We are beginning to understand how vulnerable we are through our frustrations. We overcome our spirits’ reluctance; but there still remains a certain element of frustration even when we earnestly strive to move ahead. Then in trying to cope with our frustration, we become aware that it—at least the effects of it—can largely be eliminated by our covering. Everyone has to have a covering. The head of every woman is the man, and the head of every man is Christ, and the head of Christ is God (I Corinthians 11:3). This Scripture speaks not so much about rank and position, but about authority and submission, and the covering that submission gives.
We have talked a lot about shepherds and sheep, and how everyone needs a shepherd. We tend to think, “I need a shepherd because I need someone to look after me.” However, when I talk about being a spiritual father or a spiritual shepherd, I am not thinking about hours of teaching and counseling so much as I am thinking about a covering of authority that the people need. They need the authority to cover them. Everyone needs that very much. In fact, we all constantly feel a need of a covering that can give us an immunity when the assault of battle comes against us. There is a frustration which comes because things are coming at you that you do not know how to handle. That frustration is ended when you have a covering over you. This is a very basic principle of shepherding.
In the Communion we can receive a deliverance from the roots within us. We need the roots, the reluctance, the deep things in the flesh nature, uprooted; but we also need a covering, a canopy over us, so that we are functioning under that protection always. We must be diligent to provide that to one another, not on the basis of what anyone deserves or what he has earned, but simply because he wants to move ahead in faith; he therefore has to have a covering.
Basically we are burdened that there be a deliverance from reluctance. This is a priority, because everything is going to be impeded from this point on if we do not receive the deliverance we need from the reluctance and the withdrawal. And it is really the major need that initiated this dialogue.
We read in the Scriptures that when we take Communion, we are to examine ourselves (I Corinthians 11:28). And I feel that the Word which came about reluctance* was your own examining of yourself before the Lord. That Word began a deep experience in you which I would like to see experienced in our hearts also. Eliminating reluctance is such an important key for all of us, and we want a way by revelation that it could expand to many. As we take Communion, there will be a real provision in it for inner deliverance and eliminating the impasses that have slowed us all down.
We are examining ourselves. For if we would judge ourselves we will not be judged (I Corinthians 11:31). We are entering into the judgment of what we find in us that is wrong. By faith we appropriate His body and His blood. We have this prerogative, that in this appropriation we can judge ourselves—meaning that we can discern the roots of the flesh nature and believe for them to be uprooted.
Communion is one of the greatest, if not the greatest, means of ministry in the Kingdom of God. Will there ever be anything greater than Communion? Time and time again the Lord has brought our focus back to this
There has always been a tremendous anointing of the Holy Spirit upon the Word that comes concerning the Communion. And I believe that one of the greatest ways we could serve the whole Kingdom of God right now would be to compile every Living Word on Communion that the Lord has given us throughout all the years.
If we have failed in any one living truth that has come to us, it is that we have never adequately emphasized the true spirit and revelation of the Communion table. We have never appropriated it fully. Babylon has perverted it to such an extent that the people in some traditional churches eat a little wafer while the priest drinks the wine. Something has to change so that we have the form but do not deny the power of it (II Timothy 3:5). The miracle of Communion is one of the greatest things to be restored. And in it we are able to confront something we cannot otherwise change. We cannot get at our own roots apart from a miracle provision of God.
We want to eliminate these deep roots of the old nature. We have talked about reluctance and how we can always be on the defensive, which is actually a form of self-condemnation. You can be delivered from self-condemnation in one form and still have it in another level in a defensiveness that cuts you off from a life flow that you need. We cannot afford reluctance or defensiveness, because it is a sin against God. We will not progress if we are defensive or reluctant, because God says, “If any man draws back, My soul shall have no pleasure in him” (Hebrews 10:38). God cannot accept us then, because that is the antithesis of faith.
We talk about faith and we talk about unbelief. But do you want to know the real antonym of faith? It is still faith, but it is negative faith; you are still believing. One person says, “I’m believing God for something.” Another one says, “I don’t believe it.” Those are not really two opposites. When one man says, “I believe for it,” and the other says, “I believe it will not happen,” that negative faith is far stronger than unbelief.
