Today on Insight for Living from Chuck Swindahl, We must not walk. according to our fleshly nature. We must determine we will not walk away. according to the flesh. I begin most every morning saying, Lord, this is your day.
I pray that I will not do. what I want to do, but I'll do what you want me to do. Help me with it. Take over. Do you ever feel exhausted by trying to be a good person?
Well, you're not alone. And today on Insight for Living, Chuck Swindahl reveals the stunning truth that will revolutionize your walk with Christ. In his letter to the Romans, Paul declares there is no condemnation for those in Christ. period. No more spiritual scorekeeping.
No more fear of disappointing God. no more crushing weight of religious performance. The relief comes when we surrender our futile efforts and let the Holy Spirit take control. Teaching from Romans chapter 8, Chuck titled today's message, Let's Talk About Our Walk. What the law could not do, weak as it was through the flesh, God did.
What is it that the law tried to do?
Well, it tried to make us holy. The law announced, Do this, don't do that. If you do this, you are holy. If you don't do that, you are righteous. Do that, don't do this.
And it gave no power to pull it off, but God did. When He sent Christ in the likeness of sinful flesh as an offering for sin, condemning the control of sin in the flesh, verse 4, so that the requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us. As the Spirit of God takes charge inside us, a righteousness. Occurs. It's a marvelous experience of walking in a level you never dreamed possible for yourself.
When times are hard, when nights are lonely, when things are turning, when you seem like you're all alone, go back to these three great truths: I am secure in Christ. I am freed from the things that once dominated me, and thank the Lord before God. I am righteous in his eyes. Because you were in Christ, the same righteousness that applies to his Son applies to you in God's eyes. It's called grace.
Now then. You say, man, I'm home free, not really. Remember, they got the old nature, and you got the new nature, and they are fighting with each other. And the old nature never will get better. He still wants to control you, but he doesn't have the dominance.
Remember the message on emancipation out of Romans 6? You've been emancipated. What happens when I walk according to the flesh? Verse five. Those who are according to the flesh Set their minds on the things of the flesh.
First thing to write down. A fleshly mindset. Verse 5. There is a mental orientation towards sin. My impulses begin to control me and begin to dominate me, and the self-serving desires kick into action.
The Spirit of God is grieved, doesn't want that. But I've made that choice. If the old nature kicks in, there is a fleshly mindset. Look at verse 6. Here's the second one.
For the mind set on the flesh is death. Don't go any further. I want that to hit you with full force. A death-like existence. Kicks in, write that down.
A death-like existence, verse seven. There is within you and me an emptiness, a futility. A frustration. We were plagued then by shame and guilt because the old nature took control. Listen very carefully.
This is why. A Christian. can commit suicide. Listen to this. How many people are confused thinking if he committed suicide, he couldn't have been a Christian?
No, the flesh dominated the individual and brought him to the place of taking his own life. The spirit was grieved in that. Is he saved? He's saved. Loss of reward, yeah, there will be.
And a life that could have been lived in fullness will no longer be able to be lived, the life was taken. Listen to the words of Malcolm Muggeridge right now. Muggeridge speaks of World War II and the demands for sacrifice and heroism in his life. By the way, Muggeridge was the one who was the editor of Punch Magazine, a satirical. A British publication that he worked in and on for much of his adult life until he was born again.
But listen to his story, just a brief little summary. He was turned down on his first attempt to enlist in the military, and finally being accepted as a spy in the British Secret Service, he found himself far from the glamorous action depicted in espionage novels. He was stuck in Mozambique monitoring the German disruption of Allied shipping. Bored, listless, and desolate, he wrote home to his wife Kitty in March of 1943: Much of the time I spend wishing I was dead, wondering why I'm doing what I have to do, putting up my own faint struggle with the tedium of time. One night, dark night in his life, Muggeridge wrote, The absurdity, the futility.
Listen to emptiness. The absurdity, the futility, the degradation strikes home. I lay on my bed full of stale liquor and despair. Alone in the house, and as it seems, utterly alone, not just in Mozambique. but in the world, alone in the universe, alone in eternity.
with no glimmer of light in the prevailing blackness, no human voice I could hope to hear, or human heart I could hope to reach, no God to whom I could turn, no Saviour to take my hand. Cheated by his position of the war's only solace, death, It came into my mind, writes Muggerage that there was, after all, one death I could still procure, my own, I decided to kill myself. He plans to do it by drowning. I'll leave the rest of the story for you. Don't you love it when preachers do that to you?
