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1 Corinthians 2:14

If it were not that I believe in the Holy Ghost, I would almost shrink from speaking about the profound philosophy wherewith the apostle Paul deals with the self-life; but I believe that God's Spirit will take my broken words and speak to each of you.

Will you turn to 1 Corinthians 2:14 : "The natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither call he know them, because they are spiritually discerned."

"The natural man." The Greek is the "psychical" man, the man in whom the soul is all, and the spirit is like a dark, untenanted chamber.

The temple of old was constituted thus: outer court, holy place, holy of holies. The outer court corresponds to our body, the holy place to our soul, the holy of holies or the most holy place to our spirit. In the regenerate man the most holy place is tenanted by the Spirit of God, but in the unregenerate man it is untenanted and dark, waiting for its occupant. The natural man is the man whose spirit is empty of God.

In the fifteenth verse of the same chapter, we read: " But he that is spiritual judgeth all things, yet he himself is judged of no man."

Here we have the "spiritual" man, the man whose spirit is quick with the Spirit of God, who speaks and wills and lives beneath the impulse of the Holy Ghost Himself. Oh, that every believer became truly spiritual; spirit-unfilled (written with a small "s"): the Spirit of God (written with a large " S") dominating the spirit of man.

In the third chapter of the same epistle, Paul begins: "And I, brethren could not speak unto you as unto spiritual, but as unto carnal even as unto babes in Christ."

Now the "carnal" man is a Christian, a babe in Christ. We might think that the carnal man is unregenerate, but it is not so. He is regenerate, he is in Christ, and Christ is in him; but instead of Christ being predominant, the carnal element is predominant. I believe that there are hundreds of people who are in Christ; but they are babes in Christ. Christ is in them, but He is overcrowded by the superiority of their self, life. Their self, life was once clothed in rags; it is now clothed in the externals of religion; but it is still the self-life, and in the Christian may predominate over the Christ life, and be the cause of unutterable darkness and sorrow.

May God help me now to reverse it, so that the carnal element shall be crowded out, shall be crucified, and the Christ element shall become the pivot of your life!

In order that you may know what the carnal element is, let me say that that word also stands for "flesh," and that the Greek word is sarx. Now the Apostle uses the word "flesh," "carnal," or "sarx" in a very especial form. He does not mean the natural body, but he means the element of self. That is proved from Romans 7:18, where he says: "In me, (that is, in my flesh), dwelleth no good thing." My flesh is "me." Some men spell it with a tiny m, and some with a capital M, but whether the m is in italics or in capitals, the "me" in each person is the flesh. Spell "flesh" backward, drop the h, as we are apt to do in London, and you get s-e-l-f; "flesh" is "self," and "self" is "flesh." It is "me," and as long as "me " is first and Christ second, I am living a carnal life though I am in Christ and a saved man.

FOUR CHARACTERISTICS OF THE CARNAL LIFE.

Now the carnal life is a babe life. What is sweeter than a babe? So beautiful, so wee, one can take the child so close to oneself. But what is tender and beautiful in a babe for a few months is terrible at the end of twelve months, or ten years. And what is lovely in a young convert is terrible in a man of ten or twenty years of Christian life. I have met men who use the same expressions twenty years after conversion that they did when they were cradled on Calvary; and if you are still living in the elementary stage of experience and feeling and prayer, and do not grow, do not know God better, do not know the Bible better, do not know yourself better, do not know Christ better, you are a little babe, you are carnal.

And then the carnal man lives on milk. Paul said: "I have fed you with milk, and not with meat: for hitherto ye were not able to bear it, neither yet now are ye able." Milk is food which has passed through the digestion of another. The babe cannot take meat, so the mother takes meat, and breaks it down, and the child takes milk. So many Christians can not read the Bible, cannot get any good out of the Bible, it must be broken down by their minister, and they are fed with a spoon! Ministers are nurses. They have to spend their time wheeling the converts about, comforting them, putting them to sleep, waking them up and feeding them; and it they are not fed with a spoon three or four times a week, there is no knowing what will happen. And if you are in that state that you must take spiritual truth through the digestion of another, you are a babe.