When we deal with reluctance, we are dealing with a contrary faith. It is diametrically opposed to faith in God. It is the mind of the flesh warring against the mind of the Spirit (Galatians 5:17). And the mind of the flesh will never submit to God (Romans 8:7). Yet it will believe and lay its life down to see that God’s will is not done. We do not know how dedicated the Adamic nature is until we reach the levels of dedication in the Spirit. Then we begin to understand how much within us has been dedicated to the opposite. We are dealing with two opposing forces. We read about it in the Word, but it is a lot deeper conflict than we realize. It is a deep, dedicated, all-out war.
And the flesh is not going to submit; it has to be crucified (Romans 8:5–13; Galatians 5:16–25). It has to be crucified. You can try to minimize it: “Well, something within me is a little perverse.” The truth is, there is something within us which believes that God’s will is not going to happen. In fact, it will do everything possible, even if only on an unconscious level, to see that God’s will does not happen.
That is why we can express faith one moment and voice something else the next that turns loose the complete opposite of faith. Life and death are in the power of the tongue (Proverbs 18:21). If any man does not offend in word, the same is a perfect man (James 3:2, KJV). But we are not going to know perfection until we stop sending forth from the same fountain both bitter and sweet, both blessing and cursing. With one word we bless the will of God, and with another our perverse nature curses it and says, “It can’t happen! I won’t let it happen!” (James 3:8–11.) It is not unbelief or disbelief; it is not even an agnosticism which says, “I don’t know.” It is something else that says, “It won’t be. It can’t be. I believe that it won’t be.” And this is what we want dealt with in the Communion. We must do far more than say, “Deal with a little root in me.” That root is the deadly thing we have fought for so many years. It has to end.
We realize that there is nothing we can do in and of ourselves to be delivered from it.
And, again, no discipline will do it.
So in our hearts we are reaching in, because I feel that we have the revelation. We can see the depth of the thing that is dwelling within us, and when we come to the Communion table we can judge ourselves. Then there comes almost a frustration, as we wonder how we can even believe God to see it dealt with, because we realize that the nature within us is warring against the faith of our spirit and crossing it out.
One minute you can voice faith, “God will crucify this flesh,” and the next minute that nature within you is going to be resurrecting itself again. You hit an impasse, wondering how to approach God or how to believe to see the thing dealt with. Is there a way to short-circuit that remnant of the old nature in us long enough to believe God to see the thing accomplished? Yes. We believe there is.
The word “identification” might help us. In the Communion there is an identification with Christ. We eat His flesh and drink His blood; we become identified with it. But identification remains vague until you really know what it means and you say, “I completely, totally bring myself to the crucifixion of the flesh through His cross. I identify myself with the cross of Christ until it becomes an experience to my flesh.” We are going to show in this way the Lord’s death until He comes (I Corinthians 11:26, KJV). We have said that we can appropriate His righteousness, His blood, everything we need right at that moment of Communion—and this is true. But we also have to appropriate what He did on the cross. But God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified unto me, and I unto the world. Galatians 6:14, KJV. Communion has to be a crucifixion. For this we believe.
The day may come in which all of this will be an instantaneous experience; it will all be finished at once. But now we have a determination to experience it as much as we can today. It may not be a total thing, because we may not know all that has to be crucified yet, but we will experience it to this extent: Today we take a very decided step of death in us. The uprooting is a death of things.
Romans 8:10: And if Christ is in you, though the body is dead because of sin, yet the spirit is alive because of righteousness. This indicates that even when you first come to Christ you are aware, “My spirit is alive, but my flesh is still dead.” We are facing the experience of Romans 8 where we will have to walk in the resurrection life (Romans 8:19–23). We know that this flesh cannot inherit the Kingdom of God (I Corinthians 15:50). So whether or not we go through a literal process of death, we will still have to experience it.
This, of course, is what Christ was talking about when He said, “If your hand offend you, cut it off” (Matthew 18:8). How can a man’s hand offend him unless the offense is in his nature, in his heart? Christ was not talking about mutilating a man’s hand; He was talking about the flesh nature of a man. It has to be cut off. It has to be totally crucified. We have to experience it. This is what we are anticipating in this Communion. The magnitude of it is staggering. God let us see how great and desperate this need is. All that God has been doing has brought us a great deliverance up to a point, but the full deliverance is going to be by impartation, by appropriation, by identification.
