There are two great wars that have raged since the beginning of humankind. 

The first is for the hearts and lives of every person across the face of time. Whom will you serve? As Dylan sang, “You’ve gotta serve somebody.”  

Will you remain a fallen member of Adam's race, dark, disconsolate, and insurgent? Will you live your life longing for the garden of Eden while rebelling against God from deep within your fallen and dark nature? 

Or will you relinquish self-rule? Will you renounce your rebel way and ask Jesus Christ to reign in your life, make you a new person, endowed with a new nature and a new heart, and indwelt by the Holy Spirit of God?  

Once an individual becomes a follower of Jesus Christ, their old and rebellious nature is done away with and they are made new. Romans notes that the old man is dead. Paul writes of being crucified with Christ. The logic is, “How shall we who died to sin continue to live in it?” 

For Satan, the enemy of God and of our souls, this battlefield loss is final. There is no reclaiming of the new person in Christ, no process by which a redeemed individual becomes unredeemed, no mechanism whereby a new creation ceases to be new and becomes old again, no provision for one who is born again to become unborn of God.  

At salvation, the war over your nature as a human being is concluded. What is now new cannot be reversed and the sealing of you by the Holy Spirit cannot be unsealed. The terms of surrender in this war are absolute and the enemy that was a descendant of Adam is vanquished.  

The second war is not a war over nature but a war for allegiance. As a new person in Christ, to whom will you be true?  

Satan, the tempter of Christians, knows he cannot reverse your salvation—he cannot make a new person in Christ into an old person in Adam again—but through deception he can endeavor to entice you to behave contrary to the new person you truly are in Christ Jesus. If successful—if you adopt as true his deceit—then while condemning you for your hypocrisy he makes his case before God, accusing Him of not being worthy to reign based upon the performance of His own children when they walk after the flesh as opposed to in the Spirit.  

A war of attrition is not an option for Satan, but a coup d’état does make sense. If the people of God no longer believe, no longer honor, no longer respect, and no longer yield allegiance to God, Satan believes his argument against God and for himself makes sense.  

It’s a desperate tactic, but Satan is a desperate individual. God has stated that He has prepared a lake of eternal fire for Satan and his demons. Either Satan casts sufficient doubt about God’s legitimacy to overthrow Him or he spends his eternity of days in the lake of fire.  

The Bible speaks of this war as the battle between the flesh and the spirit. It is not a battle between your old nature and your new nature, as Satan’s accusation intones. After all, the old you was crucified in Christ, dealt a fatal blow, and no longer possesses power to do anything. It’s dead… but that doesn’t stop Satan from invoking its memory to serve his duplicitous purposes.  

No, this second war is a war of deception. By attacking via your fleshly patterns, Satan and his minions hope to deceive you into believing you have no choice but to follow their lead, adopt their temptation as true, and follow after sin. It’s an ingenious tactic, but only if you fail to understand the tactic, thus rendering yourself inept, not for lack of power (you’re filled with the Spirit), but lack of awareness, knowledge, and approach.  

The enemy’s approach is deceptive, but not unpredictable. By tapping into any propensity, pattern, skill, talent, resource, or enablement, i.e. the flesh, that you have used to address your needs independently of God, Satan takes advantage of the familiar to approach you with a temptation that is genuinely tempting—a temptation that sounds, feels, and looks like a normal [fleshly] pattern for living.  

The truth of the matter is that deep within your new nature, you have no desire to follow your fleshly patterns and live independently from God. On the contrary! Your true desire as a new person is to trust your heavenly Father, to believe in the completed work of Jesus Christ, and rely on the power of the Holy Spirit for everything pertaining to life and godliness.  

In short, the only way that you, the new person in Christ, will follow after Satan’s temptation is if he can effectively deceive you. Otherwise, your default as a new person, with a new and godly nature, is to live in obedience to God’s will and ways.  

The battle for Believers is whether or not we will live in the power of the Spirit or walk after the patterns of our fleshly ways. This is a formidable battle, not because you are undecided, but because you live in between your eternal home and your earthly residence on this fallen orb. Your foe, Satan, is fighting a desperate battle to avoid the doom prepared by God for him.  

It is imperative that you comprehend and understand what the flesh is—more importantly, what the vulnerabilities of your individual flesh patterns are, not in an effort to remediate them, but for the purpose of understanding Satan’s tactics in utilizing these patterns when he tempts you. The vast majority of his temptations will correlate with your fleshly vulnerabilities. Just as reconnaissance of enemy position and tactics serves an army well, so understanding Satan’s tactics against you will serve your heart’s desire and God’s initiative in your spiritual life.  

But awareness of the flesh and your enemy’s tactics not only serves you well in the battle between flesh and spirit, this awareness also enlightens you to the particular work of God in your life. It is one thing to declare with general conviction that God is your victory, but it is another to comprehend and understand how God is your victory over the particular sin with which you contend.  

After his horrid bout with the sin of self-condemnation in Romans 7, Paul identifies the dynamics of his inner turmoil toward the end of the chapter and declares in general terms, “Thanks be to God [for victory].” Then, he declares a specific and personal spiritual insight to begin chapter 8: “There is therefore no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.”  

The finished work of Christ and the new identity declared for all who follow Him are true for all Believers. This is grand news. But the particular news of what Christ’s redemption of me looks like and how it functions is personal and compelling. Yes, Jesus died for many, but with my individual salvation, Christ’s victory is made individual, intimate, and uniquely powerful in my battle against the flesh.  

When I, the new creation in Christ Jesus, live in the power of the Holy Spirit, I deliver a uniquely compelling portrait of who Christ is and who I am in Him. No one else can do this except for me. Multiply this dynamic across the Body of Christ and our collective advocacy for Him and His grace is complex, varied, resilient, and contagious to both Believers and unbelievers.  

Paul writes, “But I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not by no means, carry out the desire of the flesh” (literal trans.).

Two great wars. One to determine which kingdom you reside in, the other to represent on a regular basis whom you rely upon and with whom you are allied. 

Philippians 3 says that we put no confidence in the flesh—none, nada, zero; not an iota of trust in the independent patterns crafted to establish independence from God. The new heart and nature with which we are endowed, renders no quarter to the flesh. “Walk by the Spirit, and you will not by no means, carry out the desire of the flesh.”  

The determination of those living inside the kingdom of God and loyal to their Father in heaven is to make no provision for any independence from God. Rather, these redeemed souls live resolute with utter confidence in the life of Jesus Christ in them and through them.  

While there are times this determination is visible, far and away the majority of decisions to live in the power of the spirit are contained within motive. My spiritual desire, the heartbeat of the new person that I am, the real me, is motivated by the spirit and wars against anything to the contrary.

In this, believers are loyalists to the kingdom of God and his reign.

With the work of Jesus Christ, we are made new. The old man is dead, having been crucified with Christ. We are raised in the likeness of Christ’s resurrection and are now sharers in His divine inheritance and nature. This is the Gospel, the Good News.