Ayo.
Yo.
Come take a seat.
What’s up?
Get your Bible.
Oh.
We are doing this right now?
Yes.
Right Now.
Go get your Bible!
Okay.
Okay.
Give me second.
While that is happening…
Hope ya’ll are good.
I know. I know.
Consistency is key, and I have been far from consistent.
I did try to put some things out, but let’s just say things got lost, my laptop did not want to cooperate, and here we are! But maybe it just wasn’t the right time for those things to be said.
You ready?
Yeah Yeah.
Can you get Galatians 5:24 open please.
What version?
You pick.
Cool.
NIV
“Those who belong to Christ Jesus
have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.“
Another one
Okay. Erm.
MSG. They have 23-24
Oh the Message.
Always gotta be a lil different.
What does it say?
Cool.
“Legalism is helpless in bringing this about;
it only gets in the way.
Among those who belong to Christ,
everything connected with getting our own way
and mindlessly responding to what everyone else calls necessities
is killed off for good—crucified.”
Lovely stuff.
So what do you want to call today’s post?
Okay. Hmmm.
Let’s go with…
Sometimes you’ve gotta die to live.
Sometimes you’ve gotta die to live?
I was gonna go with life after death, but that gives a different vibe.
Yeah. You’re right.
Cool. Before we get into the verse, let’s talk.
Let’s talk?
Yeah.
About?
Ourselves.
Ourselves?
You see…
It’s estimated that the average person speaks about nine million words a year, and more than half are, ‘I, me, my, mine.’
Hmm. Okay. So we like to talk about ourselves. We focus on ourselves. But what does that have to do with anything?
Think about the verse. We spend more than half of our words just referring to, not even talking about, ourselves.
Yeah. And…
Think about the verse!
Following Christ means dying to self. But we are spending so much time just on ourselves, and a wise man once said: “self-centredness doesn’t give up without a fight.”
Who was it?
A wise man. I don’t know who it was.
Carry on.
What did the message version say?
Something like, ‘Everything connected with getting our own way …is killed off for good.’ We are fighting out here. It’s a battle.
Self-interest is a daily battle, because we tend to try and cling to our own interests.
Speak on that bro.
Jesus told His disciples something along the lines of, Whoever wants to become great among you must serve the rest of you like a servant. A servant had to carry out the instructions given to them, putting aside their own wants and needs and looking only to the wants and needs of the people they were serving. And we’ve been called to give up our own interests in order to serve others.
And bro, it’s better we drop them, before God makes us drop them.
You see, if He has to, God will leave us with ‘a reminder’
A reminder. A reminder of what?
-…of what it took to get through to us in our particular areas of stubbornness and self-centredness.
What do you mean?
What do I mean?
Yes that’s what I just asked you.
Oh. Okay.
For example, after his encounter with God, Jacob walked with a limp, but it was a constant reminder of his total dependence on God.
Paul once said: In order to keep me from becoming conceited, I was given a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan, to torment me.
The Message paraphrases the apostle Paul’s words:
‘So I wouldn’t get a big head,
I was given the gift of a handicap
to keep me in constant touch with my limitations’.
That’s wild. But I love it. So I wanna just say something to you.
Maybe there’s a habit you need to battle, a problem that keeps recurring, a person in your life who you find difficult to get along with, or even a physical condition that slows you down.
God doesn’t always take things away from us straight away, because He wants us to learn that we need to depend on Him and that we can trust Him to help us in our areas of weakness.
Amen. But what else did you want to say?
What else did I want to say?
Oh. Hmm. I don’t know if theres a need anymore.
Come on bro.
Okay. Cool.
To round things up…
What Paul is saying, is, “Despite the reality of the conflict, despite the fact that every day the flesh wants to overthrow us while the Spirit encourages us to follow him and despite the fact that we need to be disciplined and thorough in following him…
Yeah.
despite all of that the fight is not fair.
The fight is not fair?
It isn’t. I promise you.
What do you mean?
Well… the outcome has been determined already.
If you truly belong to Christ you cannot lose this fight. If you belong to Christ Jesus, ‘the flesh has been crucified with its passions and desires.’
It may feel impossible at times. It may feel like we have no control. It may feel like the flesh is having it’s way with us. But I promise you, the ownership it once exerted over us–has been crucified.
We are new creatures in Christ, our destiny is not an open question.
Our destiny?
Our destiny is to be with the Lord. If we belong to him, the sacrifice of Jesus Christ is ours as well. The flesh has been crucified. The war has been won.
But it is still a fight.
Yes. It is still a fight. A fight that is going to last all our lives because, although the flesh has been crucified, it has not been eradicated; and it will not be eradicated until we are given new bodies.
Damn. So the fight remains.
To put it plain. Yes. The fight remains. We must take this conflict seriously: to learn to follow the Spirit, to serve one another through love, to lay down our lives for love’s sake for each other, to walk by the Spirit day in and day out in the little things as well as the big things, to be ruthless in our estimations of what is happening.
Ask yourself.
Who is winning?
The flesh, or the spirit?
We have to be ruthless. We’ve gotta be honest.
Having said all that, we live with confidence.
The victory over evil was accomplished on the Cross.
My Sunday Skl 
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