LLI Fellowship

Can you and I ever get to the place of living in a way where we are constantly winning against the evil on the inside of us and in the world around us?   

Is it possible to begin a new life where we are consistently overcoming the seductive temptations that confront us every day in our very fast paced, tempestuous and very pagan society?

The kind of temptations that capture control of our redeemed mind and put us in a mind-numbed temporally based state of being. 

What and where do these sinful temptations emanate from? 

Many times those nagging sins from the past are able to connect to our natural tendencies to sin against Our Creator's holy law, which keep us from experiencing the true joy and sweet fellowship we desire as born again believers to experience in our daily walk with our Creator and His Son Y'shua.  

The type of overcoming life noted by our Lord in John 16:33

"These things I have spoken to you, that in Me you may have peace. In the world you will [fn] have tribulation; but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world."

So from the words of Christ we see that it is possible to be set free from the weight and power of these high level temptations? How then do we tap into the supernatural strength God's has promised us in the new birth? 

There are times when as true believers in Y'shua we become ensnared by sin patterns that cause us to be frustrated and stuck. Sins that overtake us that we thought were defeated at the point of our conversion to Christ. 

When these kind of failures pop up, frustration and the associated shame take root in our hearts many times to the point where we might even be tempted to question if we know what it means to be a christian. 

Time and circumstance teach us that we live here on planet earth in a place of war of the soul. Born into the reality of a internal struggle of doing things that cause us to feel shame and regret compared to a life where we consistently overcome the temptations that beset us and others. 

Many times I have said to myself, "where did that intense temptation come from?" Is an urge to give into temptation the simple byproduct of bad thinking or is it an external shot at our mind from outside of us? 

When we give into old sin patterns that soak us in shame and drench us in a worldly way of thinking and being, should we retreat to the same way of dealing with these sin patterns, doing things like: building our own righteousness through good deeds, or trying to perform some christian duty with more passion, or should we actually consider a different path to overcoming reoccurring sin patterns? 

If we are honest with ourselves, we need more strength to maintain a mind full of positive thoughts and a life full of positive activity for God and His Kingdom compared to the effort we have put forth in the past. A life tortured by troubled nagging evil thoughts of regret that motivate us to do and say the wrong thing at the wrong time.

If we are honest we feel and know that deep down in our hearts are the wretched sins of lust, envy, anger, and jealousy, and since these bad things exist within our breast we need more strength than our natural faculties can offer to gain victory over evil and live a happy and godly life, filled with the joy of positive human relationships and peace. 

Using our natural will power to overcome and defeat the uprising of evil thoughts, such as the subtle sins of self promotion and self aggrandizing will not yield long-term success over these deep seated sins that oftentimes seem to get the best of us. 

Today we must realize that it is time to stop using the same old carnal means to defeat sins of the heart. The work of dying to sin and being renewed in the newness of Christ's resurrection power requires more than human will. Our will without the power of the Holy Spirit can not sustain against those hidden heart-based sin battles we face day by day and hour by hour. 

In order to learn what we must know about ourselves and our hearts, we must learn the nature of the inner workings of our soul to gain a better understanding of what we are really dealing with in our quest to become better people. More holy and more happy.

Jesus (Y'shua) died to set us free from the daily grind of living soulishly. Before we will be able to gain the victory over our soul sins we have to learn the true division of our human soul and our redeemed spirit man. 

We must understand that Our Lord Y'shua also had to live and breathe with the same emotional challenges we face every moment of every day as a soul-based human being. The difference between us and Jesus (Y'shua) is that He batted a thousand for 33 years against those same inner struggles to sin in thought word and deed, thoughts and manner of living that defeat us every moment of every day. 

For we do not have a High Priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses, but was in all [points] tempted as [we are, yet] without sin.. Heb. 4:15

We can imply from this scripture that Jesus wrestled with his soul man. We can indirectly discern that the soul is a distinct part of man. It represents our emotions, motives, intelligence, rationale, logic, culture, family upbringing, political bent, sensitivities, likes, dislikes, and our cultural influences.