If you remember the ritual of the Day of Atonement, the high priest took the blood within the veil and sprinkled it on the mercy seat (Leviticus 16:15). And in John 20:17, we read where Christ said, “I have not yet ascended to My Father and your Father,” meaning that He had to present the blood of the New Covenant. After His resurrection He was flesh and bone. His ministry was to shed His blood totally and to present the blood before the Father (Hebrews 9:6–14, 19–24), to present the blood that speaks of better things than the blood of Abel (Hebrews 12:24). The blood of Abel cried from the ground for revenge, but Christ’s blood calls for a total release of flesh and of guilt (Genesis 4:9–10; Revelation 1:5; 5:9–10). So the blood is important. Flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom of God, inasmuch as our blood is defiled blood; our flesh is defiled flesh. But by His flesh, His body broken for us, and His blood, we have the whole redeeming operation. That is why we are taking Communion. Flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom of God as our flesh and blood is; but we are partaking of His flesh and blood.
Our flesh has to be dealt with very deeply. I don’t know what form it will take now, but the Lord used foot washing preceding the Communion (John 13:3–5). He did that because the filthiest part of a person was his feet. You probably have no concept of what it was like then, when a man walked with bare feet or sandals through a city that had no sewage system. What ceremony or ritual would be the counterpart of foot washing now? Most people’s feet are fairly clean already when they walk in off the street; they don’t really need to be washed. What would we do today if we wanted the true ritual of foot washing and Communion?
Suppose you wanted a form for cleansing now. What is the most unclean part of the human body? Okay, grab a bowl and a washcloth and wash that on one another, because it is probably dirtier than your feet, if we are talking about the thing that really needs to be cleansed. We are being realistic and blunt; the religious world would draw back from this.
But let’s face it: We are dealing with the armpits of our nature; we are dealing with that which is the filthy side; we are dealing with the flesh. We come to be loosed from the flesh nature; and so we come by faith. Jesus washed our feet, and Jesus gave His body and His blood for us. He is saying to us, “I want to cleanse you from all filthiness of the flesh and spirit so that you can perfect holiness in the fear of God (II Corinthians 7:1). Whatever form you take, or whether you use any form or not, it is the reality of it that we are looking for.
We want to be healed! We want to be God’s delivered ones in the earth. We want this more than anything else in the whole world. We want to be delivered.
This deliverance began in me a few days ago; and I cannot tell you how real and definite it has been. Nothing ever before has reached to the depth of that reluctance in me. There have been changes in my own patterns of thinking. My mind’s processes of thinking and its normal responses and reactions to things have changed! Before God delivered me from that root of reluctance, I did not realize how much that root was feeding my response to situations, although where it came to my speaking the Word of God, that has been a pure thing. All relationships are indeed influenced by this root of reluctance.
We are going to be transformed by the renewing of our mind (Romans 12:1–2). We have to be released from the mind of the flesh into the mind of the Spirit. The weight and the sin, the transformation of mind, the flesh warring against the Spirit, the mind of the flesh and the mind of the Spirit—these are all terms that occur in the Scriptures (Hebrews 12:1–2; Romans 12:1–2; Galatians 5:17; Romans 8:6, 27). They are meaningful to us.
We believe to be loosed from this flesh, even though we may not see the significance or importance of it now; because there is a willful ignorance in us. The Scriptures speak about this: “These things they are willfully ignorant of” (II Peter 3:5, KJV). And they do not listen to the prophecies (II Peter 3:1–4). We can have truth from God that we cross out because we don’t want to know. Something perverse in us will just resist it.
This thing in us is deadly. It is almost a conditioning in our minds to debate with God. We have to come to the place where we can resist this perverse nature within us, because it is triggered off against God. That mind of flesh is far more complex than we know. Something within our spirit says, “This war is going to be won by the Spirit and not by the flesh.” That is what we are after.
That is why we are partaking of the purest means of grace available, the means that God has committed to us which can bring about the uprooting of the flesh. It is the provision of grace that enables us to examine ourselves; and even when we do not understand the full extent of our own guilt, or the perversity of the flesh, or what manifestation or form it takes, we still know it is going to die. It is going to be uprooted. It is going to be crucified.
We take the body and the blood of the Lord, which means we take His cross to be ours. It is our cross; we are going to die on it. The flesh is going to die; it is not going to live. I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me. Galatians 2:20a, KJV.
