The grandfather looked at the grandson and went on. “The other wolf embodies positive emotions. He is love, joy, peace, hope, humility, kindness, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith.”
He said, both wolves are fighting to the death. The same fight is going on inside you and every other person too. The grandson took a moment to reflect on this. At last, he looked up at his grandfather and asked, which wolf would win? The grandfather gave a simple reply. “The one you feed.”
In Matthew 26:31, Jesus tells several of His disciples a similar story. He asked them to watch and pray while He we off a bit farther and prayed. But as He prayed, the disciples fell asleep. Jesus saw this and said, “What! Could you not watch with Me one hour? Watch and pray, lest you enter into temptation. The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.”
In a way, Jesus was saying to them, there is a battle going on inside each of you. It is played out between two people. One is your flesh, and the other is your spirit. Your flesh and your spirit are battling for dominance over how you live your life. Will you live for what you want for yourself, or will you live for the things the Lord wants in your life?
Your flesh wants to live by having things that make it feel good. It wants you to get satisfaction and fulfillment from the things you get from the world. The problem with the flesh is that it is weak. The more you give it the more it is controlled by what it gets. It can never be satisfied because it is controlled by the things it wants.
Jesus tells us our flesh is too weak to be strong enough to win the battle for our lives. But your spirit wants to live in submission to the authority and to the Love of God. It wants to teach you to satisfy someone else more than yourself by the way you live. Your spirit wants to teach you to get your satisfaction from submitting your flesh and life to the things of God.
Jesus is telling us, in this battle for dominance, our flesh is too weak to win. The more we feed it, the weaker it becomes and the stronger we make the things that will dominate our lives. The more we want the greedier we will become. The more we want what you have the more envy will dominate our desires. The more selfish we are the more we will be dominated by things like resentment, sorrow, regret and the need to belong.
Your flesh does not know how to fight for dominance of your life. So, it will always lose the battle. But all is not hopeless. Jesus says our spirits are willing. Willing to do what? Willing to fight this battle for us. The spirit knows how to fight for dominance of your life.
Our flesh has no weapons to fight with because it fights for things more than it fights against anything. But our spirit is a weapon itself. All we need to do is allow the spirit to fight against what fights to have our lives. The spirit uses the spirit of satisfaction to fight and win over our greed. It uses the spirit of appreciation and respect to fight against becoming envious. It uses the spirit of selflessness to fight and win against resentment, sorrow, regret and things like that.
For sure, there is a battle that goes on inside each of us. It is not a battle against anything. It is a battle for something. Your flesh can never win a battle like this because it is deceived to believe it can have all that it wants. Your spirit is fighting for you to give up more so you can gain more. It will always win when you allow it to fight for you.
So, the grandfather taught his grandson a lesson on life. Many of us can see the value and wisdom in what the grandfather taught his grandson. We will probably say to ourselves, we would feed the positive wolf.
Jesus teaches us a life lesson. The question is are we willing to hear His lesson the way we heard the message of the grandfather? Living through the flesh only makes the things that are bad for us stronger than us. Living through the spirit helps us discover the weapons we have to overcome the things that make the flesh strong.
Lesson taught. Lesson learned. That’s the willing spirit. Will we learn from what Jesus is teaching us? Is the Yes of your spirit stronger than the yes of your flesh?
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