A carnal Christian is also sectarian. " I am of Paul, and I am of Apollos, and I of Cephas." Oh, how much we make of the fold, and how little of the flock! How much we think of the hurdles, and how little of the sheep! One man says: "I am a Baptist"; and another: "I am a Presbyterian"; a third says: "I am a Roman Catholic"; and a fourth: "I am evangelical." Half the time we are worrying about the sect to which we belong. Directly a man begins in that course, and forgets the Church with a large C,--the Church of Christ,--he is a carnal Christian and a babe.
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I would lead you one step further because I desire to make my system perfectly clear. Turn to Hebrews 5:14, where we read:

"Strong meat belongeth to them that are of full age, even those who by reason of use have their senses exercised to discern both good and evil."

Here we have a fourth characteristic of the carnal Christian: such an one is unable to exercise his senses to discern good and evil. When I returned to England from one of my Atlantic voyages, my nose was very sensitive; the pure ozone of the Atlantic had made me very keen to discern impurity. I went to stay with some friends in the country, and all that time I was haunted by a noisome effluvia. I said:

"What is the matter?"

"Oh," they said, "there is nothing wrong."

I said: "I am sure there is," and presently, after investigating, about a mile off we discovered a sew-age-farm which infected the air. My friends who had had no training on the Atlantic were unable to detect it. So there are men who take up a novel full of impure thought and read it and not feel hurt, though the hurt has been certainly received; men and women who listen to uncharitable talk, and not detect its undertone; men and women who go in and out in the world and mix in its pleasure and sin, and still call themselves Christians, because they cannot discern good and evil.

Those four tests,--are they true of you? I am here as a surgeon, and must help you to anatomize yourself to know where you are. Are you growing? Are you living on the strong meat of the Bible? Are you a sectary? Have you the power to discriminate between good and evil? By these four tests you may know whether the Christ-life or the flesh life is predominant in you.

Let us go deeper. When God created man, He gave all intelligent beings a self, hood, a power of self, determination. He gave it to angels. Demons have it, because they were angels. Men have it,--self-hood. The Creator meant the self-hood to be dependent on Himself, so that a Christian might turn to the Creator and say: "Live Thou in Thy will through me." When Jesus Christ, the perfect man, came amongst men, during all His earthly life He said nothing and willed nothing from Himself; He lived a truly dependent life. The vegetable creation, --the flowers, the trees,--they depend on God absolutely, and that makes them so beautiful. Consider the lilies and the cedars, how they grow! And the angels who have kept their first estate live on God. God wills, thinks, acts, energizes through them. Satan was once an archangel dependent on God, but something passed over him and he caught the fever of independence, and began to make himself his own pivot; and so he began to be in hell; because hell is the assertion of self to the exclusion of God, and heaven 'is the assertion of God to the exclusion of self. The devil fell, and all his crew that leaned on him, instead of on God, fell also. Then when man was made, Satan traversed the abyss, and whispered to man:

"Be God, be independent, take your own way, do your own will."

Man in his fall withdrew his nature from dependence upon God, and made himself a center of his own life and activity. And this world is cursed to-day because men and women are living for self, and the flesh life. The carnal mind is enmity against God, and is darkness and despair.

Christianity is a science, a deep science, which tries to do away with the evil or the fall into selfishness by substituting for self the Son of God, which is Christ. Is it not wonderful that Hindooism and Christianity are each of them intended to deal with the same root of evil? But the Hindoo tries to exterminate the self life by absorption in eternity until :Nirvana sets in, whilst the Christian who also sees that the self, life is accursed eliminates it by the philosophy and the action which I am now going to describe.

SELF-WILL SHOWS ITSELF IN VARIOUS FORMS.