"I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the [life] which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me. Gal.2:20

note:
Our accomplishments, positive inclinations to do good, and our God-given talent are Divinely granted gifts, but when we look at our credentials instead of the cross of Christ, we don't tap into His Divine power inside of us. We don't walk as He walked when we decide to trust in our gifts and talents and we sin against the blood of Jesus and the soul transformation intended for us in the NEW covenant.

What I am offering to you all today is a way to defeat the soul which is a part of man's being, a part of our natural man AND the apostle Paul clearly states in Gal 2:20 that its wants and desires must be crucified. 

Our soul can be influenced by what the scripture call the “carnal mind” which refers to our natural bent toward sin as is spoken of in Rom. 8:7, where we are told is at enmity with God and His Holy Spirit and His holy laws.

“Because the carnal mind is enmity against God; for it is not subject to the law of God, nor indeed can be”. 

See also Gal. 5:17:

“For the flesh lusts against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh; and these are contrary to one another, so that you do not do the things that you wish.”

So in our natural state, outside of the grace of God's power on the inside of us, we cannot please God or ourselves. God’s law is perfectly right and good. His Torah (teaching) works when followed and our soul naturally fights the righteous influence of the law of God.

Our soul left to itself, without instruction, will ultimately destroy our way and bring us down to Sheol. Without a Divine intrusion and the power that comes from the Holy Spirit we cannot put away the works of the flesh as mentioned in Gal. 5:17

What then are we to do to gain the victory and live a more productive life and experience better relationships in our home, neighborhood, church, and in our world?

Left to our natural state, post the fall in Eden, we are mired in a mi lase of screwed up emotions and left to ourselves we can not find our way out all our tangled strands of conflicted emotions.

You may protest and say, “I’m not a bad person” I haven't cheated anybody or murdered anyone, I don't lie, well, too much. When we are tempted we will think bad thoughts, you and I inherently know that deep in the hidden recesses of our hearts dwell all kinds of evil thoughts that rise to the surface when we are slighted, slandered, mistreated, and so forth.

Even as these words of self-justification roll over your tongue you are lying to yourself and to God. The law of God calls even your slightly jealous and covetous thoughts as evil workings of the flesh.

In the book of James we discover the most succinct description of why we have a hard time with relationships in the world and in the Body of Christ.

Meditate with me on James 1:1-6

Where do wars and fights come from among you? Do they not come from your desires for pleasure that war in your members? 2 You lust and do not have. You murder and covet and cannot obtain. You fight and war. Yet you do not have because you do not ask. 3 You ask and do not receive, because you ask amiss, that you may spend it on your pleasures. 4 Adulterers and adulteresses! Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Whoever therefore wants to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God. 5 Or do you think that the Scripture says in vain, "The Spirit who dwells in us yearns jealously"

6 But He gives more grace. Therefore He says:

"God resists the proud,

But gives grace to the humble."

How can we then live a peace filled life in this world where every human has the same propensity to sin? 

The only way to achieve peace in world gone crazy with conflict is through the acquiring of special grace outside of ourselves that gives us the necessary power to overcome the works of the flesh. This power comes through the ministry of the Holy Spirit which comes to us through an open confession of our sin. 

If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us [our]sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. I Jn 1:9

Only by His power we are able to apply the power of holiness and right behavior at the point of any temptation. If we are left alone without help from above us, we will fail. Our natural sinful propensity to indulge our human soul feelings is very powerful and will beat us every time we use the flesh to defeat them, so in the end we are absolutely incapable of consistently overcoming our native soul inclinations when temptations come against us.

Conversely, the moment we confess our thought sins to Christ and ask forgiveness of all our sins that we have been made aware of by the Holy Spirit, the power of a Holy Spirit comes to our inner being to beat that hidden sin desire into submission. As we continue the practice of this behavior, we will continue to grow into His image through the continual act of soul death, this again happens as we confess our sins at the point of our knowledge of sin. 