We are not fanatics; we are prisoners of hope (Zechariah 9:12). We are imprisoned with the hope of what we are going to get. We will break out of the flesh’s activity against us. We cannot blame the devil for everything, we have to find where the chink is in our own armor—our Achilles’ heel. Where is the open door? Where are we vulnerable?
The enemy has a way of coming against us where we are very weak, or where we think we are very strong. The enemy comes against us in the weakness of our flesh and we succumb; he comes also where the arrogance of the flesh thinks we are strong, and hits us there and we succumb. Whether it is a weak area or a strong area, we still fall. It was the apostle of love who wanted to bring fire down and consume everyone in a certain town (Luke 9:54). Peter was full of faith. God revealed many things to him. It was not flesh and blood that revealed to Peter that Jesus was the Christ; the Father told him that (Matthew 16:17). So the devil hit him on that and he became the one to deny the Lord three times (Matthew 26:69–75).
Weak or strong, the flesh is a deceptive, damnable thing, and it has to be uprooted. Even in the areas where we would boast, we have to come to the place where we say, like Paul, “There is nothing good in me; no good thing dwells there” (Romans 7:18). It is by the Spirit that we are going to change. God is going to impart His faith, His righteousness, His love. That is how we will make it.
Great disillusionment can come when we look at our own flesh; and that may be topped by looking at our brother’s flesh before we look at our own. It is quite deadly when you have a revelation of your brother’s flesh and you have not had one of your own. That can really blow you out. Whom the devil would destroy, he allows to have a partial revelation of his brother in his flesh—without having a revelation of himself. In case that doesn’t work, the devil gives you a revelation of your own flesh and pushes you into self-condemnation to the point of utter despair. He is the accuser of the brethren (Revelation 12:10). He accuses the brethren about their own selves, and he accuses the brethren about one another, and the worst thing is that he has a lot of facts to unveil and work with. There are many things he can use to say, “Look at them!” But you must say, “Satan, yes, but it is going to be uprooted.”
Our flesh should never be the instrument of our defeat. We who have believed God have believed for righteousness. We seek first His Kingdom, and we seek His righteousness (Matthew 6:33). We still have to learn about righteousness. People have said, “Yes, let’s be righteous; let’s be righteous; we have to be righteous!” But have they loved righteousness? Have they hated the unrighteousness of the flesh and loved His righteousness? Is this what Paul was saying to the Galatians when he talked about having the hope of righteousness? We who have believed have the hope of righteousness to come (Galatians 5:5).
You will not be made righteous by discipline; you will be made righteous by deliverance and by impartation. It can be yours. I minister it to my own heart by faith. We are going to minister it to one another by faith. This is what you will do when you take the body and the blood of the Lord in the Communion and you lay hands on one another. You are going to become another person.
We will pray and we will believe. We will believe for this deliverance, this time of judging ourselves that we be not condemned with the world. We believe in impartation. We are believing to impart; but we are believing that appropriation is an even greater part of this. I believe that our appropriation and the faith to receive can be so strong. Faith is going to have an answer.
The provision of Christ is so great that our identification with His cross, our revelation of our need, and our deliverance from this flesh are absolutely in His heart to accomplish. Is there anything greater that He wants to do for us than to end this travesty of our being half-spiritual, half-fleshly, and yet wanting only to be spiritual—really wanting the will of God, but still consenting in our flesh to the law of sin that is in our members. We loose ourselves from it. You say, “Who will deliver us from the body of this death? Thank God, through Jesus Christ the Lord” (Romans 7:23–25).
We bless the bread that eating it be more than a ritual. We are taking His body. The end of our flesh is our partaking of His holy flesh.
Lord, even as we partake of Your body, we partake of judgment to those things which are deeply rooted in our flesh that would keep us from totally doing Your will.
Can you feel your heart break? We take His broken sacrifice and we respond with a broken spirit ourselves. A broken and a contrite heart—these are the sacrifices God wants at His altar (Psalm 51:17).
Reflect on the roots of reluctance, of defensiveness, of rebellion, of bitterness, of holding back. O God, our flesh has not been subject to You. God, our flesh hates You. Blessed and ready for deliverance is the man who says, “I love God. But I am also aware how much in the flesh I hate Him.” We have never been honest until we face our own ambivalence, the fact that coexisting with our love is hatred, that coexisting with our faith is the determining faith of the flesh that the deliverance will not happen.
