hit yourself on the head lessons
what to do and how to do it
So you know what you know. In fact, you've heard it all before. But the Christian life is not about sitting back and understanding a few concepts. It is taking a hacksaw to whatever part of you is keeping you back from serving God. Your default personality traits, your habits, the way you spend your time, your tastes, your desires, whatever is not pleasing to God or causes you to stumble has to go.
Romans 8:12-13 (ESV)
12 So then, brothers, we are debtors, not to the flesh, to live according to the flesh. 13 For if you live according to the flesh you will die, but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live.
Here are some practical suggestions that may help you to put to death the deeds of the body.
Get plenty of sleep. We all know the complacency about sin that constant fatigue can create. Be always ready to serve by resting well. Eating well is also helpful. Be healthy!
Be busy, but not too busy. Paul warns us against idleness:
1 Tim. 5:13-15 (ESV)
13Besides that, they learn to be idlers, going about from house to house, and not only idlers, but also gossips and busybodies, saying what they should not. 14 So I would have younger widows marry, bear children, manage their households, and give the adversary no occasion for slander. 15 For some have already strayed after Satan.
2 Thes. 3:11-12 (ESV)
11 For we hear that some among you walk in idleness, not busy at work, but busybodies. 12 Now such persons we command and encourage in the Lord Jesus Christ to do their work quietly and to earn their own living.
For whatever reason, doing nothing all the time can lead us into sin. We are to work for our living; some of us, like Paul, are to do the work of an evangelist all the time. Either way, our earthly life is to involve work; while we are out of work we are to be diligent in looking for work.
It seems that the greater problem for myself and most Christians I meet is that of being too busy. If we do too much, jump between too many Christian meetings, we will not invest the amount of time in people that will help us to really encourage each other in holiness by caring deeply for each other. Ask whether events and meetings are more important to you than people.
Meet with your brothers and sisters in Christ. Be honest about your struggles with just one other Christian. Read the Bible with them, pray with them. Remember to pray for them. God has given us each other so that we can spur one another on to good works and to bear each others burdens.
Separate yourself, at least temporarily from those things that lead you into temptation. You probably already know what these things are. It may be TV, the internet, going to certain places, being with certain people. If you haven't already identified such things think about what you were doing last time you started being tempted by something. The environment or activity, while not sinful itself, may be helping you into temptation and then sin. Stop immersing yourself in popular culture, music, literature—just for a while—and immerse yourself in the word of God, in Christian conversation, in prayer, in thoughts of God.
Do a Joseph. If you find yourself tempted, don't just brace yourself and try to get through it, escape in whatever way is open to you. Leave. Put music on. Go outside. Run honestly to God. Remember Joseph, who, when tempted by Potiphar's wife, ran out of the room, leaving the cloak that she managed to grab hold of.
Learn to laugh at the kinds of things you are sucked in by. Sin is foolishness. Stupidity. Learn to see it as such when you are in a clearer state of mind. Know that your patterns of thoughts about your sin can be deceptive. Remember that accusation is the work of the devil—he will try to keep us ineffectual by making us obsessed with sins that seem like enormous problems only because of the time spent thinking about them and our reluctance to come to God with them.
Read books that provide personal insight into the psychology of sin. Books such as The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan, The Pilgrim's Regress and The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis, Augustine's confessions. Just knowing that other people struggle with the same things that you do can be a great encouragement and can free you from the tyranny of “my secret sin that know one else knows about or has to deal with”.
Enjoy things. Learn this from The Screwtape Letters:
Screwtape, the experienced devil is reprimanding Wormwood, the junior devil, for letting the man he is “responsible for” slip through his fingers...
And now for your blunders. On your own showing you first of all allowed the patient to read a book he really enjoyed, because he enjoyed it and not in order to make clever remarks about it to his new friends. In the second place, you allowed him to walk down to the old mill and have tea there—a walk through country he really likes, and taken alone. In other words you allowed him two real positive Pleasures. Were you so ignorant as not to see the danger of this? The characteristic of Pains and Pleasures is that they are unmistakably real, and therefore, as far as they go, give the man who feels them a touchstone of reality. ...
The deepest likings and impulses of any man are the raw material, the starting point, with which the Enemy has furnished him. To get him away from those is therefore always a point gained; even in things indifferent it is always desirable to substitute the standards of the World, or convention, or fashion, for a human's own real likings and dislikings. I myself would carry this very far. I would make it a rule to eradicate from my patient any strong personal taste which is not actually a sin, even if it is something quite trivial such as a fondness for county cricket or collecting stamps or drinking cocoa. Such things, I grant you, have nothing of virtue in them; but there is a sort of self-forgetfulness about them which I distrust. The man who truly and disinterestedly enjoys any one thing in the world, for its own sake, and without caring twopence what other people say about it, is by that very fact fore-armed against some of our subtlest modes of attack. You should always try to make the patient abandon the people or the food or books he really likes in favour of the “best” people, the “right” food, the “important” books. I have known a human defended from strong temptations to social ambition by a still stronger taste for tripe and onions.
Conclusions
These practical things may, over time, help you to eliminate the “negatives”—but the Christian life is not about “neutrality”. That is, the Christian does not aim to just not do any bad things. Such a way of thinking ignores that sin is personal. The Christian life, rather, is a beautiful one that is lived to God. Every minute of our lives is for God, to be spent doing the things which we know please him because he has told us they please him.
So a liver cleansing diet, by itself, is not the answer to a sinful life, rather we need to hear the word of God, and hear it regularly. It is one thing to put to death the things of the flesh—the ideas above are intended to show you that it is our responsibility to construct our environments in such a way as to minimise the chance that we will give in to sin—but such things are not enough. We must also be informed about God's desires for us and for our time.
Perhaps you do not have the privilege of hearing the word of God taught to you. Get it any way you can. Books, tapes, friends, study it all the more yourself. It is only as you understand the truths contained in God's word (as explained in the previous article) that the central theme of your life will change from “I must stop doing bad stuff” to “Christ's love compels me to love others.”
You must understand God's great love for you. Only then will you be unafraid to approach him, repentant, even after constant failure, time and time again, for the rest of your life until you see him face to face.
Ben Beilharz now needs to take his own advice.
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