They just leave you hanging out there. What I want you to feel is the emptiness. That kind of emptiness can be experienced by a believer. That kind of emptiness attacks the carnal Christian. Operating in the flesh, you respond just as if you don't even know Christ.
And thoughts of desperation and despair occupy your mind. Called here. Death. Mind set on the flesh. is death.
Look at verse 7. A third characteristic, look at this. Description because the mind set on the flesh is hostile toward God. When you read through your Bible, take note of things like this. There are themes that occur, and write those themes down in your study.
Just make a note of them, especially in Paul's writing. Very logical writing. The mind set on the flesh is hostile toward God.
So, the third characteristic: when you operate in the flesh, you are hostile toward God. You resist him and you resent him. You resist those who try to represent him to you. That's why, when there are marital problems and one won't listen to the other, it's because the other may very well be representing what God says in His Word. But the carnal one responds, I'm not ready to hear that.
I don't care about what it says in His Word. I don't care about what God says about this. You see, a Christian can say that. I've heard it all through my adult life. I've sometime done it.
I've done it. Cynthia will bring something to my attention. I don't want to hear it. She'll say, remember last Sunday? Oh, that gets to me when she says that.
Last Sunday. Why? Because I'm in the flesh. I'm operating in the realm of the old nature. And I'll lash out back at her.
I'll say things I shouldn't have said. And it'll just plague me. You know, I get tired of sleeping on the back porch. I mean, it finally gets to you after a while. What's wrong?
I'm hostile toward the things of God. There's an open defiance in my spirit against God. It can happen to any one of us. when the flesh controls. I got a hold of Oz Guinness' book, Long Journey Home.
He does as good a job at describing our postmodern era as anybody I've read lately. Normally, I don't understand what he writes, but this is one of those books I can get. And so it's in, you know, monosyllables and big spacing, and it's short. Anyway, Long Journey Home. He writes this.
The fact is that many of the greatest thinkers, writers, artists, musicians, scientists, inventors, poets, and reformers throughout Western history have been people of profound and genuine faith, and he names a number of them. Yet, faith continues to be dismissed by many of the educated and cultured as something only for the uneducated and uncultured. I don't know where you work. I don't know the group you run around with, but chances are good. If you're known for your evangelical faith, they're calling you, whether you're around or not, uneducated and uncultured.
You're just not that with it. Anne Lamotte recalled her experience of growing up near San Francisco. Delightful writer. She says, none of the adults in our circle believed. Believing meant that you were stupid.
Ignorant people believed. Uncouth people believed. and we were heavily coothed. Writer Annie Dillard felt obliged to tell the New York Times magazine: just because I'm religious does not mean I'm insane. If you read the New York Times magazine, you know why she said that.
If you're an evangelical, you're insane. Your borderline. Voltaire's notorious contempt for religion. is captured in this command, crush the infamous thing. And that thinking is spread down through the, echoed through the generations that have followed.
All of us remember well the media mogul Ted Turner's snide remark. His dismissal of the Christian faith as a religion for losers. hostile toward God. Hostile toward God. It's right here.
Because the mind set on the flesh. is not just neutral. It hates the things of God. You're in a culture like that, men and women. That's the world in which we exist.
And your children exist. And many of their teachers exist. And that old nature is inside every one of us. Seven, right in the middle, talks about an unsubmissive lifestyle. That's number four.
Write that down. For it does not subject itself to the law of God. There's a lack of submission. There's open defiance against authority, a refusal to bow one's knee. Haven't you dealt with rebellion in someone?
Haven't you seen them as they resist it? I know a couple right now that's just at each other's throat. They're both believers, and neither one's gonna back down. Both of them determined to have their way. There is a lack of submission.
No issue was ever resolved until someone was willing to submit. And the flesh says, don't give up, don't surrender. Stand against it, resist it. There is an unsubmissive lifestyle that accompanies it. There's one more, and that's an inability to obey God.
Just write it down, an inability to obey God. He's not even able to do so, for those who are in the flesh cannot. Please. God. When I am in the flesh, I know that those activities.
Did not and cannot please God. It's like another language is being spoken. Let me show you something. Hold your place here and look at 1 Corinthians 2, okay? Come on, let's turn together.
1 Corinthians 2. Verse 14. Let me show you this situation in the life of the natural person. For a natural man or a natural woman, 1 Corinthians 2:14, does not accept. The things of the Spirit of God.