Oh, the blood of Christ, that eternal sacrifice, taken within the veil into the Holy of holies to guarantee our righteousness in our approach to God! (Hebrews 9:24–26; 10:10–14, 19–22.) We are going to stand before God righteous. The self-condemnation, the unworthiness, is the flesh! We are going to stand before Him without spot or blemish because His righteousness, His blood cleanses us (Ephesians 5:26–27, KJV; Revelation 7:13–14). We take it. This is more than an admittance into a church. This is real. We are going to be holy people (I Peter 2:9–10). Before God, we have what we have claimed today! We have all this in the name of the Lord.
Let this break your heart. It is a meeting with the Lord. We have to say, “I came to the altars of God and I took a bite of God, and I will never be the same again.”
People are reluctant to enter into foot washing because it seems so crude. But I think that what you did when you expressed how much we hate God in our flesh and how much we resist Him reveals what has been lost from Communion. It should be crude. As we lay our flesh out on that altar to die, and at the same time we are eating His body in faith, we are confessing how much the flesh is resisting the Kingdom and has to die. The dedication has been in our hearts to do His will, yet the resistance and the withdrawal and the bitterness of our own spirit has held us back. If any people have functioned at ten-percent efficiency, it has been us.
Let me explain that. It has been ten-percent efficiency in the spirit realm. But look at the Christians who are moving in the soul realm and are moving at one-hundred-percent efficiency. They have all the support behind them, because Satan is not going to battle that. Without a doubt, we are further ahead at ten-percent efficiency on the spirit level than the Christian world is at one-hundred-percent on the soul level. That does not excuse us, however, and we are going to get the impartation and move more efficiently.
Christ washed the apostles’ feet. And the minute you start washing the filth off of someone’s feet, or out of his armpits—or whether you do it totally in the spirit-some nice religious soul will say, because of his pride, “You’ll never wash my feet. You can’t do that to me.” Yet God will say, “If I don’t wash your feet, your pride is going to mean that you will never have any part of Me” (John 13:8), because that pride is only religious flesh. And more filthy than the dirt on your feet can be the dung that is in your heart. Then how should you respond? What can you say? “Lord, not only my feet, but my hands, my head also” (John 13:9).
If you are that humble that you say, “God, I see where the flesh really is; wash it away,” then something happens in your heart.
Christ told Peter, “Now you are clean, but not all of you” (John 13:10). There was one Judas. In some way in the plan of God there is always a Judas wandering around.
For many walk, of whom I often told you, and now tell you even weeping, that they are enemies of the cross of Christ, whose end is destruction, whose god is their appetite, and whose glory is in their shame, who set their minds on earthly things. Philippians 3:18–19.
This passage tells about the enemies of the cross of Christ. Their god is their belly; their glory is in their shame; they mind earthly things. They are on that flesh level—enemies of the cross. Why are they enemies of the cross? Are they against Jesus? They are not against a religious pseudo-Jesus they have manufactured. They are against the Christ who would crucify their flesh. They are enemies of His cross. They will not be identified with it. But we are making friends with the cross. We are not going to be enemies of the cross. We have died today. God only knows how much we have died to. We have given the flesh a gut-shot wound. It may take several hours for its death to be manifested totally, but we received the gut-shot wound today.
Somehow you have to experience your death. And you are doing it. You are experiencing the work of the cross. You are going through it. God is not allowing us to be spared. He is not allowing anything about our flesh to look beautiful. The flesh is ugly. It has to be presented that way. Somehow we watch each other die, and that is very difficult.
If we could only die in private! If we could just do this without God making us, as the apostle said, “the spectacle of men and of angels, the offscouring of the earth” (I Corinthians 4:9, 13, KJV). Do we look for appreciation or acceptance? So then death worketh in us, but life in you. II Corinthians 4:12, KJV. You have never had any life worked in you unless there was a death in the apostle first. There is not going to be any life in those people out there in the world unless they see you die too. In no way will it look glamorous. It is written of Jesus Christ that He was “a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief. And we hid, as it were, our faces from Him” (Isaiah 53:3). Will we hide our faces from each other in this hour too?
