The World, the Flesh and the Old Nature

I have marking to do for school, so of course writing this seems much more appealing.  I've gone over this kind of stuff before, but I'm going to really try to tie it all together and try to boil it right down.  Try to be brief.  I am not good at being brief.  Still:

   I was always taught that the World was bad.  Full of time-wasting, money-wasting, immoral, depraved, seductive fun that took you away from The Things of the Lord.  I was taught not to "be friends with it," and if I had any acquaintances who weren't willing to come out to church, this was frowned upon in our house.  The religious efforts of the world were fake and bad.  They were thinly-veiled opportunities for human beings to worship, essentially, themselves; to venerate and admire their own architecture and stained glass and music, their robes and solemnity, and above all things, their men, the levels of importance and power in their religious groups.  Titles, degrees, positions.  Reverends, pastors, bishops, cardinals, popes.  These were all too human systems.  Mere churches.  Of the flesh.  Feeding human pride.  Feeding the senses instead of the spirit.

   I was always taught that the flesh was more or less the same thing as the Old Nature, a term I was quite shocked to find simply does not exist in the bible.  Many things were said at my church about the Old Nature which contradicted what the bible said about the flesh, or the Old Man, but no one seemed to notice this.  I eventually came to suspect that this rebranding had the effect of making certain ideas "clash" less obviously with clear bible verses.

   The flesh/Old Nature, you see, loved the world, they told us.  It wanted Star Wars and Superman and television, dancing and movies.  It wanted to eat too much.  It wanted pride.  It wanted adultery and fornication.  It wanted drunkenness.  If it went to church, it wanted incense and candles and music and stained glass and robes and Latin ceremonies and other sensual, theatrical distractions from an inner connection to God. It wanted to feel good about itself and be proud.  We knew better than all of that.  How blessed we were to have been shown better!  Felt pretty good.  Or should have.

The Church Package

Our group supposedly wasn't just a church.  It was a safe refuge from the World and its excesses and error.  One had only to regularly attend at the street address given, at the appointed times, submit to the "assembly decisions" of the unofficial but very powerful duo or trio of men there, and one could confidently live in this bubble outside the World, could safely wait in this Rapture Waiting Room.

   Only, obviously, this wasn't real.  It's been a real mind-eff-word to learn the truth: the flesh and the world were as much a part of the people and things going on in that system, in that Brethren group, as anywhere else.  It wasn't safe in there.  We weren't "above" or "outside" of anything.  The Meeting was a human system.  It was built on and daily enacting the efforts of the flesh.  It was as much "the world" as anything else.

   Because, a few things: Phariseeism isn't new.  Nor is puritanism.  These are uninspired human ideas which do not please God.  Because the flesh can't please God.  The bible presents "the flesh" as the natural human capacity, quite unrescued by Christ, quite uninspired by the Holy Spirit, quite unheeding of God and willing to run roughshod over the bible when anything is written which deemphasizes the importance of human obedience and endless activity to "earn" grace or blessing.  The flesh wants to feel good about itself, alright.  In fact, it wants to feel righter and better than others.  And it is willing to make almost any sacrifice to get this.  It is addicted to this.  Addictions are cycles.  They are traps.  They are self-justifying.

   My upbringing repeatedly presented the attendance at "meeting," the plainness and puritan style of living, the sacrifice of joy and human connection, the isolationist "separation from the World," as terribly important sacrifices we made in order to know God better and get blessed; as stuff we did instead of all the fleshly, natural, human-created, pride-filling stuff.  As terribly important stuff which, we didn't quite admit, we felt it was terribly important that we be the ambassadors/salesmen/teachers of, to save the world.  Made us feel good to have that role.  Made us the purveyors of enlightenment.  Dishing out the way of salvation.  We knew better than other people. They needed to listen to us.  Because until someone finally accepted what we were dispensing, we kind of were better, weren't we?  If they followed our lead, they would be novices in our system.  Our acolytes.  If they rejected it, they were clearly pretty sad wretches who'd get no blessing from God.
  We knew, of course, that Jesus Christ saves, but we really were quite unabashedly presenting a "spirituality package" which involved a whole lot more than connecting to him.  And it was all the other stuff that caused all the problems.  Stuff one could cobble together fragmentary bible verses to support, and then engage in mutual judging/pissing contests with other Christians over, all the while demonstrating a clear refusal to obey the central tenets of the New Testament, that Christians are to be at liberty, and that they are to act in love. 

   No amount of saying we had some kind of purely theoretical ("spiritual/made up") liberty, which we sacrificed out of prudence, could disguise the truth.  It was painfully obvious that  none of us even knew what liberty looked like, that we were deeply uncomfortable even being in the same room as any Christian who seemed to be at liberty from all the bondage we'd put ourselves under, in our fleshly efforts to please God with the flesh.  To earn God's favour with all the human efforts, the sacrifices, the human religion, the power hierarchy, the Pharisee and puritan lifestyles and mindsets.

