The Battle with the Flesh: Pleasing God with R.C. Sproul

In Paul’s letter to the church at Rome in the thirteenth chapter he makes this comment: “The night is far spent, and the day is at hand. Let us therefore cast off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light. Let us walk honestly, as in the day, not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying; but put on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the flesh to fulfill the lusts thereof.

” Now, I’m sure that many of you who have just heard me read this text are aware of a very unusual, historical incident that is associated with this passage. How many of you here have an idea of what I’m talking about in your mind? Let me see those hands.

I see a few. Back centuries ago there was a young man who was very brilliant and very wild whose mother was a Christian and whose mother prayed for him daily, hoping that this young man would see the error of his ways and so on. And on one occasion after allegedly having been out all night carousing, and he now is in a stupor – a hangover of sorts – he was making his way along the side of a garden, and there were some children playing in the garden; and they were playing a child’s game where a refrain was used in the game that the kids called out one to another, and the refrain was this: “Tolle lege, tolle lege, tolle lege,” which literally – though not for the purpose of the game – but literally could be translated to mean, “Pick up and read,” or “Take up and read.

” And this man who was walking by stopped in his tracks and had this overwhelming sense of the intrusion into his life of divine providence. For there in the garden he saw a copy of the New Testament, and he had just heard these children shouting, “Pick up and read. Pick up and read.

” And so he walked over, and he picked up the Scriptures and allowed the text to fall open wherever it did. And when it did, his eyes fell upon these words: “…Not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying; but put on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the flesh to fulfill the lusts thereof. ” And when he read those words, it was as if each word of that text were an arrow that pierced his soul, and his conscience was so agitated by it that on the spot he was converted to Christianity.

His name, as I’m sure you recognize by now, was Aurelius Augustine, later the Bishop of Hippo and considered by virtually every historian to be the greatest theologian in the first 1,000 years of the Christian church. Augustine was converted by a passage that spoke directly to the conflict in life between the flesh and the spirit. I remember just a few years ago that Rod Serling, who was the creator of “The Twilight Zone,” entered into a business relationship with Bennett Cerf and a group of other men who were trying to find ways to discover new talent in the literary world, and they tried – they set up different contests to get young writers to become involved in this particular enterprise; and as part of this venture of these various men, they each took one of the English classics in literature and wrote a critical review of it.

Bennett Cerf perhaps would write about Shakespeare, and somebody else on Milton, and so on. Well in any case, Rod Serling was assigned the task of writing a critical review of Saint Augustine’s famous work, “The Confessions. ” How many of you, incidentally, have ever read “The Confessions” of Saint Augustine?

All right, that’s a very small number in this group, and if the number’s the same on television, let me admonish you right now and say this: What my mother used to say in a situation like that is that she would take a finger from this hand and a finger from this hand, and she would put them together like this, and she would say, “Shame on you. ” Now listen, if you’ve been a Christian for one year, and you haven’t read “The Confessions” of Saint Augustine, shame on you. That is a classic that we need to be exposed to.

Now, here Rod Serling read it, and he came – in his review he said his scathing remarks of criticism that in his judgment this book was one of the most overrated books in the history of western literature. He said, “It simply does not deserve the status and the fame that it has enjoyed over the centuries, and in this criticism the point that made him so severe was he was convinced that the book was written by somebody who had a neurotic preoccupation with guilt, and he called attention to one passage in “The Confessions” that would illustrate his judgment that Augustine had this adolescent, neurotic preoccupation with guilt. It was the story where Augustine recalled, as an old man, the things which he had done in his life about which he was most ashamed, and he recalled an incident that took place when he was a teenager where he became involved with some other young guys in an adolescent prank where these fellows went into somebody’s private orchard and denuded a pear tree.

They helped themselves to the pears that belonged to somebody else, stole all these pears, and then left. And Augustine now, fifty years later, is mourning over this childhood prank; and Rod Serling says, “Give me a break Augustine! I mean, what’s the matter with you?

I mean, people are out here guilty of adultery and of murder and of grand larceny, and these serious things, and here’s this guy all exercised over stealing a few pears when he was a kid! ” But Augustine explained what it was that made him feel so remorseful. It wasn’t the bare act of stealing this fruit, but he said, “As I consider my life, and I consider the things that I have done that were evil, I can see that there were certain sins I fell into that though they were not excusable, they were certainly understandable.

” Yes, Augustine confessed to all kinds of sexual sins as a young man – fathering illegitimate children and so on – and he had remorse for that. He said, “But that I can understand. There’s a strong biological drive to become involved sexually, and that temptation can befall a person when they are at a weak moment and anyone can succumb to it.

” He said, “That I can understand. It doesn’t excuse it, but I can understand it. ” He said, “And I can understand a man who was starving stealing a loaf of bread.

