Biblical teaching - T115

The Power of the Preaching of the Cross

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If anyone says to a brother or a sister : "You must wear a head-covering, you mustn’t smoke, you mustn’t drink", those are nothing but fleshly rules unless they are imparted from within our hearts by the Holy Spirit, who fills the Word with light and shows us what to do. If you are already crucified, you will do all those things naturally, because you have read them in the Word. A crucified person has no problem at all obeying the Lord. Obedience comes simply and naturally, because the flesh has stopped resisting. The flesh resists the things of the Spirit : it cannot even understand or accept them. It refuses to obey the Lord. Unless it is dead, it will keep on rebelling in indirect ways, preventing us from doing what God wants us to do, for very "spiritual" and religious reasons, and people don’t understand why : it is because their flesh hasn’t been put to death. "Beware lest anyone cheat you through philosophy and empty deceit, according to the traditions of men, according to the basic principles of the world, and not according to Christ." (Col. 2:8). A vain philosophy is a Gospel in which the Cross is not central. The Lord has called me to return over and over again to the message of the Cross as long as that message is not manifested in our lives : otherwise, the Holy Spirit will not be able to do His work. Every Christian must be brought to fully realise in his heart that he was crucified in Jesus, that he died and rose again in Him and with Him.

Paul exhorts the Colossians not to rely on "the basic principles of the world", but on Christ, "for in Him dwells all the fullness of the Godhead bodily." (Col. 2:9). Elsewhere, Paul tells the Ephesians to "be filled with all the fullness of God". (Eph. 3:19). That fullness of God dwells bodily in Jesus Christ crucified. Jesus opened the door for us through His death on the Cross, and in Luke, He tells us : "If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow me." (Luke 9:23)

No-one can be Jesus’ disciple and obey such a perfect law - so as to manifest the character of Jesus - unless his flesh is crucified. Jesus is not asking us to crucify our flesh ourselves : what He says is : "I have already done it for you. Believe that and receive it in faith." Some people try to crucify their flesh in their own strength : they take monastic vows, abstain from meat or wine, or from sexual relationships. It produces nothing at all, except self-glorification. It proves only one thing : that the flesh has not been crucified, and that one is still glorying in it. If, on the contrary, I quietly ponder the Word and say : "Lord Jesus, You have done it for me ! All I need to do is accept in faith what You have done for me ! Let the revelation of it sink into my heart of hearts ! I receive it ! I died in You and was raised from the dead in You ! It is no longer I who live, but You who live in me !" There is a condition, however : I must mean what I say, it must be an experience and not a mere concept : it is much more than mouthing the right words. I have heard Christians say : "It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me !" then go and quarrel with their wife, their brother or their sister. Christ was not living in them ; they had uttered idle words and not spoken out of personal experience.

In Colossians 2: 10-11, Paul says : "You are complete in Him, who is the head of all principality and power. In Him you were also circumcised with the circumcision made without hands, by putting off the body of the sins of the flesh, by the circumcision of Christ." When you became a Christian, the death of Christ became your death. Christ died for you ; He circumcised you. When an eight-day-old Hebrew baby was circumcised, he had nothing to do. It was done for him, in spite of him. In the same way, we accept Christ through faith, and it is He who achieves the circumcising and grants it to us. It is His gift to us, and we accept it through faith. There was nothing we could do to crucify ourselves. He did it for us and now He says to us : "Only believe it and accept it in faith."

One thing must be made very clear : we must never become the allies of our own flesh so as to keep it from dying, because in our own carnal eyes, the most precious person in the world is our own self. Unless we watch carefully, we do not always realise that our flesh needs to be crucified. Formerly, we had grown so accustomed to looking after ourselves, to justifying ourselves, to taking care of our own interests that when we come to the Lord, we truly need a powerful revelation from the Holy Spirit : we need to hear Him say : "All of that is a stink in God’s sight. He has sentenced your flesh to death, He has killed it, together with its passions and its lusts, on the Cross : He Himself has given you a new nature that has nothing to do with your previous one. Your former nature is hopelessly rotten, and it died with Christ two thousand years ago."

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