I affirm, by the boasting in you which I have in Christ Jesus our Lord, I die daily. I Cor 15:31

Soul crucifixion happens as a matter of our yielding to His Grace and Power in our hearts BUT it happens as we lay our will down on the cross of exposing our sins first to Our Father in heaven and if necessary to anyone who saw us sin or were affected by our sin. 

We must be confident that this work of overcoming the flesh and human pride will happen if you have truly repented by actually turning away from doing the wrong thing.

Our Lord Yeshua modeled this for us in the Garden of Gethsemane the night in which He would be betrayed by his friend and Jewish brother, Judas. 

He went a little farther and fell on His face, and prayed, saying, "O My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from Me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as You [will]." Mt 26:39

The ultimate sin we all will struggle with until we pass from this life to the next is sin of human pride and self sufficiency, the idea that we are our own boss. Satan uses our pride to overcome the good we want to do by allowing us to hold onto to our soul pride. Satan knows our pride tendencies so well and will oftentimes not have to do any form of demonic attack knowing that our pride will defeat us without demonic intrusion.

Before we move onto the application of soul crucifixion let's define the difference between a demonic attack and the natural workings of our flesh found in every human, deep in the inner workings of our fallen sinful human soul.

Once you resist your flesh thoughts to lie or cheat or commit adultery in the mind or heart, Satan brings additional demonic support to attack you with the hope that by applying additional intensity or pressure to your difficult circumstances that he and EVIL will ultimately triumph over you by causing you to succumb to sin. 

Many times we fall back to the mindset that in the end we will be forgiven our sin and receive that atonement in BLOOD of Jesus, but this only occurs in real time if we confess our sin. Repeating the same sins over and over, like outbursts of anger, can only be defeated on the inside of us by the power of the Blood of Yeshua. We know that continuing in sin ruins aspects of our practical life here on earth and in turn causes us to lack the power, peace, and influence we could be experiencing. 


Here we need to stop and consider that spiritual discernment is required that comes to us beyond the natural realm, we need spiritual insight that comes directly from the Lord of heaven and earth to know what kind of spirit we are wrestling with at in our daily battles with sin and death. Remember dear reader that this battle rages for real right in the here and now, it happens in our life and it represents live theater of war with no breaks, no holidays, it comes at us in seasons but it is there ready to knock us off all the time so you and I must walk in the Spirit or we will succumb to temptation.

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How often we miss the power of God to help us apply these principals in our daily lives. The area where we need this inner power to overcome the sins found in our soul is in our relationships with each other. 

So how can we experience on a daily basis the kind of relationships that should be the envy of the broken world around us?

Frankly, we can't do anything that really pleases God outside of His help. This help only comes through the cross of Jesus Christ and our willingness to die to our natural inclinations and put these dirty deeds on His work on a very ugly thing called a cross.

When we realize afresh that our soul attitudes drove Our Lord to the tree of His crucifixion we gain the right perspective on how He and Our Father in heaven view heart sins.

Trusting in man’s view on the mind or soul that sets forth a human assessment of how to manage human thought or the latest in human psychology is a manifestation of our soul pride.  Our native human pride (spirit of death) seeks to connect to the spirit of this age and time so to connect with its framework of thinking and accepted practices on how to live, and quite naturally we are led to follow in this way.

Satan, the prince and power of the air, uses the weakness of our soul to follow the works of our human wisdom to entice us into sinful self-reliance.

By accepting the reality presented to us from the scriptures that our soul is imperfect we begin the process of coming clean from the power of our soul to keep us from experiencing great relationships.

 Our Ego or self-esteem, as we might define it, is totally ruined by the fall of man in the Garden of Eden.

When Adam and Eve ate the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil breaking the only law of prohibition set before them in their state of perfection their souls died within them to the law of evil. Hard to accept but true nonetheless.

Today all of us are stuck in the mire of that once-in-for-all fateful decision, we really only have a slice of Adam's perfection before he ate that abominable fruit, we only can see the good to perform but our tendency to evil continually ensnares us and most of the time entices us to follow the path of death. Here we discover the real work that we must undertake in order to crucify the flesh and gain victory over the natural propensity of our soul to follow the way of death.

