I have noticed that more and more people understand what the flesh is here in South Africa. I remember how it changed my life to know that the devil is not my problem, but I am my own problem because I allowed impatience to rule my life. The Lord taught me how to crucify anger and impatience and to be saved from it, to live a life in the saved Christ-mind. It was a matter of doing daily introspection, crucifying fleshly thoughts, and living a peaceful, calm life as my thoughts were being transformed. I learnt to become a living sacrifice and follow Jesus daily. (Romans 12)
I am thankful today for our readers who have taken this message to heart and learnt to guard the heart against the things of the flesh. I know that many of you have taken part in guarding the heart and are now teaching others to live a saved life in Christ. You have all become disciplined in your thinking and learned to have an organised mind. I have lately met some people who have this knowledge, they learnt in cell groups or by listening to leaders preach the truth. Once again, thank you for what you are doing for Jesus! We intend to put out some posts on the knowledge of the cross and hope that it will be of use to those of you who live the truth and preach the message of the peace of God to all mankind.
Nevertheless, I also know that you have endured some suffering as we all have. Unfortunately, there comes a time when we all look down into that deep, dark hole and find scriptures like “it is through suffering that Christ learned obedience”. It has become my daily meditation to follow Jesus to the cross. One translation said that Jesus saw the horror of the suffering that lay before him in the garden of Gethsemane. He was deeply distressed and filled with anqiush as He overcame the thoughts of the flesh and perspired great drops of blood. The part that I would like you to remember is that an angel of the Lord appeared to strengthen him. My wife, Yvonne, had a hip transplant, and she took it badly. It was hard to watch her suffer, and when I read this scripture of the angel that strengthened Jesus, I anointed Yvonne with oil and asked the Lord to send His angel to strengthen her. Truly, since that day, she started to recover more speedily. I believe that Jesus was completely revived by the angel and was so strong that when the temple guards and Roman soldiers came to arrest him, they fell over backward when He identified himself.
It comforts me to know that he was strong in the spirit to face what lay ahead as they bound him to beat and torture him. He was falsely accused! Do you know that nothing is worse than being falsely accused, and no matter what you do or say, they will not believe you. So he just stayed quiet and allowed everyone to do their very worst. In this way, I believe he was setting a trap for all the evil that is in man. They flogged him with a lead-tipped whip that was certainly not sterilised, but I know that lead in itself is poisonous, so I think this was the way he took all sickness into himself. After this, a battalion of Roman soldiers mocked him. Between four hundred and a thousand two hundred men were called out to mock the only man who never sinned. They pushed a thorn crown into his head and beat him with a reed, put his clothes back on, only to take them off to crucify him. He was naked as they nailed him to the cross; the loneliest man in the world was ministering to the woman there. He saved the soul of a man, and then he forgave everybody. No one understood that he had trapped all sickness and all sin inside that body that was stinking and pouring pus. He hung there for six hours from nine in the morning until three in the afternoon. If you study this out, I believe you will agree he was in hell. Finally, the earth could not stand it any more, and it became dark at twelve, and the earth began to shake, and the rocks split apart around Jerusalem. The one thing all four gospels mention is that the temple veil was split in two. I can’t help but wonder what kind of fear must have come upon the temple priests when this happened. Finally, he gave up his spirit. That life-giving spirit just slid out and left the old, sick body weighted down by sin; it was dead! And so was everything he trapped inside it. On Sunday morning, the same Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead slipped back into that old body and glorified it. It could now walk through walls, sit down, and eat with them, a new creation. The first one who rose from the dead, this is why we follow him daily. We partake of the death of the flesh, but we rise in the spirit.
