The Dressing up of Evil

One thing I do quite often before I see people (most girls do this, so I’m not alone!) is go to the mirror, fix my hair and put makeup on my face. I think as a whole, people –both men and women- want to be presentable when they see other people. We all have our way of doing it. And we all have our reasons for doing it. Certain events call for certain dress. At church, we dress up in our “church clothes”. At work, we wear the appropriate “work clothes”. None of that is wrong, but I want to talk about another dressing up we do that is very wrong, but appears to be very right.

In my previous post, I talked about the flesh. In quick recap, if I were to put the whole post in one sentence, it would be this: The flesh has no power over Christ in you.

Now I want to talk about one way my very own flesh strives to deceive me on a daily basis. Oh, how do I begin?

Imagine with me that I am standing in Christ (to pick up on the scene from the previous post), and my flesh is hiding in the shadows. Christ takes me to live in the heavenly places in Him. My heart is overjoyed as He uses me to display Himself to the lost and dying world around me. I don’t realize it, but my flesh follows me everywhere I go. When I take my mind and my eyes off Christ, it takes that opportunity to speak from the shadows, masquerading as something good.

Fake Righteousness

Since it was already exposed for the evil that it was, it takes on a new form: Self-Righteousness. “You can be everything Jesus wants you to be,” It whispers, tugging at me, “People will look up to you if you do everything He says. Just try harder. I will help you!” It sounds right to me. It even feels right. I imagine myself succeeding and think, “It surely is worth the try!”

So I grab a cloak of self-righteousness and wrap it around the flesh. It takes my hand and says, “Just listen to me and I will tell you how to be the amazing Christian that you're supposed to be!”

From that point, my flesh instructs me in how to live right. I watch Jesus from a distance and the flesh tells me how to imitate Him. When I see people that have a real relationship with Christ and hear them pray, I mimic them. It feels dry and pointless. I go to church, I serve others, I read my bible, I pray… My flesh sets spiritual goals for me: Standards of love and holiness, and I strive with all my might to do them.

When I succeed, I feel good about myself. I look for Jesus to see if He likes it and I don’t see Him, but somehow I think He must be pleased. Though I sometimes succeed, more often I fail, and the more I fail, the more I come to hate myself.

Pretty soon I am depressed, because the joy in everyone else that I am seeking to imitate isn’t in me. The flesh instructs me to smile, because Christians smile. But the smile is plastered on my face and my heart doesn’t have any real joy from which that smile could flow.

My flesh comforts me when I fail by saying, “Look at that other Christian! At least you’re not as bad as them.” 

I look and see another Christian who is living in sin. I know that my failure at an honest attempt to please God at least proves I love God, while their sin is showing they obviously don’t, and somehow I feel better.

The flesh fails me daily, but every day, I still dress it up in self-righteousness and hope it will be better than the day before. But instead, it steadily gets worse.

A cold heart of bitterness becomes what beats inside of me. My eyes can only see sin, though shrouded in self-righteousness. I begin to view others as projects, not people. 

“Perhaps if you can fix them,” says the flesh, “you will feel like you are more successful at being a Christian.” 

I reach out to fix, but it only harms and cuts off relationships. I blame them, knowing that I am honestly attempting to please God, so it could not be me who is to blame for a broken relationship.

His enemy can't please Him...

What I do not realize is that all the while I do not please God, because I am attempting to do it according to the flesh, and the flesh can’t please God.

…Paul understood this when He said to the Galatians, “Are you so foolish? Having begun in the Spirit, are you now being made perfect by the flesh?” (Gal 3:3)

He also said in Romans 7:18, “For I know that in me (that is, in my flesh) nothing good dwells…”

Do you see it yet? Your flesh has always been, is, and will always be an enemy of God. The flesh may try to imitate God in order to please Him, but it’s just a miserable imitation. It may try dressing up in false righteousness that did not come from God, but that doesn’t match God’s holy standard. 

Deep down under every act of self-righteousness is the flesh (aka sin nature­) with its selfish motives, wanting the throne where God sits, and God cannot be pleased with that.

I wonder if you struggle with this… Have you ever wondered why it is so hard to please God on a regular basis? For the longest time, I wanted to be everything Jesus wanted me to be and I tried so hard. I thought for some reason that I could. I still to this day find myself defaulting to this mindset. Christ is still working in me to change my mind.

Maybe you’re asking: “Change your mind about what specifically?”

For the longest time, I thought it was good to dress up my flesh in righteousness. I thought that’s what Jesus wanted me to do. Somehow, having started off in the Spirit, I veered off and started living according to the flesh… and what miserable results it produced! There is nothing enjoyable about forcing the rebellious flesh to do what "pleases" God, because it can’t please God. Can I say that enough?

Then what does please God? Maybe we should rephrase that question to this: WHO pleases God? Not my flesh. Not yours either. Yes, some of us are really good at looking good, but dressing up the flesh pleases no one.

The only One who can please God is God Himself.

This is what we need to change our mind about.

So that’s why when Jesus ascended into heaven, He told His disciples to wait until they were given power from on high in Acts 1. He knew that to call them into a supernatural life without supernatural power would be disastrous. When His disciples had waited, He filled them with the Spirit of God, and gave power by placing His own life in them. By His Spirit, He made them spiritually one with Himself so that in Christ they could be pleasing to God and the supernatural was now possible in the lives of men and women.

So I repeat the question Paul asked earlier in Galatians 3:3: “Are you so foolish? Having begun in the Spirit, are you now being made perfect by the flesh?”

He later clarified how the supernatural Christian life works: “I say then: Walk in the Spirit, and you shall not fulfill the lust of the flesh.” (Galatians 5:16)

I will hopefully dive more into what it means to walk in the Spirit in a later post, but for now, I want to leave you with some questions... 

Do you want to please God? Have you been guilty of dressing up your flesh in self-righteousness in order to do so?

If you, like myself, have tried to dress up the flesh in self-righteousness, you need to realize that Christ is your righteousness. All over the old and new testament, it plainly states that God (A.K.A. Jesus Christ) is our righteousness. That leaves no room for the flesh. He is all that is needed to please God, and if Christ is your Savior, then He lives in you as the righteous One who pleases God and is the power you need for the supernatural life He calls you to live.

Let's give Him thanks that He did not leave us helpless in the Christian life! We can depend on Him to empower us to be all that He calls us to be! 

More on this later. (: