EVERY true believer, if in an active state of soul, is engaged in some sort of conflict. If he be asleep, he dreams on in a dangerous condition of contentment, is open to Satan’s temptations, and is practically useless on the earth for God. The conflicts in which Christians are engaged, though they all may be necessary, are not all of the proper christian character. Unless in the sleepy state, Christians are engaged in one of the three following kinds of conflict.
First; The conflict with self.
The burden of this struggle is “I.” Ten times over in the two short verses quoted we have “I” Self is the subject here. The trial and pain of this conflict lies in the absolute powerlessness of the believer, either to do good or to abstain from evil. The object of the strife on the part of the believer is to do good, and not to do wrong; but the war is for him hopeless. The battlefield is the soul of the believer; the opposing forces are good desires and evil powers. The end of this struggle is captivity and misery, such as vs. 23 and 24 describe.
Numbers of God’s people are thus engaged at this moment, and are so fully engaged, that they are unfit for anything else. Indeed they could not engage in any other conflict while occupied with this, for this conflict fully occupies them. God save our reader out of this struggling, if it be now his.
If there be any comfort in the remark, however, we observe that none but a believer can be engaged in this strife, because the desires for good are divinely given; they are holy desires, and none but a true believer has truly holy desires. Had the gracious lesson been learned by the believer engaged in this struggle―that Christ alone is our power to enable us to do good, and that Christ is risen, and that all that we are by nature, good or bad, has found its end in the sight of God at the cross of Christ―the christian would not wage this warfare another hour. He would seek and find deliverance from it. He could not so much as dream of victory in it.
In Christ―who died for us and rose again; in Christ, with whom we died unto sin, and in whom we are alive unto God―is our power; and when we simply believe and rely on this blessed fact, we have deliverance from this most painful conflict. So long as the christian looks into himself for power over himself, so long as he tries to master his wishes in his own strength, he will struggle on; but when he lets go all his weapons, and surrenders to his own utter inability in himself to do one single good thing, and trusts alone to Christ, he will be delivered from this character of conflict.
Then, instead of fighting himself, he will trust Christ. Then, instead of waging the hopeless battle, with groans and perhaps despondency, he will thank God, through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Fellow christian, instead of trying through your own efforts to carry out the desires God has put in your heart, rely on Christ’s strength, and thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord for all that He is for you.
Second; The conflict between the Spirit of God in us and our flesh.
Our own flesh is here ranged on the one side, and the Holy Spirit who dwells in us on the other. In the conflict with self, it was the struggle between good desires and a nature powerless to do good. In this case the struggle is between our natural evil desires and the Spirit in us restraining us from doing evil.
The Spirit of God dwells in the believer. He is the Holy Spirit. Not only does no good thing dwell in our flesh, not only is our fallen nature a corrupt thing, but in us there are active lustings after evil, as we very well know. In ourselves and of ourselves, and if left to ourselves, we should think evil and do evil continually, Christians though we be. Our old nature is never improved; it is discovered and restrained by the Spirit’s presence. Holiness never grows out of fallen human nature, any more than figs develop out of thistles. When people speak of being or becoming in themselves holy and sinless, we may believe their testimony if they show us a thistle bearing figs for its fruit. Let us never forget that our own natural evil selves do not become changed or improved by the presence of the Holy Spirit dwelling in us.
A truly holy-living christian is he who is filled with the Holy Spirit. The Spirit restrains the believer from doing that which, if left to himself, he would do. The Spirit in him desires according to God, the flesh in him desires according to the flesh, hence the Spirit desires or lusts against the flesh. The Spirit creates holy desires and produces holy actions in the believer, and of this grace is each believer daily the subject, at least where there is honesty of soul before God.
If the believer yield himself to the Spirit, his life will be one of peace and joy; if otherwise, his heart will be a battlefield, and the Spirit in him will render him unhappy and downcast. In the latter case, the Spirit in him will be checking and restraining, preventing him from doing the things he would―not giving him joy. Thus the believer will find, instead of joy in the Holy Ghost, conflict, because of the presence of a grieved Spirit.
In order to attain to christian happiness we need to yield ourselves to the Spirit who dwells within us. Even as to be freed from the first character of conflict, we need to give up all hopes of self-mastery in self power and to trust Christ alone for strength; so in the second, we need to surrender our wills to God, and yield ourselves to the Spirit Who dwells within us.
We will conclude this paper next month.