Why? because they are foolishness to him. The Greek word is moros. Guess what we get from that? They are moronic to him.
He cannot understand them because they are spiritually appraised. They're spiritually discerned. That's why you could bring a friend who doesn't know Christ and you haul him to church and you put him down beside you and you're on the edge of your seat just drinking in this truth and you look at your friend and he's dozing off. Or he's checking his watch saying, How much longer is that guy going to be yelling up there? How much longer is this service going to go on?
Why? Because he has no interest in spiritual things. You can't get enough. I've had people say, we wish the service didn't end when it did. God bless them.
Not often do I hear that, but sometime I'll hear that. Why? Because they got a hunger that's never satisfied. But you get a lost, you got a carnal Christian sitting next to you in church, he's miserable. He hates it.
It's like another language is spoken. I like the illustration that Donald Barnhouse uses. Two men, each accompanied by a dog, meet along a road in the country. The men start to talk and the dogs touch noses and begin to communicate, dog fashion, with each other. Perhaps they have some way of telling each other that there's a rabbit trail over there in the bushes.
And they romp off together. They come back to their masters and their dog hears the sounds. Of the conversation that is taking place between the two men, but they have not the slightest knowledge of the meaning. Whether the men are talking about atomic physics or the price of corn per the bushel.
Now, what dog knows the things of the dog except the nature of a dog that is within him? Even so, the things of a man know no dog, that only the Spirit of man can understand them. If we take those two phrases, set them down on top of the verse from Corinthians, we understand our relationship with God. Get this: just as a dog may not understand a dog, even though a dog may understand a dog but cannot understand a man, so a man may understand a man but can never understand God unaided by the Spirit. That's a classic illustration.
I mean, you could talk about deep things and your doggies. You want you to know is it time to eat? Or can I go outside? And you're into deep conversation. Why?
Because he's on another plane. That is the way it is when we are carnal. We know in our hearts we're supposed to be enjoying the worship and enjoying the truth of God's word, but we don't. Why? Because we are operating in the flesh.
Now That's clear. Everybody's got it.
Now the things of the Spirit, we'll work through this quickly. Talk about walking in the Spirit. Go back to verse 5. Remember our threads? When I'm in the spirit, what's true?
Number one, I have a spiritual mindset. When the Holy Spirit does his work within me, there's a hunger that can never be satisfied. I love spending time in prayer. I love spending time in His Word. I love talking about spiritual things.
I love it when God does things and I see Him at work. Verse 6 tells us of something else. The mind set on the spirit is life and peace. There's a vitality of life and there's an inner peace. Those things go together.
I'm excited about the day. I wake up in the morning. I can't go back to sleep. I'm all excited about what the future holds. I'm excited about this opportunity.
No Sunday comes that I'm not on the edge of my bed in the morning early thinking, what an opportunity. I never dread this. This is a thrill for me to do this. I can't believe they pay me for it. Don't tell the elders I said that, but I can't believe they pay me for this.
This is something I'm driven to do. I love it. And you too, you love doing what your gift and your passion drive you to do. Why? Because you have life and you have that sense of peace.
Look at verse 9. There's a transforming presence of the indwelling spirit.
However, you are not in the flesh, but in the Spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God dwells in you. Verse 10: If Christ is in you, though the body is dead because of sin, that's that old nature, yet the Spirit is alive because of righteousness. There is this welling up of the transforming presence of the Spirit of God. And it's like an aura. It's magnificent.
You're not faking it. It genuinely bubbles over. You think, what an opportunity to tell that person about Christ. And Lord, guide me as I open my mouth and talk to him about spiritual things. Give me the right words.
And you're excited about that. You don't dread that. You love it. The reason is, verse 10, there's a divine life. within you.
That divine life longing to get out.
Now you get to verse 12. He says, So then. Just like people who hear a message go, so what?
So what? Paul says, so then. Brethren and sister, let's include the women, men and women.
So then, men and women, we are under obligation. To what? To live according, we are not to the flesh, but to live according to the spirit.
So, let me give you a couple things here. We must not walk according to our fleshly nature. We must determine we will not walk according to the flesh. I began most every morning saying, Lord, this is your day. I pray that I will not do What I want to do, but I'll do what you want me to do.
Help me with it. Take over. If you wonder what happens when you do what you want to do, check the list in Galatians 5. 19 through 21. Galatians 5, 19 to 21 lists the things of the flesh.