 When we operate in our natural state, in the soul realm, we can act very often as sheep without a shepherd. Whether we admit to this reality or not we stand in need of a true shepherd who can guide us with our permanently messed up soul back to the tree of life.

 “For you were like sheep going astray, but have now returned to the Shepherd and Overseer of your souls." I Pet.2:28

To that fountain opened for sin and uncleanness.

Ponce De Leon's ancient journey did not lead him to any real fountain of a real eternal life. If anything, he discovered the reality of the mirage of life ultimately connected to the power of darkness, and sadly, in the end ole Ponce found that place to be connected to the ancient lie of listening the voice of powers that operate in the realm of satan’s lies. 

Life outside of Our Creator’s supreme authority over our soul is not worth living.

"I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me.

 The “I” of “I am crucified” represents the soul  side of Paul's being.

Paul, a renowned Pharisee, keeper of the law, a man who had built up a great reputation as a Torah teacher and holiness advocate.

A Torah trained rabbi of great reputation, a student of Gamaliel, a hard working Jewish tent-maker. A man of real intellect. Artist by training. A scholar by virtue of diligent study. A keeper of the law. A very religious man.

Understanding the "I" in Paul's case is very important because we all have an acquired "I" in this life. Things we have accomplished, our gifts and talents, our family, our titles, and many other things are earned credentials of this life and are part of our soul existence. 

The apostle Paul had more than most men and he still was willing to become a fool for Christ and his message of resurrection to the Greek man-based philosophical world he was called to reach.

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We must move now to the implications of this truth and gain an understanding of how to apply this truth to our life today and to get a better handle on what the Spirit of the Lord is seeking to provoke in us today, in our culture, with its distinctive way of seducing us into the way of death using psychology and medicine to keep us bound to a spirit of death.

When we realize our soul cannot be trusted to guide us to eternal life we find the real beginning to life in Christ.

It is only through an anointed hearing of the gospel of the Cross of Jesus Christ that a person comes into a life-changing understanding (spiritually acquired) of how to break free from the power of death found in our soul and mind.

For the most intensely evil sinner and rebellious person who ever walked this earth this war within ranges the entire gambit of persons all the way to the most noble of men and women who bring beauty and government that bless our world.  From the worst to the best of men each and every person in between we find that all of us have no power to free from the encumbrances found naively in our soul.

Nothing can reverse the curse of death on our soul. So when Paul reveals to us in the Gal. 2:20 passage is very important. 

We must understand his audience was both Jew and Greek converts to the belief in the bodily resurrection of Yeshua. Both camps of humanity believed in His resurrection from the dead yet both came to this faith from totally different vantage points. One from a law basis in the Torah and the other from a secular greco roman perspective, yet for both groups, the answer lies in the same place, the cross of Yeshua and all that it meant for Him to obey His Father to walk with His Cross and what His example means to us today who are aligned with Him and His death. 

The Galatian believers preached the gospel of His death and resurrection to their family, friends, and neighbors. They preached what Paul preached to them when he first arrived in Galatia. But they soon drifted away from the basic principles delivered to them from the mouth of the apostle Paul a few years earlier.

No less then the great apostle Peter was found among the number of those who sought to add to the original message of salvation. These Galatians were on the verge of losing their way when they succumbed to the pressure of the Judizing Jews who came into their assembly with a slightly different teaching that led many of the faithful to espouse a way of sanctification that differed from Paul’s original message that formed the assembly in Galatia.

But even if we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel to you than what we have preached to you, let him be accursed.

Gal. 1:8

In Galatia the power of the flesh/soul overcame the basic simplicity of soul crucifixion, this soul love was surmounted by their love of their Hebrew roots and the religious pride that eventually drove them allow added elements to come into their message of Life. These little additions almost kept them out of heaven and hindered the foundational message of salvation found only in the cross of Y'shua. 

 So when men tamper with the message once for all delivered to the saints we think we are just trying to make it a little better but in the end our better religion can actually kill us and ruin our soul.

