Eph 4: 23 and be renewed in the spirit of your mind, 24 and that you put on the new man which was created according to God, in true righteousness and holiness. 25 Therefore, putting away lying, “Let each one of you speak truth with his neighbor,” for we are members of one another. 26 “Be angry, and do not sin”: do not let the sun go down on your wrath, 27 nor give place to the devil.
The “renewal” here mentioned is not that of the mind itself in its natural powers of memory, judgment and perception, but “the spirit of the mind,” which is our spirit in communion with the Holy Spirit where His life and power and revelation is directing our thinking. It is the infilling of the Spirit influencing our mind. It is the life of God flowing into our spirit and then into our soul.
Putting on the new man, is allowing the Holy Spirit to reveal an aspect of Jesus Christ, the divine nature, who becomes to us whatever we need in any given moment in time. We can tune into any attribute of God we need, in any situation or circumstance.
This verse is giving us a command, an imperative to be angry and sin not. It is in the passive tense, which means we actively receive the mind and feeling of God towards the object he is angry about.
There is a divine, godly, righteous anger which isn’t sin. It is objective and not subjective. It is directed toward the spirit forces and influences and desires that are not of God. This anger is the Spirit of God rising within us and has nothing to do with self.
Religion says you are going to get angry but confess it and ask forgiveness and don’t go to bed angry.
What this verse is saying is don’t ever let this anger go dormant. Don’t ever fall asleep, don’t ever let yourself become unaware of the divine anger we need because we are in a warfare situation. We are in a battle beloved, and we cannot fall asleep.
We have an enemy, and if we are not aware of his schemes and deceptions, we will miss out on the perfect will of God for our lives.
And then what the next verse says is do not give place to the devil.
Paul is saying that if we don’t have a godly anger or if we let it subside and we become passive in our stand against evil, we are giving place to the devil.
If we don’t use anger properly then we are giving place to the devil.
James 4:7 Therefore, submit to God. Resist the devil and he will flee from you.
The word flee in the Greek means to run in terror. Because when we are submitted to God, we enforce the authority he has given us.
SUBMIT AND RESIT 2
To submit ourselves to God is to bring our soul and body, under subjection to our spirit in fellowship with the Holy Spirit. In this submission, there is a unification of our entire being brought under the Lordship of Jesus Christ.
In our submission to God there is also a resistance that is very aggressive and necessary. Many of us do not yet comprehend what Authority we have when we become totally and completely submissive to Jesus Christ.
As we come into this total and complete submission to the Lordship of Jesus Christ, our spirit is totally free to really begin to commune with the Lord, the areas of our soul that would block us are removed so that we come into a oneness of spirit with God.
It is in this condition where we become a spiritual person, and when we resist the devil, he runs in terror, this is the promise the Lord gives us in this verse of Scripture. The devil cannot get away fast enough from our presence because we are a manifestation of Christ in the earth.
The Authority and Power the Lord Jesus walked in (His three- and half-year ministry on this earth) was based upon the humility and submission He had to the Father, they were one, what He saw the Father do He did, what He heard the Father say He said.
We have never even really begun to live, until we submit every area of our life to the Lord in a deep and total submission. This is not a reluctant giving up of all the sin and bad things that have been destroying our lives, but it is loving God so much, that His Love begins to motivate us and control us, and we set about to see God’s will be done upon this earth, as it is in Heaven, to see His kingdom come in power, through the manifestation of Christ in us.
We have yet to comprehend the Authority, the Lord wants to entrust to us. We are to speak His will into existence upon this earth, not ask Him to do certain things. We are His mouth, His hands, and His feet. But first our spiritual eyes and ears must be opened up so that we can be led by the Spirit of God.
The whole creation is groaning and waiting for the manifestation of the Sons of God in the earth. The church at large is waiting for Jesus to come again, but Jesus is waiting on us to come into a total submission to His Lordship, so that He can bring in the finial harvest through us and entrust to us His Judgment. The judgments coming upon the earth come through us.
A whole army came against, Elisha.
2kings 6: 17 And Elisha prayed, and said, “Lord, I pray, open his eyes that he may see.” Then the Lord opened the eyes of the young man, and he saw. And behold, the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire all around Elisha. 18 So when the Syrians came down to him, Elisha prayed to the Lord, and said, “Strike this people, I pray, with blindness.” And He struck them with blindness according to the word of Elisha.
We are coming into a total submission to the will of God, a total submission of all that we are in Him, even as Christ submitted unto the Father and did those things that pleased the Father.
Jesus did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped but emptied himself. Everything that Jesus did He did through the power of the Holy Spirit resting upon Him, he said of myself, I can do nothing. We must empty ourselves too and have the same mind that was in Christ Jesus.
