Flesh, Mortifying

Our outward works show what we believe, what we worship, and what we aspire to become. Apart from God, all human works activities are potentially destructive.

A key to overcoming our sins is learning when to deny ourselves. Christ plainly declares that those who desire to follow Him must deny themselves.

All the medieval 'seven deadly sins' could be categorized as a facet of lust. God designed us to have proper desires, just as His desires are always proper.

Beyond the fact that our Savior Jesus Christ was crucified on a cross of some sort, He used its imagery to instruct His followers: He bids us to take us our cross and follow Him. David Grabbe analyzes what Jesus' command would have meant to those who heard. . .

How many of us go through life with our noses to the grindstone? Real life comes as a result of giving our own.

John Ritenbaugh, reminding us that God does not do things uselessly, and certainly does not need our physical goods, examines the role of the offering and sacrifice rehearsed at each Holy Day. The nouns offering and sacrifice derive from two separate Greek. . .

David Grabbe, claiming that the command to take up the cross has been sullied, tainted, and moreover smeared by Protestant heretical syrup, insists that the venerating of the cross (explicitly violating the Second Commandment) pre-dated Christianity by sev. . .

Reflecting on surgical procedures to eradicate cancer, Richard Ritenbaugh observes that every last cancer cell has to be totally destroyed in order to save the patient. Likewise, sin must be excised with the same sustained, relentless aggression. Like the . . .

We must don the whole armor of God, using His spiritual weapons to bring every thought into obedience to Christ, destroying the enemy's footholds.

Our pilgrimage to the Kingdom will not be easy; we will suffer fatigue from difficult battles with serious consequences. We fight the world, Satan, and our flesh.

In this powerful conclusion of the sin series, John Ritenbaugh warns that, contrary to the syrupy, unctious Protestant teaching of Christianity as a warm fuzzy feeling- a cakewalk into eternal life, true Christianity is a life and death struggle- spiritual. . .

John Ritenbaugh reminds us that we do not have immortality as a birthright (the lie which Satan told Eve), but that God is the sole source, making our relationship with God and God's judgment the most important focus of our life. One common denominator in . . .

Coveting—lust—is a fountainhead of many other sins. Desiring things is not wrong, but desiring someone else's things promotes overtly sinful behavior.

John Ritenbaugh explains the significance of "the fellowship of His sufferings" and "being conformed to His death" (Philippians 3:10). Christ's death had both a substitutionary and a representative aspect. The former pays for our sins, . . .