I don’t think a man who is starving has a right to steal a loaf of bread,” Augustine said, “but I can understand the force of the temptation to do it. ” He said, “But I stole pears when I didn’t like pears. That is, there is nothing that would stimulate my passions to steal those pears except one thing, and that was the sheer joy in doing something that I knew was wrong.

” What Augustine was lamenting was the exercise of his fallen nature, of his flesh for the sheer joy of doing it. It’s been said that one of the most selfish of all crimes ever committed is vandalism because vandalism gives no benefit to the person who performs the deed other than the sheer pleasure of harming someone else or someone else’s property, usually in the case of people they don’t even know. Just last week Bob had the back window of his car shot out, and when the police came they said – what, how many in the neighborhood?

Something like fifty cases where kids just went joyriding and used their rifles. They were just emptying their guns into people’s cars – people they didn’t know, people that had not done anything to them. There was no relationship of animosity, but for the sheer fun of doing something evil the kids did, oh probably – I don’t know – several thousand dollars worth of damage to other people’s property.

But ladies and gentlemen, that’s not something that is done simply by wild, unbridled, evil people. This last night I was reading once again the history of the holocaust in World War II, and I was particularly reading about what happened in Poland just prior to the establishment of the Warsaw ghetto and the creation of the Camp of Treblinka where the beginning stages of the final solution of genocide was being worked out, and I read of women who were pregnant, into their ninth month, who were forced to stand up in cattle cars and give birth to their children without even having the benefit of lying down and where the mother and the child would both perish; and I read these atrocities over and over again, and I kept saying to myself, “How is it possible that one human being could do these things to another human being? ” And as astonishing as that is, I asked “In the case of the holocaust, it wasn’t one human being doing this to other human beings.

It was eight million human beings suffering at the hands of a network of people who were involved in this. ” Daily, systematically at Auschwitz eight thousand people every day were created. Do you – or were cremated and murdered.

Do you realize how many people it takes to murder eight thousand people every day? See, this wasn’t just an isolated Charles Manson. This was something that revealed the shadow side of the human heart – what Joseph Conrad called the “heart of darkness.

” Paul speaks of a state of humanity that he calls “the flesh,” and we’ve already noticed that Luther said that the three – the great triad of enemies for the Christian growth contain the world, the flesh, and the devil. Now when we’re talking about the flesh I want us to understand, without getting into the technicalities of it, that when the Bible talks about the struggle that we go through with the flesh, it is not simply talking about the body – that the struggle between the flesh and the spirit cannot be equated with a struggle between the body and the soul or the body and the mind. But rather, what the New Testament is talking about when it talks about this fierce struggle that goes on in the Christian life between the flesh and the spirit is the struggle between the power of sin in our natural fallen humanity against the influence of God the Holy Spirit in our lives.

So that the whole struggle and process of sanctification involves what Paul calls ”warfare. ” There’s a war going on, and it’s a war between the flesh of man and the Spirit of God. Now, I get so irritated when I hear preachers stand up and say, you know, “Come to Jesus and all your problems will be over,” because that’s just simply a lie.

My life didn’t get complicated until I became a Christian. Before I was a Christian, though I was not happy, I had a relative degree of peace. I knew that I was doing things that I ought not to be doing.

I mean, I had not totally annihilated my conscience, but I was on the way to it. I mean, by repeating certain actions you can so sear the conscience and put calluses upon the soul that where you once perhaps felt a little tinge – twinge – of guilt, now you can do these things through repetition that don’t bother you anymore, and you experience what the Bible calls “hard-heartedness. ” But when I came to Christ, I found a new conscience, and so now things that I didn’t worry about before became matters of ethical concern, and life was complicated.

And wouldn’t it have been nice if I would say, “Well what I did when I was converted was I traded in the flesh, bought into the Spirit, and lived happily ever after. ” That’s the struggle of sanctification. Though the power of the flesh is broken, and the power of the flesh is now subordinate to the Spirit to a very real measure in regeneration, the flesh, ladies and gentlemen, is not totally annihilated at conversion.

The war goes on. Now, listen to what the apostle says in chapter eight of Romans. He says in verse four “…that the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in us who walk not after the flesh but after the Spirit.

For they that are after the flesh do mind the things of the flesh but they that are after the Spirit the things of the Spirit. To be carnally minded is death, and to be spiritually minded is life and peace because” – listen to this – “the carnal mind is enmity against God. For it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can it be.

So then they that are in the flesh cannot please God. ” Now, what is the topic of this series of lectures? Pleasing God, and here the apostle says, “Those who are in the flesh cannot please God.

” That God is not pleased – He’s never pleased by a lifestyle that is characterized by the flesh. Now, when He says that does that mean that what God hates is physical things? So often that’s the way this verse has been interpreted and other verses like it, and so Christians think that to be spiritual means to deny the body and that anything that has anything to do with physicality must necessarily be wrong.