Some will say, “Devastation is not of God.” Actually, devastation was just the beating we took before taking up our cross to go up to be crucified. Do you love Him? Do you hate what is happening to you? Do you ever wish, as Christ Himself did, “If it be possible, let this cup pass from Me” (Matthew 26:39). There is no escape from it.
If you follow Him, you are going to take up your cross (Matthew 16:24–25). Don’t fool yourself. The cross is not some little ornament that hangs around your neck on a gold chain. You are taking up the cross of Christ with the intention, the dedication, the revelation, the full commitment: you are going to die on it. A cross is for death. But we have this privilege: We can be the ones who by our faith judge ourselves and identify ourselves with the cross and experience it. That is our privilege.
It is our choice to say, “If we suffer with Him, we will reign with Him” (Romans 8:17; II Timothy 2:12, KJV). And the cross is the “suffering” that Paul was talking about here. There will be no true spiritual authority in the earth that is a blanket rubber stamp of approval on men’s flesh; it will be Christ’s authority manifested through those who have known the work of the cross.
For many walk, of whom I often told you, and now tell you even weeping, that they are enemies of the cross of Christ, whose end is destruction, whose god is their appetite, and whose glory is in their shame, who set their minds on earthly things. For our citizenship is in heaven, from which also we eagerly wait for a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ; who will transform the body of our humble state into conformity with the body of His glory, by the exertion of the power that He has even to subject all things to Himself. Philippians 3:18–21.
What Paul is saying is that if we welcome the cross, the Lord will kill everything that stands in the way of His being glorified in the earth through us.
I thank God for His faithfulness, but my flesh seems to term it the relentless pursuit of God after His enemies. My flesh seems to cry out, “If I go to the uttermost parts of the earth, Thou art there. If I make my bed in hell, Thou art there. Where can I flee from Thee?” (Psalm 139:7–8.) The flesh has to say, “That is true. In Thy faithfulness, Thy relentless pursuit for the end of my flesh has tormented me day and night until I say, ‘Yes Lord, Thy will be done.’ ” Faithfulness and relentlessness are very much the same. His faithfulness is that He never fails, never ceases to try to work His own nature in us. His relentlessness is that He faithfully pursues after the destruction and end of that which would prevent His will. Therefore, with our spirit we love Him; with our flesh we hate Him. He becomes our enemy because He will pursue us until we are identified with His cross. But that is really what our spirit is crying for.
We took it today. You took it! It is yours! It has happened. It is done. You can walk in it. You can add to it day by day. You have the breakthrough. The stalemate is broken between the flesh and Spirit. There is no longer a detente war. You are going to crucify that flesh, totally; and the experience of it has begun.
Each of us covers one another. That is in our hearts because of our love (I Peter 4:8). Yet it is strange how God, by His work in us, compels each of us to have everything laid open and bare before Him with whom we have to do (Hebrews 4:13). God did not anoint me to uncover your problems and needs and nature. He anointed me to cover you. But how can we fight God, who gives us so much love that we know even as we are known? (I Corinthians 13:12.) We find that the love which covers ultimately results in the love that knows to the depth. That’s what is happening. We would not expose each other for the world. God simply gives us so much love that we stand naked and exposed before one another, because the love causes us to know even as we are known. We stand and say, “This is me. I’m going through this. This is me. They know me.” And then we say, “O God, help me; I know them too. And I would spare them; I would cover them.”
We have no image to defend. We are in the Kingdom indeed when we no longer have an image which we must defend. Those who draw back from the time of exposure all draw back because they do not want the reproach. But, you see, persecution and reproach opened the door to the realization that God is exposing everything. We do not want to be persecuted. We say, “I don’t want this. I want my good image. I want my good name.” You cannot have it because God destroys the image a man has of himself, and He destroys the image that others have of that man and brings him into the reality of the Kingdom. The reality is that we have no image to defend.
How can our new nature believe so much in life and our flesh believe in death?
Our flesh must be laid upon the altar when we partake of His flesh that was crucified for us.
The Communion is our toast to the death of the old nature, and a feast upon the life of Christ Himself.
Our spirit must be determined to end the reluctance of the flesh.
It takes the wisdom of the Holy Spirit to reveal to us the deceptive cunning of the flesh.
The heart is deep and desperately wicked, but it is in the heart of God to give us a new heart.
The cross of Christ is an instrument of death—yours and mine, in fact.
Communion and the Cross must be more than theories; they must be experienced