Pick your battles...

August 8, 2012

For some of us, El Guapo is our El Guapo!!!

In The Three Amigos, the boys are trying to rally the townspeople to see what they are good at and use that to fight off the soon arriving banditos that are coming to destroy the town. They go on and on with the idea that we all have something that we must fight. For some, fear is our El Guapo, for others poverty may be our El Guapo…etc, etc, etc. But the thought is ended by saying: for us, El Guapo is our El Guapo. I think we need to realize that we do have an enemy of our soul; we try to fight all the other little El Guapos but fail to realize that behind it all, our El Guapo is our very own sin nature. And the sooner we realize it is not the symptoms, the sin, we need to be fighting, but that carnal nature that desires above all else to be god or ruler of our life. This is where the real battle is.

Listening to Jerry Dirmann yesterday, I got some clarification on what is actually going on in our Christian walk of Sanctification. For those of you that wonder what sanctification is, simply, it is the process of becoming more and more like Jesus. We are promised in the letter to the Romans that God is busy at work in each of our lives to make us more and more like His Son.

Many of us live our lives as Christians in failure because we look at Jesus and then we take an honest look at our own lives and we see that there is no resemblance at all. We more identify with Paul in Romans 7 where he talks about doing what he doesn’t want to do and not doing what he knows he should. Why this failure, this disconnect, if we are being changed from glory to glory?

It is because we are our own worse “El Guapo”. We are living in our minds, emotions and body, rather than allowing our spirit, which is now alive in Jesus to be the leader. The more we realize we are no longer the physical part of our person, but we are the ‘born again’ spirit that is alive to God…redeemed…bought for a price so that we can now live in true freedom. We are no longer subject to the bondages, addictions, sins, temptations, accusations, weaknesses, being victims of people and situations….BUT we are free in the spirit to Jesus…the author and finisher of our faith.

When we screw up we can now say…Hey that was my old rotten nature…that is not me now…of course we take responsibility for the actions and ask God to forgive us knowing He will because He has promised us that He will. We no longer have to listen to the devil or people or even our self trying to bring us down for our actions…telling us we are not worthy to be called a Christian. We can agree with them that we are not worthy, but then speak the truth that Jesus paid the price and because of what He has done for us, we have been made worthy. We are now the righteousness of Christ, because He took our place for the punishment of all of our sins.

Now there are some practical things we must do if we expect our body, mind, emotions and will to catch up with our spirit in walking in true freedom. First and foremost we must spend time in the Bible getting to know the Truth. We cannot live our lives in ignorance, expecting that God will just take care of everything for us without our even taking the time to get to know Him. This is a love relationship and just like you would want to know everything you could about a person you are falling in love with…you should take the same attitude with Jesus. And amazingly, the more you get to know Jesus and what He has done for you, the more you will fall in love. The more you fall in love the more you will want to know, and the more you will want to be like Him.

In conclusion, do not let El Guapo intimidate you any longer. It is defeated!!! You have the right and the freedom to live in victory. You no longer have to do what El Guapo wants, but the ability to follow in the footsteps of a living and loving Savior.