Mortify the Flesh
Mortify the Flesh
Mortify therefore your members which are upon the earth; fornication, uncleanness, inordinate affection, evil concupiscence, and covetousness, which is idolatry….
Servants, obey in all things your masters according to the flesh; not with eyeservice, as menpleasers; but in singleness of heart, fearing God. (Colossians 3:5, 22)
Christians might as well admit that there is a reality you have got to reckon with, and that is your flesh. By flesh, I do not mean your body. That old monastic idea that God is angry with your body is just as silly as it can possibly be. Your body is just the goat you ride around on, that is all. It is neither good nor bad; it is just your bones and flesh and blood, that is all. It is what the thinkers and the philosophers call amoral—not moral or immoral, just neutral.
So when the Bible says, “mortify your flesh,” it does not mean kill your blood and your bones and your epidermis and your hair and teeth and eyes and stomach. God is not mad at our physical body. When the Bible says, “Mortify your flesh,” it means your ego, your old man, that self, that evil that is in you. That birthday present you got from the devil when you were born. That inward thing. That is your flesh.
If the old man was something that could be lifted out, like an onion could be pulled out of a garden, then we’d all feel very proud of the fact that we’d been de-onionized and debunked. But the terrible part about crucifying the flesh is that the flesh is you. When the Lord says mortify the flesh, He doesn’t mean abuse your body by starving it or lying on beds of nails. He means put yourself on the cross. That is what people do not want to do.
Some denominations started out believing in the doctrine of self-crucifixion, of putting ourselves to death, of mortifying the flesh through the cross of Jesus. That is all old stuff now; it belongs back there with the horse and buggy and high-button shoes. Nobody believes it anymore, or if they do, they do not live it. I think it is better not to believe it and say so, like some of our good Calvinist friends do, than to say you believe it and then live in spite of it, in defiance of it.
There are a lot of people trying to get away with the old man. What do I mean by the old man? I mean your pride, your bossiness, your nastiness, your temper, your mean disposition, your lustfulness and your quarrelsomeness. What do I mean, Reverend? I mean your study, your hunting for a bigger church, being dissatisfied with the offering and blaming the superintendent because you cannot get called. The reason you cannot get called is nobody wants you. That is what I mean, Reverend.
Deacons, what do I mean? I mean sitting around in board meetings wearing your poor pastor out because you are too stubborn to humble yourself and admit you are wrong.
What do I mean, musicians? I mean that demeanor that makes you hate somebody that can sing a little better than you can. I mean that jealousy that makes you want to play the violin when everybody knows you can’t, especially the choir director. You hate him, wish he were dead and secretly pray that he would get called to Punxsutawney. That is what I mean. All of this may be under the guise of spirituality and we may have learned to put our head over on one side, fold our hands gently and put on a beatific smile like St. Francis of Assisi and still be just as carnal as they come.
I do not know why you fear sanctification and I do not care. But I do say this: You had better mortify your flesh, or your flesh will do something terrible to you. In these terrible days in which we live, we have not only accepted the flesh in its morally fine manifestation as being quite proper, but we have created an ignoble theology of “extenuating circumstances” by which we excuse the flesh.
People do not hesitate any more to say, “Oh, was I mad!” and then a minute later, lead in prayer. But he is just mumbling words. I have no confidence in a man who loses his temper. I do not believe that a man who blows up and loses his temper is a spiritual man, whether he is a preacher, a bishop or a pope. He is a carnal man and needs to be cleansed by fire and blood. But we have excused people who say, “I was mad.” If you were mad, you were sinning and you need to be cleansed from your bad temper. But we have incorporated the flesh into our orthodoxy, and instead of being humble, we magnify the proud fellow.
Years ago God gave me an ice pick and said, “Now Son, among your other duties will be to puncture all the inflated egos you see. Go stick an ice pick in them.” And there has been more popping and hissing in my ministry as the air goes out of egos. People hate me for that, but I love them for the privilege of whittling them down to size, because if there is anything that we ought to get straight, it is how little we are.
When I was a young fellow, I always loved guns. I had a .22 revolver and loved to shoot. Just for fun when I had nothing else to do, and that is rare now, I would go out shooting with another fellow, and we shot what we called a mud hen. It looked like a great big duck, but when we dressed it, it was the biggest hypocrite you ever saw. It was practically all feathers. It was not much bigger than an oversized robin when we got down to the real bird. That describes most Christians. We stand our feathers on end so people do not know how small we are.
The word mortify comes from the same Latin word as mortuary—a place where you put dead people. It means “to die.” But we do not talk about that much any more. We talk about it, but we do not believe in getting reduced. But you will never be a spiritual man until God reduces you to your proper size.
Mortify is a New Testament word. Turn your back upon yourself and reckon yourself to be dead indeed and crucified with Christ. Then expect the blood of Christ and the power of the Holy Spirit to make real what your faith has reckoned. And then begin to live it. Some people go to an altar and get sanctified, but they’re still resentful, they still have a chip on their shoulder. They still love money. They still have a temper. They still look where they should not. And then they claim to be sanctified. They are just pretenders, or worse than that, they are deceived persons. Either we mortify the flesh or the flesh will harm us to a point where we have no power, no joy, no fruit, no usefulness, no victory.