That’s why we’ve seen incidences arise in church history where Christians have got involved in all kinds of rigorous forms of asceticism, forms of self-denial and self-flagellation where you go and you hide in a cell like a hermit and you beat yourself and you deny yourself food, and you get skinny as a rail, and you take all kinds of vows for celibacy and – so because sex is wrong, not only outside of marriage but inside marriage. Food is wrong. Anything that brings physical pleasure is considered wrong.

Ladies and gentlemen, that was invented by Manicheanism not by Christianity. The first affirmation of the God who makes a physical world is what? He looks at that physical order, and He says, “That’s good.

Plato came to the conclusion that anything physical is so far removed from pure spirit that by its very physicality it is imperfect and so that the ideal of the Greek for redemption would be to be released from the body. The body is seen as the prison-house of the soul - not so Judeo-Christianity. Christianity doesn’t believe in resurrection from the body but resurrection of the body, and so when the Bible talks about the warfare between the flesh and spirit, it’s not saying that matter is evil and spirit is good.

No, no, no. If you look in Galatians where Paul sets forth the works of the flesh, what does he say? “The works of the flesh include such things as drunkenness, adultery, fornication.

” Now let’s just stop there for a second. Those would indicate what? Physical sins.

Drnkenness is something that happens when we have a physical appetite, a physical desire for alcohol, and we overindulge ourselves in those things, and so we get blotto. We can obviously see the connection between the body and the action there. Adultery is a physical sin.

It’s being – succumbing again to biological instincts and passions where God has said, “No. ” But if you look at that list he goes on and speaks about lying, envy, hatred. Now obviously you can’t lie and envy and hate outside of your bodies, but they are not physical actions are they?

They have to do with attitudes and dispositions of the heart. You look at this: envy. I mentioned earlier the sin of vandalism.

Why do you suppose vandalism takes place? Vandalism is simply the outward action of inward envy. The basic attitude of the vandal is this: If I can’t enjoy what you possess, I’m not going to – I’m going to make sure that you can’t enjoy it either.

” He doesn’t simply steal it for himself, but rather he destroys it so that no one can enjoy it. There’s a certain sense in which that’s a degree worse than actual theft, but it comes out of a spirit of envy towards other people’s possessions. Do you have any idea how destructive, for example, to human relationships, envy is, how many ways people are violated that are motivated by envy, how many times you’ve been slandered, you’ve been attacked unjustly because of someone’s envy?

Do you ever wonder why in God’s ordering of priorities God puts envying in the top ten of the laws? “Thou shall not covet. ” The New Testament teaches us that if somebody else receives a benefit – something good happens to them – we’re supposed to rejoice in their good fortune, rather than to rejoice in their fall.

There’s an expression – a cynical expression – in golf. I don’t like it, and it is this: Every golf shot makes somebody happy. Every golf shot makes somebody happy.

If a guy hits it in the water, it doesn’t make him happy, but it certainly makes his opponent happy. But what I love to see in a golf tournament is where everybody’s rooting for everybody else to play their very best and to have somebody win it rather than somebody else lose it. There’s a difference because you’re not wishing bad fortune on another person.

That’s what we do when we succumb to envy. So what I’m trying to get at is this: that the flesh refers to the old fallen nature. Now in the time remaining let me ask this question: The Bible says that “…to be carnally minded is death.

To be spiritually minded is life and peace, and the carnal mind is at enmity to be – of God. ” And he said, “But you are not in the flesh, but you’re in the Spirit. ” But here’s the problem.

You may be in the Spirit, ladies and gentlemen, but you still lie and you still envy, and yes even still commit adultery and still get drunk. In other words, we continue to perform the works of the flesh even though we’re in the Spirit. Now I know there are some who say, “You’re either in the flesh or in the Spirit” – that you can’t be a carnal Christian.

Now when Bill Bright, I think he speaks to it in a very significant pastoral way where he’s saying to people, “Look, you have these influences, this warfare going on. Who is going to be on the throne? Who is going to be the victor?

Are you going to live in acquiescence to the Holy Spirit, or are you going to indulge the flesh for the rest of your life? ” And he’s talking about a Spirit-filled life that sees the emphases on the level of the Spirit rather than on the flesh. But some people have devised from that and from others the theories that there are different kinds of Christians – a carnal Christian who doesn’t have the Spirit of God and spiritual Christian who’s no longer carnal.

Ladies and gentlemen, anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ is not a carnal Christian. He’s a carnal non-Christian, okay? So in that sense, “carnal Christian” is a contradiction in terms.

If a person is only flesh – what the New Testament calls flesh – with not the Holy Spirit dwelling in him, then he is outside the kingdom of God. He can’t possibly please God, and yet if a person has the Holy Spirit dwelling in them, that person may do carnal things. That person may still struggle with the flesh, but he is a spiritual person.

Now it becomes a matter of decree, of how much we submit to the Holy Spirit. A person who pleases God is a person who seeks the fruit of the Spirit in his life.