Better Flesh?
I am not a strong as Dwayne Johnson, the rock.
I am not as rich as Bill Gates, who is currently worth over $79 billion.
I am not as smart as Terrance Tau, who has an IQ of 230 and earned a doctorate by age 20.
I am not, nor will I ever be, as tall, dark, and handsome as Tom Selleck.
But so what! Jesus said, "the flesh profits nothing." (John 6:63)
"Nothing" means nothing, regardless of the advantage we might enjoy over others. When we boast of our
superiority in the flesh, we are still just boasting in the flesh!
The world is very concerned with the four B's: Braun, Bucks, Brains, and Beauty.
But only God, the one who conceived of us before the foundation of the world, has the right to give us our value.
"There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus." (Galatians 3:28, NRSV)
Neither our nationality or our social status or even our gender determines our value. It is our bond in Christ that gains us true value.
Unmixed Devotion
Many people love Jesus but they also love the sin of the world. Because they dabble in both, they are miserable. It's like loving lemonade and frappuccino and drinking from both instead of one or the other. It will make you sick. Loving the world and loving God will make you miserable.
Some drinks can be mixed, just as some interests can compliment one another. But some mixtures are so contradictory that to mix them is to create something that's noxious. The interests of the world and the interests of God can't be mixed.
"You cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons too ..." (1 Corinthians 10:21).
"So letting your sinful nature control your mind leads to death. But letting the Spirit control your mind leads to life and peace" (Romans 8:6, NLT).
Spiritual Body Odor
Believe it or not, there are people who devote their entire lives to studying stinky, smelly things. Take Dr. George Preti, for example.
Preti has been studying odors for just under 40 years, primarily at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, which he joined in 1971. ... Once, he spilled a flask filled with concentrated armpit extract, which shattered on the floor of his lab and covered Preti’s sneakers. He cleaned the mess and put his shoes in a plastic bag, thinking he had contained the odor.
“But it’s like when you work in a restaurant where they’re cooking something really pungent,” he says. “After you’ve been there for awhile, you don’t smell the odor anymore.”
Preti took the train home, getting more than a few dirty looks from his fellow commuters, and was picked up at the station by his wife. “As soon as I got in the car, she said, ‘You smell like a street person!’ She was just overwhelmed with the odor, and I couldn’t smell anything,” he says. Preti later calculated that he had spilled the equivalent of “about 600,000 people’s armpits” onto his sneakers and pants.
He learned a hard lesson: The power of body odor can’t be underestimated. And those sneakers? “I threw them out,” he says. “There’s no way I could’ve neutralized the smell.”
Did you know that the sin nature has an odor? Well, it does. The Bible tells us that even the good things we attempt to do, when motivated by fleshly pride, carries an odor--they are like the stench of filthy rags in the nostrils of God!
You know the smell: that old mop that you left sitting in dirty water too long; dish rag that you used to wipe the spelt milk off the counter that didn't make it into today's laundry; or that sweaty towel that you accidently left in your gym bag.
"All of us have become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous acts are like filthy rags" (Isaiah 64:6).
When we walk in the flesh instead of the Spirit, we become like poor Dr. Petri who was so accustomed to the ambient odors in his lab, that he no longer even sensed their presence. It took the contorted faces, the pinched noses, and finally the confrontational words of his wife to alert him to how offensive he really was.
Don't ignore the cues and cringes of others. Cleanse yourself in the grace of God--it's the only thing that can neutralize the smell of carnality.
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