"Now the works of the flesh are manifest, which are these. Adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, envyings, murders, drunkenness, revelings, and such like." There you have the passion of the self--life in lust. "Are ye so foolish? having begun in the Spirit are ye now made perfect by the flesh?" There you have the aspirations of the self--life, trying to perfect itself. There was a school of perfection in Galatia, and they sought to perfect themselves in their own energy; and there have been schools of perfection since then which have tried to be good in the energy of the self--life. "Let no man beguile you of your reward in a voluntary humility and worshipping of angels, intruding into those things which he hath not seen, vainly puffed up by his fleshly mind, and not holding the Head, from which all the body by joints and bands having nourishment ministered, and knit together, increaseth with the increase of God." There you have some intellectualism prying into the things of God, but not submitting to the will of God and the teaching of God. "When I therefore was thus minded, did I use lightness? or the things that I purpose, do I purpose according to the flesh, that with me there should be yea, yea, and nay, nay?" There you have the self life planning, scheming, and arranging for itself, and the Apostle says: " I am not going to plan after the flesh."

We see then that we are always in danger of doing good things from the self pivot. That is our curse. I hear of a man who has consecrated himself to God, and I say to myself: "I will do the same." I hear of a man who has attracted crowds by some special lantern, or by some new machinery, and I say: " I too will do the same." I learn of a school which is teaching a certain line of doctrine, and because I think it will pay, and get me prestige and popularity, I adopt it. But not until I begin to notice the working of my own life, shall I have any conception how perpetually the self-life is underlying all.
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HOW GET RID OF THE SELF, LIFE?

I will show you. There are three steps: the cross, the Spirit, the contemplation of the risen Christ. May we take them now; may the Spirit of God reveal to each one this blessed secret!

First, the cross. Now understand that I hold that on the cross Jesus Christ offered a substitutionary sacrifice for the sins of the whole world. But there is a second meaning significant in the cross. Turn to Romans 8:3-4 : "What the law could not do in that it was weak through the flesh, God sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh: that the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not after the flesh but after the Spirit." God sent His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin. "For sin" is substitutionary. " In 'the likeness of sinful flesh" is the reference of the cross to sanctification. On the cross God nailed in the person of Christ the likeness of our sinful flesh. I cannot explain it to you more than that; but I know this--that next to seeing Jesus as my sacrifice, nothing has revolutionized my life like seeing the effigy of my sinful self in the sinless, dying Savior. I say to myself:

" God has nailed the likeness of my self life to the cross. The cross is the symbol of degradation and curse. Cursed is everyone that hangs on the cross. If then God has treated the likeness of my sinful self, when borne by the sinless Christ, as worthy of His curse, how terrible in God's sight it must be for myself to hug it and embrace it and live in it!"

Oh, wondrous cross! But that is not all.

Christ and I are one. In Him I hung there. I came to an end of myself in Christ, and kneeling at His cross I took the position of union with Him in His death, and I consigned my self-life to the cross. It was as though I took my self-life with its passions, its choices, its yearnings after perfection, its wallowing, its fickleness, its judgment of others, its uncharity,--I took it as a felon, and said:

"Thou art cursed, thou shalt die. My God nailed thee to that cross. Come, thou shalt come. I put thee there by my choice, by my will, by my faith. Hang there."

After that moment--you remember in Galatians it is the aorist tense: "They that are Christ's, crucified the flesh with its affections and lusts "-after that moment, that decisive moment in my life, I have ever reckoned that my self life is on the cross, and that the death of Christ lies between me and it.

Let me make that perfectly clear. Supposing a woman has been married to a felon, a drunkard, a libertine. After years of sorrow there comes a moment of liberty when she seeks and obtains a divorce. She now enters into union with a perfectly lovely blessed man who becomes to her everything. Whenever her former husband reels along the street and seeks again to get her back into his power, she points to a moment, the moment when the divorce was granted, and she says:

"From that moment I became divorced from you. Touch me if you dare."

If he comes reeling across the street, she only clutches closer the arm of the true man she loves, and puts him on the other side between the sot and herself. She counts from the moment of deliverance.

