The Battle

Your flesh screams, “Stay in bed a little longer. You can get up just in time to take a quick shower, drive through McDonalds for a large coffee and 2 bacon, egg and cheese biscuits and still get to work in the nick of time.”

The Spirit of God whispers, “How long will you lie there, you sluggard? When will you get up from your sleep? Seek me first.” (Proverbs 6:9 and Matthew 6:33)

Which voice will you listen to?

Which one will you feed?

The one you feed will grow larger in your life. And they are waging war within you for supremacy.  

The Enemy doesn’t need to destroy your life like he did Job’s.  He just needs to keep you from God, keep you from feeding the Spirit. You have to beat your flesh into submission with discipline (1 Corinthians 9:27). I define the act of discipline as doing what you don’t want to do to achieve the results that you want to have. Hebrews 12:11 says, “No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it.” Most of the time we read this in terms of God or someone else disciplining us, but self-discipline is not very pleasant either. Getting up at 6am every day to do P90X bites and usually results in pain the next day or two, but the end results are nice.  

Spiritual discipline is the same. Spending the first minutes of your day with God in prayer and reading the Word is not always fun. Some days you wake with your mind racing over the things you need to get done and you don’t think you have time for God. I hope that He never feels the same towards me. But He tells us in Matthew 6:33 to seek Him first and He will take care of all these things that worry us. When you give discipline and consistency a chance by setting a goal to get up each day and spend 5 minutes in prayer and 5 minutes in the Word for 7 days in a row before you do anything else, you will see results in our life. Spend 30 seconds of your prayer asking God to give you the strength to be consistent tomorrow because He will. He wants to spend this time with you and He will bless you for it. As you tack on days upon days of this spiritual discipline, you will notice changes in your life and other people will notice them too.

The Spirit of God is increasing in you and the flesh is decreasing (John 3:30).

The only way to win the battle against your flesh and the Enemy is by disciplining yourself with prayer and the Word of God.

Fight the good fight.