"The War Inside" -2

"Yea, my own familiar friend, in whom I trusted, which did eat of bread, hath lifted up his heel against me." (Psalms 41:9) We are instructed that we should have no confidence in the flesh, but to worship God in spirit, and to rejoice in Christ Jesus (Philippians 3:3); this, if you will, is the basic foundation of our faith; it is the simple conclusion that we are sick and that we need to be healed, and that without God's redemption we are not going to be healed, and more than that, that God wants to heal us, and has provided the cure for our sickness. The flesh, on the other hand, wants to try and pretend that it is not sick at all; as a matter of fact, even if it might be sick, it wants to bring about healing on it's own, thereby making the way for it to receive the glory in doing something. I'm sorry, but you cannot perform heart surgery on your own heart! Our sickness is of the heart, and we require a new heart, one that is in love with God and that does not harden itself against His voice, but wants to hear and obey what God says. Again, the title of the Psalm is, "A Sick Man's Prayer", at least that is the title in my Bible; the point of which is, before we can be healed of the sickness that we have, we must come to the honest conclusion that we are sick in the first place. But you might say, Yea, but I got healed from that sickness a long time ago; and so you did, but that does not mean you are done with treatment; that does not mean you don't need to continue taking your heart medicines, or that you don't need to watch what you eat. If we are not careful, we could find ourselves being worse off than we were when God first changed our heart; that is, if we do not take care of this new heart... "When the unclean spirit is gone out of a man, he walketh through dry places, seeking rest, and findeth none. Then he saith, I will return into my house from whence I came out; and when he come, he findeth it empty, swept, and garnished. Then goeth he, and taketh with himself seven other spirits more wicked than himself, and they enter in and dwell there: and the last state of that man is worse than the first. Even so shall it be also unto this wicked generation." (Matthew 12:43-45)