Eugene Peterson in the message lists them like this, and they're shocking. It is obvious what kind of life develops out of trying to get your own way all the time. repetitive, loveless, cheap sex. A stinking accumulation of mental and emotional garbage. Frenzied and joyless grabs for happiness.
Trinket gods. Magic show religion. Paranoid loneliness. cutthroat competition. all-consuming yet never satisfied wants.
A brutal temper. An impotence to love or to be loved, divided homes and divided lives, small-minded, lopsided pursuits, the vicious habit of depersonalizing everyone into a rival. Uncontrolled and uncontrollable addictions, ugly parodies of community. I could go on and on, says Paul. That's the flesh.
That's the flesh You've got that capacity to live out.
So, the other must is: we must not rely on our own strength, but on the Spirit of God. We must not rely on our own strength, but on the Spirit of God. Ella Wheeler Wilcox put it like this: one ship drives east, the other drives west. With the selfsame winds that blow. It is the set of the sails and not the gale that determines the way that we go.
Is that good? You who love to sail know that that's true. You can actually get to the harbor with a contrary wind blowing right against you. You tack. You work the sails, you work the rudder so that you get into the harbor, even regardless of how the winds blow.
There's a second verse to her words. Like the winds of the sea, are the ways of fate as we voyage along through life. 'Tis the set of the soul that decides its goal and not the calm. or the strife. Love that.
People don't make great things of their lives because life is calm and easy. It's because they've set their sails toward the Spirit. and they're determined not to operate in the realm of the flesh. Two final questions, and it's over. Number one, am I absolutely certain that I am a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ?
Am I absolutely certain that I'm a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ? Only you can answer. If I were to look at you, I would say, yeah, you are, but you may not be. I would see you going through the motions, but you may not be. Has there ever been a time in your life when you have received Christ as your own personal Savior and God?
If the answer is no, you are not a Christian. You cannot say, I am absolutely certain. Be sure of that today. Make that decision today. Do it now.
Now's the time. You may not have tomorrow. You may not make it to tomorrow. Decide now. The second question, is my mind firmly set on my flesh?
Are on God's Spirit. That'll determine the way that you go. Is my mind set on the flesh? Or is it set on the Spirit? Boy, this is important stuff.
I know I've gone a little long. I don't apologize. But it takes a little while to get it all set. And for the two of you that think I haven't gone long enough, God bless you. Let's bow our heads together.
Hmm.
Now, Lord, I pray for your help, knowing the adversaries heard everything that's been said. Knowing that he would love to steal the seed that has been sown. May that seed take root quickly. May it begin to bear fruit. this week.
May we become easier to live with. Maybe become the kind of people Christ was. Magnetic. Magnanimous. Forgiving.
Full of grace and truth. Caring, loving. Kind. But honest. Straight thinking.
Straight talking. Turn us into people like that, Lord, as we give ourselves to the power of the Spirit. and this community will be transformed. I ask it in the name of Christ. Our Savior.
who has secured us once for all and forever. And everyone said, Amen. When we walk according to the flesh, we experience death-like emptiness, hostility toward God, and spiritual frustration. But when we yield to the Spirit's control, we discover the freedom, peace, and righteousness that Christ secured for us. The choice is ours.
You're listening to the Bible teaching of Chuck Swindahl, and this is Insight for Living. Whether you're a new student of the Bible or you've been reading God's Word your entire life, it's important to renew our minds with these liberating truths. For that reason, Insight for Living offers a number of great resources. Today I want to mention Chuck's compelling biography of Abraham, the patriarch of the faith. and one of the people that Paul refers to in his letter to the Romans.
We've selected a powerful chapter in Chuck's book to share with you. It's the chapter that describes how Abraham earned the title Friend of God and cultivated an unshakable relationship with his Creator. You can access this deeply personal chapter on your mobile device or print out a copy online as a downloadable PDF. In the chapter titled, Can We Talk?, Chuck wrote these words. God, like a good friend, remains interested and available.
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or go to insight.org slash monthly companion. I'm Bill Meyer. Join us when Chuck Swindahl describes how to engage the Holy Spirit as your sole source of spiritual power. Tomorrow on Insight for Living. The preceding message, Let's Talk About Our Walk, was copyrighted in 2007, 2010, and 2025.
And the sound recording was copyrighted in 2025 by Charles R. Swindahl, Incorporated. All rights are reserved worldwide. duplication of copyrighted material for commercial use is strictly prohibited.