Now think about it, pray about it. Later I am going to publish the marriage bans between you and Christ, and to show how Christ takes the place of self. But we must move together, my friends. You must allow me to be persistent. You will not benefit by this teaching unless you act as the result of any separate address in the direction it indicates. So kneel down before the cross of Jesus, and realize why your Christian life has been a failure. The cause of your darkness and sorrow and desertion is to be found here: you have never consigned the self, life where God consigned it. In your will, with streaming eyes, with reverent face, unite yourself with the death of Christ. Doing so, remember you will do what Jesus said Peter must do. Peter said: "Thou art the Christ."

"Well and good," Christ replied. "I am going to die. "

Peter said: " You must not think of it. Spare Thyself."

Ah, that is what you will hear said to you a thousand times,--spare thyself!

Jesus said: "Get thee behind me. That is Satan: it is the spirit of the pit. If a man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross and follow me."

You may say what you like about Christianity, but I undertake to affirm it has been shamefully misrepresented, both by Protestant and by any other class of Christians. They have thought that Christianity depended in the objective, whereas it is subjective largely, equally. They have thought that it depended on trusting Christ to put away your sin, whereas it also consists in trusting Christ to deliver you from yourselves, who are the center and curse of your life.

Whenever the self, life obtrudes, reckon yourself dead to it; reckon that the cross stands between you and it.

But you say: " Sir, I do not see how I am to live like that. I shall always be on pins and needles, always in agony whether this is self or not, and I do not see how I am to live."
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Ah, I thought you would say that! I said that my‑ self, and here comes the second point: the Holy Spirit.

"If ye through the Spirit do mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall live." And again: "The Spirit lusteth against the flesh."

It was by the Eternal Spirit that Christ offered Himself without spot to God, and it is by the Eternal Spirit that the cursed spirit of self is going to be antagonized in your life and mine. Just as in a scarlet fever case you take carbolic acid, and the carbolic acid antagonizes the germs of disease, so turning from that curse I kneel before the Holy Ghost, and say:

"Spirit of God, infill, infill, INFILL my entire being, deeper, deeper, deeper yet. In the depth of my nature, when I am least thinking about it, go on day by day as the antiseptic of my flesh or self-life. Antagonize it, work against it, keep it out of sight, keep it under Christ."

The Holy Ghost will do it.

But you say: " Mr. Meyer, I am so afraid that if I am always dealing with the self-life, it will hurt me. It will be like standing by a bier and seeing death disintegrate a corpse."

This reads me to my third point, and I reply,--and this is the beauty of it,--that whilst the Spirit of God in the depth of your heart is antagonizing the self life, He does it by making Jesus Christ a living bright reality. He fixes your thoughts upon Jesus. You do not think about the Spirit, you hardly think about self, but you think much about your dear Lord; and all the time that you are thinking about Him, the process of disintegration and dissolution and death of self is going on within your heart.

A dear sister said to me once: "I am going to spend a whole day praying for the Holy Ghost."

She went to a hut in a wood, and she came back to me at night and said:

"I have had a grand day, but I am a bit disappointed. I do not feel that I have more of the Holy Ghost now than I did."

"But," I said, "is Jesus much to you?"

"O," she replied, "Jesus never was so sweet and precious as He is now."

" Why, my dear woman," I said, " that is the Holy Ghost, because He glorifies Christ, and when the Holy Ghost works most, you do not think about the Holy Ghost, but you think about your dear Lord."

O, man and woman, forgive me! It is a very broken, broken way of putting the deepest mystery in the Bible, but I can only ask that the Holy Spirit may make you know what it is to have Jesus as the center and origin of your life. The fountain and origin hitherto has been self, has it not? O cursed self, Barabbas, Barabbas, to the cross! The world says: "Not Christ, but Barabbas, self." The Christian says: "Not Barabbas, but Christ."

May God explain this to you, for His name's sake.