   Also, no amount of claiming that we acted out of necessity and prudence and love when we shunned someone for life, or refused to let Christians eat with us if we felt they might "defile" us with worldliness or dodgy doctrine could hide the fact that we felt under no obligation to act in love to any great degree.  Not so's you'd notice, anyway.

How Humans Do Religion, Every Single Time

Here's how we did it: You claim to be a Christian, "outside" the fleshly religious efforts of the World, yet you amass a proudly defended megalith of rules, expectations, political positions, dress restrictions and lifestyle narrowing guidelines.  You place a huge focus upon who is right and who has power.  You make your plainness, your lack of stained glass and organ music a thing that fills you with a sense of superior spirituality and correctness.  And you draw away from people who aren't "where" you are, spiritually. 
   Well, it's pretty clear what's happening, when this is what you're up to.  Jesus didn't become a hermit monk.  But we want to.  We do stuff like that.  Looks like this, usually:

   You read the bible, a book designed to provide liberty and love, and the light to live that by, but you read it with an agenda and for a reason that invalidates and subverts its purpose.  You wear the tired old spectacles of "Where are the rules?  Where are the limits?  I'm right aren't I?   That guy over there can't just go ahead and do all that, can he?  'Godly' looks like what we do, right?  Give me simple answers so I can stop looking for them. Give me a position so I can stop thinking.  Give me a structure!" and it's the flesh.
   We want to be done growing.  It is all just more human efforts.  Humans thinking human thoughts, skimming through divine scriptures looking for bits here and there that help them do what they already intend to do.  The flesh builds Babel and God confuses the languages until you can't even talk to the others in your church and be understood.

   Every single time: humans want less, rather than more freedom.  They cling to limits and do, think and feel less, rather than more.  They follow tyrants so they won't have freedom. They shut out more and more.  They withdraw from others emotionally, in terms of social discourse, and just generally.  They shore up their own defences and positions and fancy themselves under attack.   They rally 'round that megalith they built with their own hands, and which, if we're honest, they not only worship, but are willing to sacrifice their own children to.
   The real enemy, of course, is their own hearts and minds being childish, and inevitably smug, elitist, arrogant, petty and cruel.  Being fleshly.  Feeling religiously enlightened and dutiful so as to feel better than other people, all the while claiming not to feel this way.  Re-enacting the same old carnal approaches to God and godliness that got us to the pretty impasse we find ourselves at today.  Endlessly returning to the same old tables full of filthy vomit and not letting "dirty" people eat at them, lest they defile our filthy tables of fleshly human complacency, avarice and superiority.

If Your Outer Doesn't Match Your Inner Self, You Celebrate

You decide upon a bunch of limits and rules you aren't going to call what they are.  Let's say it's swearing.  You couldn't even picture yourself to truly be a real, heaven-bound Christian, were you to let the word "shit" pass your lips.  It's not the act that matters, it's the fact that someone might mistake you for a normal, unspecial human being.  That would be a bad testimony.  Imagine seeming regular or usual...
   Your fleshly, human approach to "God" almost exclusively involves outer appearances.  Self-image.  Instead of "What can a Christian do?" or "Who is a Christian, inside?" you worry about "How does a Christian dress and talk and act?"  And you focus on superficial stuff like clothes and hair, demeanor and word choices.  Leisure activity.  Not on heart stuff like the fruit of the Spirit, which you should know quite well you can't "grow" by your own effort.  If you show signs that the fruit of the Spirit is growing in you, you get no credit.  But if you make a vow to "clean up your language" or "dress more Christian" or toss out some CDs, you will take credit.  Flesh sacrifices stuff to feel better.  It's a deal.
    You can't make yourself grow internally, spiritually, but you can create a superficial (outer) image by effort, so you focus on that, rather than looking to God to deal with what's inside.  When you turn to God, it is to consult and ask for help with your image, with how you are perceived.  Outer things.

   So you start to feel something like a certain CD, or saying "shit" or drinking a beer doesn't fit your image, so it must be bad.  It's a threat to the flesh.  Because now it's beneath you.  You're better than that, spiritually.  It's not going to help you feel superior.  Someone who says "shit" is pursuing liberty in a way you know better than.  He should know better.  You do know better, so you are living better.  He can't just do that without losing status in the human system.  That's only fair.  And your sacrifice must be honoured.  If not by God, then by your peers, who you seek to put beneath you through just such sacrifices. So his status does suffer among you and your Respecters of Persons club.

   But it's tempting to swear, or whatever your token piety sacrifice is, you might find.  People around you sometimes swear.  You need to appear better than that.  So, you cut yourself off from them, and pretend to be offended if they talk like themselves, though you're not actually offended at all.  But you try to look offended and try to conjure up a corresponding inner feeling of offence within you.  To feel better.  To feel superior.  But what's actually in you?  Maybe some swear words.  Some evidence maybe you aren't different at all.  Maybe you're just normal?  What a horrible thought.
   So you try not to say swear words when they are in your heart to say.  Never mind that there's jealousy and strife and wrath in there.  So long as you don't say "shit," you feel that's what's important.  Outer over inner.  You focus away from the inner.  Away from your heart where God focuses His attention.  Away from where the source, from where everything flows out of you to begin with.  So long as you ensure that your outer persona doesn't match what most people can clearly "look in and see" is your inner self, you feel like this is what Christ died to give you, and it isn't just your own fleshly efforts, but Divine Inspiration.  You try to become wholly a persona.  A facade.  You try to be the mask, and be happy being that.
   Eventually you find you have become the kind of person whose "yea" (yes) is no longer yea, your "nay" (no) is no longer no, and your "shit" becomes "poop," or something you superstitiously spell, as if you have in so doing, no longer communicated it.  You say "effing," "flipping" or "frickin'."  Which marks you as different from the regular folk.
  Your inside is proud of your outside not being like it.  Because that's the deal.  You try to give no sign outwardly of who you really are.  The work of Christ makes people seem different from who they really are.  You look to God to help with this makeover. 
   But He's more interested in the inner stuff you're not even willing to look at squarely.  And it's not all bad in there.  Not if God's at work in there.  And God wants to work at redeeming it in there.  But the flesh has no good thing in it.  And you're focused on your outside.  And that outer focus is fleshly.  It's about how you come off to others.  God is not in it.  It is your inner, fleshly, superior-feeling self unredeemably concocting a fake self to present to the world, which has seen this game before and isn't fooled for a second.

To Summarize

So what you have done is use the flesh to follow fleshly ideas (puritan ones, Pharisee ones, "touch not, taste not, utter not, handle not, gaze not upon, click not, download not" ones) and to build a fleshly self image upon that human created system, with scripture serving merely as a jumping off point for a lifestyle characterized by bondage (no liberty) and a primly reproachful, superior drawing away from the kinds of people Jesus spoke to and ate with.
  You find ways to be proud.  Oh, you really do.  You are proud, not of yourself of course, but of the doctrine, the thinking, the church, the committee, the efforts of the whole fleshly thing.  You aren't proud.  No, you are humbled to be privileged to be chosen to lead.  So grateful to serve.

Me

All this was extremely hard for me to learn.  I wanted to follow rules and get rewards.  I wanted God to be like a gum machine you could stick piety quarters in.  Here is what in particular was very hard for me to grasp: 

   My "spiritual exercises/religious views" weren't even mine.  They were traditions created by dead Brethren men, handed down to us, getting warped and watered down and grown vinegar-bitter over the generations, losing the heart and joy that was perhaps in these human constructs to begin with.  And I wasn't finding God in them.  Because God's not in human constructs.  He's in everything.  And He wants to interact, not simply be infrastructure humans can fight over.
   And I wasn't safe from the World in these traditions.  I was in the World the whole time.  The Meeting, like The Matrix, was a construct.  A fleshly human construct in the world, just like everything else is.  But we preferred to live mostly in our fleshly Brethren imaginations.  The real world was much less idealized and black and white.  Far easier to play "let's pretend" in The Matrix/Meeting.  Pretend we were good people who knew stuff, and were doing actual good in the actual world, while living outside of it.  Now that was bullshit...  Bullshit of a kind that ought not to be called anything politer or gentler.
  God demands we grow up, grow strong, and not hurt each other.  Be free.  Be accountable.  Be open and loving.  Be helpful.  Listen as well as talk.  Give and receive.  Connect.
   Growing up, I was supposed to spend the maximum time I could each week on "The Things of the Lord."  But I had to learn that "The Things of the Lord" was really just the flesh.  Our tradition.  Brethren lifestyle and routines. The Meeting.

   To find God, I had to pursue Him without getting side-tracked into rule-following and church association designed to continually restrict and block the natural development that God was nurturing.  In plain terms, I had to learn that, if I am an alcoholic (I've got friends who are), I can't simply build up doctrine, remind myself of scripture, put my faith in a support group of people, repeat axioms to myself, listen to inspiring Christian music, attend church, and figure it all out, or otherwise in any way save myself, or be saved from it by a group of humans with their human system.  I needed "Jesus only."  Jesus means "saviour."  We all need to be saved.  Not only from hell.  From the cycles of fleshly, pious, religious, self-deluding, other people not deluding, human efforts.  From those limits.  From that trap.  We're in a cycle.  To break out of it, we need something new, something from Way Outside the cycle.  Someone.  Jesus.

   Of course every human effort listed above claims to be reaching out to or coming from or focusing upon Jesus.  "Oh, we're not us.  We're agents for Jesus."  But it isn't true.  It is the flesh.  Put humans in groups, and they will act fleshly.  You don't have to look too close to see that people always think they have to do the work of Christ themselves.  We just do.  We really do think that.  We think we have to do it all.  Practically speaking, we do not believe Jesus will really save us from ourselves, or that God will ever add growth to us, in a way that is quite beyond our strivings.  We think we have to know, to strive, to use the flesh to stop acting fleshly.  We don't have the courage to wait for salvation.

   There is salvation in no other name.