We see this same tendency today when we limit the service of those who may have been saved from a very dark place, a drug user, harlot, or someone with a ton of tattoos from the music scene, we are tempted in a more civilized church in a certain neighborhood to put these kind aside in our public ministry. 

We can also limit those who do not have the same training as those who had the privilege of a high level of seminary training. We see even today in the Jewish roots community a divide in how we interpret the scriptures and who and how all the words of the sacred writings should be received. 

Paul went after our proclivity to do this kind of thing very directly in his day, used the Word of God to strengthen the church and reestablish the truth. 

To his very own sect of Pharisees Paul had to suffer a very real death to natural logic. Here the rabbi Paul had to let go of his intelligence in the ways of the Tanakh – the Rabbincal interpretation of the Torah, Poetry Books, Historical Books, and the Prophets and reproach the gospel to people who called themselves believers in Yeshua’s work on the cross.

 The knowledge of history of man and Judaism. Of Moses and Aaron and the Levitical priesthood. Paul crucified these things in his heart way before he was raised up to be a spokesman for the only message that changes our soul problem. He stayed dead to these things by dying daily.

 Paul was taught for 13 years by the Lord, he waited on God's call to do what he was told he would do the very first day he was converted. So when he felt most ready to tell the world what he saw lifted up before his eyes on the road to Damascus. But the wait was a daily cross within his soul that he learned to crucify.

His Master, Jesus Christ, had to take him aside and train him in the way of soul crucifixion. Part of Yeshua's training was to spend 40 days without food and water in the wilderness and then be tempted by Satan directly to break the commandments of His Father, Y'shua learned obedience by the things that He suffered, so to his apostle, Saul.  

Same training is available to all of those who are willing to go through this kind of process. We all learn this kind heart training at the feet of Our Master who made the way of eternal life possible to dying to His self-will. We must die today to self-will if we would live a powerful faith-filled life and overcome that pride that brings contention.

Because we are born into sin in a fleshy state, not one of us is capable of perfect heart obedience, so whether we like it or not we must fight ourselves without any relief until we are called up to meet the Lord in the air. 

None of us can transport out of our mortal and flesh laden way to enter into perfect spiritual place consistently and constantly, yet we have to learn how to win against the flesh in-spite of our constant knowledge of this truth.  

Rom 7:1-6

1 Or do you not know, brethren (for I speak to those who know the law), that the law has dominion over a man as long as he lives?  2 For the woman who has a husband is bound by the law to her husband as long as he lives. But if the husband dies, she is released from the law of her husband.  3 So then if, while her husband lives, she marries another man, she will be called an adulteress; but if her husband dies, she is free from that law, so that she is no adulteress, though she has married another man.  4 Therefore, my brethren, you also have become dead to the law through the body of Christ, that you may be married to another—to Him who was raised from the dead, that we should bear fruit to God.  5 For when we were in the flesh, the sinful passions which were aroused by the law were at work in our members to bear fruit to death.  6 But now we have been delivered from the law, having died to what we were held by, so that we should serve in the newness of the Spirit and not in the oldness of the letter. 

We will not experience deliverance from soul death completely until we die physically and leave this planet and we are released permanently from this time and space continuam, but we are called to wage this struggle with the flesh and soul within continually until we get to go Home.

Our war with our soul / flesh ends and we can go on to the bliss of perfection.

But today, my dear friends, in order to have better relationships, we must die to our soulish pride which wars within us.

We must die to our plans.

We must die to our credentials.

We must die to preferences.

We must die to our intelligence. 

We must die to our human strength.

Our reputation.

Our desire to be our own boss.

And any and all other pull of the flesh on our soul realm. 

 We must be crucified to these things or we will die eternally. 

The confession of our lips must be, “for me to live is Christ, and to die is gain”

Let's pray.

We ask that you forgive us, especially those of us who are members of Your Body, for our prideful self-indulgence. Our love of the world and our love of the things of this life. We have failed miserably at being our own bosses. We entreat you to have mercy on us and lead us into paths of righteousness for Your Name's sake.

Amen.