Lifetime Guarantee (14 page)

Someone says, “Oh, no, Bill, you don’t understand. That’s just the way God sees us. It’s positional truth.” Listen to me:
There is no such thing as “positional truth.”
The Bible speaks only of truth and deception. The term
positional truth
is simply Satan’s deception that will block you from accepting the present reality of God’s solution to your problem. He has now accepted the new you, and He finds it delightfully easy to do so. Ask the Holy Spirit right now to reveal to you your true identity as you study just a very few of the abundance of verses in this chapter that document the identity of any person who is
in
Christ rather than in Adam.

What are you doing with His life during your earthwalk? Are you still trying to milk acceptance and self-esteem out of the world like lost people when you’ve already
got
both? Are you still employing the same old methods, such as trying to perform for others to get them to accept you, or striving to perform up to your flesh’s standards to generate and maintain self-esteem moment by moment?

You
are
of infinite worth. You
are
accepted. Not by people, perhaps, but by God! If you’re rejected by certain people, welcome to the club. So was Jesus. But He didn’t go around with His head down. Why? Because He knew it’s not a feeling that matters; it’s what you know. He
knew
He was accepted.

Do you know that? Or are you prostituting Christ’s life by living to get your need for acceptance met? That’s sinning, and you are still walking after the flesh, the results of which will be burned up at the Judgment Seat of Christ. There will be no reward, because you will
already have had your reward.
Self-acceptance. A “righteousness of your own.” You are not to strive to
get
love; we don’t live that way now. We live from a posture of knowing that we
are
loved.

It’s time to go to the Lord and repent. You have swallowed the deceiver’s lie and wasted many years of Christ’s life by striving to get your need for love met through the flesh. You can accept yourself now as the new person you truly are in Him, just as the Father accepts you—perfectly.

Spend some time praising Him for His fantastic, gracious plan whereby He has solved the problem in sweet Jesus. Praise Him, dear relative! Go ahead and weep for joy! It will tickle Him to death. He’ll weep for joy with you and hug your neck unabashedly, just as He did when the Prodigal Son came down the road to his father’s home. You are totally accepted forever as the new creation you already are.

Answers in “Answers to Questions for Further Study”.

A while back, I received the following letter:

Bless her heart. I can identify! This sweet lady is asking the pleading question, “But how do I do this?” She had gotten just enough teaching to give her a glimmer of hope, but her friend had unwittingly left town without giving her the “how-to” teaching tapes. Satan’s goal is to entice the believer into employing his same old fleshly techniques to get his human needs satisfied, or, in the case of the Yukky Flesh Christian, create a sense of hopeless despair. In this chapter, we’ll see how he deceives you.

The woman’s question points to exactly the same problem Paul addressed in Romans 7:18b: “…but how to perform that which is good I find not” (
KJV
). Many Christians say, “Amen,” and camp right there, failing to see Paul’s “Thanks be to God” shout of victory in verse 25.

To better understand what caused him to shout verse 25, let’s trust the Holy Spirit to enlighten us by studying the passage leading up to it. What I am about to share with you is one of the most revolutionary truths the Holy Spirit has ever revealed to me. God has used it as a tool to give victory to thousands of Christians over the years I have taught it. I invite you to read carefully.

Look at Romans 7:15, the defeated Christian’s verse: “For that which I am doing, I do not understand; for I am not practicing what I would like to do, but I am doing the very thing I hate.” How many actors are there in that verse? One: “I.” Now jump down to Romans 7:20: “But if
I
am doing the very thing
I
do not wish,
I
am no longer the one doing it, but
sin
which dwells in me [is doing it]” (emphasis added). How many actors do you count in this verse? Two: “I” and something called “sin.” Somehow, an entity or power called sin is the “one” who wishes me to do “the very thing I hate.” Something that
indwells
me wants me to rebel against God.

Now, I’m not teaching “the devil made me do it.” He can’t
make
me do anything. What I’m saying is an entity called sin somehow
suggested
that I do it. When I bought into sin’s idea, it became mine, and
I
did the very thing I do not wish. Clearly, there are two actors identified in verse 20, but only one in verse 15. And clearly Paul says in verse 20 that he did not
want
to commit this sin, but that somehow this other actor was able to entice him into doing it.

I do not understand exactly
what
this entity is that the Bible calls sin, but I have an opinion that I expressed in Chapter 4. I believe it is Satan’s counterfeit of the
Holy
Spirit, “the spirit that is now working in the sons of disobedience” (Ephesians 2:2). Sin rules the spirit, soul, and body of the unregenerate person, but sin only indwells the
body
of the new creature in Christ (see Romans 7:23).

Many years ago when I recognized the truth of the preceding paragraph, I said, “Lord, there are two actors in verse 20 and only one in verse 15, yet I know that the
power of
sin was in this man in verse 15, too. Sin entered the human race at the Fall. How did sin manage to go underground to keep from being identified in verse 15?” And over a period of several weeks of examining and meditating on God’s Word, I believe the Holy Spirit showed me how the Evil One operates.