When we are totally and completely submitted to the lordship of Jesus over our spirit, soul and body, the minute we voice a resistance to Satan, that resistance comes forth with such an impact that devils flee from us.
It is difficult for the flesh to be submissive; our spirit is totally willing but the soul-flesh is weak. We have basis human instincts like self-preservation.
The goal of human beings is security and independence from all the destructive forces that are in the world. They look to the government of the world and ask for unemployment if they get laid off from their job, if they get sick, they go to the hospital to be taken care of. They want social security. Nothing wrong with that if we seek His kingdom, and his righteousness first.
The goal of humans is security and independence, but divine goals are different. The Lord desires us to be submissive to Him and have faith in His provision, in His promises and in His Lordship over us. We need to learn how to be sheltered in Him, to learn how to live in the Secret Place, the heavenly places in Christ.
Palm 91: 14 “Because he has set his love upon Me, therefore I will deliver him; I will set him on high, because he has known My name. 15 He shall call upon Me, and I will answer him; I will be with him in trouble; I will deliver him and honor him. 16 With long life I will satisfy him and show him My salvation.”
There is a place of submission where we decide with all our heart, I am going to walk with the Lord. We come to experience the work of the cross in us, where the flesh is no longer warring against our spirit, and we wholly submit to the Lord.
Submission has to do with the whole of our being coming into unification, where we have no other motivation than to wholly be set apart to Him. We cannot want in many directions; we cannot drink from many fountains.
First, submission means the unification of our spirit, soul, and body to love the Lord only, and only serve Him. Then under His Lordship He directs His love in us to others. We do not bow down to anything else or let anything else be the driving motivation of our life. We have forsaken everything to love Him and Him alone with all heart.
There can only be one love, our desire to be well pleasing to the Lord, and then He will love other people through us. We have to say good-bye to the world. We will not love the world; we will no longer find within us that ambitious drive that has to find satisfaction in the many things of this world, but we will find within our heart a love for the lord alone and find our satisfaction in Him.
In the natural, when a woman comes to be married to a man, and a man takes a woman to be his wife, they make a vow, they are willing to forsake all others, and they throw away their little black book of phone numbers.
But humans have that self-preservation instinct, that well this might not work out. I got something going for me here that I’m kind of reluctant to give up. It’s too late for that; we shouldn’t be coming to the altar to get married to someone unless we are willing to forsake all others. And that is the way it works in the Lord.
There are so many people who go to church, read the bible, believe in God with their mind, but their spirit is never continually joined to the lord.
Once God, joins Himself to our spirit and imparts His uncreated life to it, we never have peace when there is any area of our life that the Holy Spirit convicts us of. If our spirit has truly been made alive in the Lord, we will bring our soul and body into subjection to it. We need to learn this spiritual principle of how submission has a resistance in it, or else it is not submission.
Once our spirit has been once for all enlightened; the Holy Spirit goes to work to bring every thought and imagination in our heart into captivity and make it subject to the Lordship of Jesus Christ. Our emotions are pretty much a result of the thought patterns going on in our mind, and when we come into this love with the Lord nothing else can compete with it. We are continually filled with the Spirit, which becomes our fulfillment. We have such an intimate relationship with Him, that nothing else really matters or can distract us for very long. When we truly love the Lord, we let nothing else compete with it, we come into a unification or sanctification of spirit soul and body; this is what submission really means.
Submission has that quality in it, which can resist, we are not going to be torn by conflicting emotions, desires, or motivations. Then it becomes more than a resistance, it becomes a complete rejection. This love of the Lord shed abroad in our heart will not allow anything to hinder this love.
In the beginning of our walk with God we struggle. A temptation comes, and we resist it. No, I shouldn’t be thinking that way or I shouldn’t do that. But we do not really win the battle until we come into the strength of the word reject, it gets down into the depth of our subconscious and we begin to hate it, there is no longer any trace of sympathy for the things we are resisting, but now we now totally reject them. What use to draw us now repels us, we recoil from it!
There comes a time when we have rejected so totally, that we hate the inordinate lust of the flesh as much as God hates it. We enter more than a resistance of evil; we enter a rejection of evil. We find ourselves rebuking it and hating it as God hates it. We reject it with everything within our being.
We submit ourselves unto the Lord, and resist the Devil, and he flees from us, because we are so yielded to the Spirit of the Lord that we are thinking God’s thoughts concerning iniquity; we are judging God’s judgment upon that very thing. What we voice is exactly what God feels and what He thinks.
The lord is our deliverer, and we are going to come into a total submission to Him, with a total rejection of everything else. This is the kind of submission that brings the kingdom down with power.
We come into a spiritual state where we hate iniquity and arbor it completely and cleave (to penetrate something deeply, to hold closely and steadfastly) unto the Lord.