New Clothes

James 4:1-4 (NIV) What causes fights and quarrels among you? Don’t they come from your desires that battle within you? 2 You want something but don’t get it. You kill and covet, but you cannot have what you want. You quarrel and fight. You do not have, because you do not ask God. 3 When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures. 4 You adulterous people, don’t you know that friendship with the world is hatred toward God? Anyone who chooses to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God.

OK. The Lord must be trying to get my attention. This is the third day in a row where the word desire (that which conceives temptation – James 1) is highlighted. I’m guessing this is important. As I’ve postulated, what I desire is based on what I believe, which is where the enemy can deceive me – by “misinformation” of what is good, right, and scriptural.

James 1 warns that desire leads to temptation. James 4 tells us it will do more than that. It will lead to quarrels and fights; coveting; stealing; murder – those are all from verse 2. Verse 3 says it can lead to our own pride and a dismissing of God for provision for aide, for whatever we need, or that we’ll try to manipulate God to give us what we “want” under the guise of something else. Wow! Talk about being deceived… to think that we can outsmart the One who created us! How foolish is that! Verse 4 says that we will befriend the world – the creation – in lieu of the Creator.  And in God’s deal, you can’t be friends to both… We  are called to stand on one side or the other.  We can’t sit on the fence.  We’re either for God or againt Him.  That’s not a decision I want to make in the midst of being deceived… in the midst of unholy desires.

Deception, desires… bad stuff.

By no accident (thank you Lord) I also read Romans 13 today in my attempt to continue in Romans. Check out the this verse. Here is the antidote to errant desires.

Rom 13:14 (ESV) But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.

What the ESV translates as “put on” literally means to clothe myself in Jesus Christ. My question then becomes… what does that look like? How do I clothe myself in Christ? By living out Galatians 2:20 “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.“

Daddy, I die to myself today.  I die to my desire.  I die to everything I “think”.  I die to my flesh, my mind, my soul.  I ask you to take control and live today for me.  Put my flesh on like a suit and walk around in me today so that those around me see, feel, and hear Jesus, not Bryan.  In Jesus’ Name, let it be.