Names are important in Scripture. You will often get marvelous truth by studying them. Satan is called “deceiver,” “tempter,” and “accuser,” among other things. What’s a deceiver? A deceiver is someone who will make you believe something is true when it’s a lie. Or he will make you believe something is not true when, in fact, it is. Magicians are deceivers. They make you think they cut a woman into two pieces, when in fact they do not. And what part of you do they seek to deceive? Your
mind.

The Word says that Satan “disguises himself as an angel of light” (2 Corinthians 11:14). What is “light” in the Word? Truth! He can come at you as “truth,” as “revelation,” as “insight into reality.” But how? It’s simple.
He gives you a thought in your mind and disguises it to seem as if it is
your
thought.
You say, “How could he do that?” By speaking to you with
first-person singular
pronouns (I, me, my, myself, etc.)!

When the power of sin speaks to your mind, it does not use the pronoun “you,” but the pronoun “I.” Instead of experiencing the communication, “Why don’t
you
go ahead and give her a piece of your mind!” it will be served up to your mind as, “Well!
I
have a good mind to tell her off! By George,
I’m
going to do it!” And you often wind up “doing the very thing you hate.” You grab the idea and convert it into action. You sin! Yes,
you
did the evil thing, but the
genesis
of it, the
origin
was the power of sin,
not
your mind. Let’s go to the diagram again to explain how this spiritual warfare transpires in you.

In Figure 6.1, the shaded portion represents everything earthy. The curved surface represents the curvature of the earth, and everything below the horizon belongs to earth. It is not necessarily evil, just earthy. It belongs to this earthly dimension. Your body in its present form is in this category. It will never get to go into the presence of God (without being transfigured). Your body isn’t evil; the Holy Spirit lives in it. It’s neither good nor evil, but neutral. It’s sort of like an oak tree; it can be used for a pulpit or a totem pole.

Satan’s kingdom is here on planet earth. After the Fall, he was given the right to wage war against God and His people. His goal is to destroy God’s plans and to usurp His Kingdom and His glory for himself. He’s an egomaniac. Let’s place him on earth in our diagram.

Satan has agents through which he works to accomplish his goals, including the world (system), the flesh, and (the power of) sin. Let’s place the flesh and sin in their biblical locations in our diagram. Employing our definition of “flesh” as “the old ways,” we will place these green highways in the
brain.
These are the memory traces, the habit patterns, the software in your computer. If you are deceived into staying locked in on this software, your brain will play the same program over and over.

The power of sin is located in the
body,
too. Romans 7:23 makes this location very clear: “I see a different law in the members of my
body,
waging war against the law of my mind” (emphasis added). Sin is in the body,
not
in the personality or the spirit. Your soul and spirit have been “sealed with the Spirit.” They are holy now. My guess is that sin is located in the brain, but so as not to clutter the diagram, I will draw it elsewhere in the body (see Appendix D).

God created you with needs. These are very good things. The idea is for you, the created, to turn to Him, the Creator, in total dependency on Him, worshiping Him, loving Him, fellowshipping with Him, cooperating with Him and His plan for you. Part of this agreement is that He promises to “supply all your needs” (Philippians 4:19). But Satan’s strategy is to get you to opt to live to get your needs met. He wants you to be deceived into making this your goal. Thus, he offers you “Plan B” for getting your needs supplied—your “old ways.” That’s what sin is all about. It is independence from God.

Let’s take the sex drive, for example. It was God’s idea to create it, not Satan’s. Now, let’s draw a curvy lady on our diagram (see Figure 6.2). You are parked in your car in front of the post office. Let’s give you an eye on your earthsuit so you can see the lady walking by. The sunlight bounces off her earthsuit through your eye, up the optic nerve to your brain, where you get a printout of the curvy lady. Let’s make you a male, a dedicated Christian, but let’s give you an eight-lane, green highway for sexual lust. It’s that wide line in your brain on the diagram.

How did it get there? Oh, it could have resulted from many things, but let’s say that your dad was as strong as an acre of garlic. His strength, talent, and domination so intimidated you that you have spent many years struggling to measure up to his model, attempting to prove to your feeler that you are male. Your goal was to generate and maintain masculine self-esteem.

One of the ways you discovered to accomplish this along your journey as a god-player was to seduce women. It always made you feel so good about yourself when you could accomplish this. The chase and conquest were so satisfying. But you’re saved now. Oh, yes! You are still
tempted
to seduce women to bolster your need to feel macho, but you don’t want that. You desire victory over that.
Your desire is different from your temptation.
That’s why God says He will give you the desires of your heart (see Psalm 37:4).

Let’s add another variable to the mix. Let’s say that your wife is the type of person who withholds sex from you if things are not all right on the home front. She has withheld herself from you for two weeks. Tell me, would this heighten your godly normal need for sexual satisfaction? Of course. The Bible says the Spirit lusts against the flesh (see Galatians 5:17), so the word
lust
is not always an evil word. It simply means an accelerated appetite. Sin tries to capitalize on this heightened need to get you to rebel: “But each one is tempted when he is carried away…by his own lust” (James 1:14). If you receive the tempting thought, you’ll be carried away by your own lusts.