The Flesh Remembers (Breaking the Cycle)

"This flesh is not saved," says Evangelist David B. Nellum. "It remembers how to lie. It remembers how to cheat."

It's a blunt admission, and it sits at the center of his message on putting off the old and putting on the new. 

Evangelist Nellum doesn't doubt what happened at the cross. When Jesus died, we were on the cross with him. When he rose from the dead, we rose with him, and now we stand in Christ as sons and daughters of God. Old things have passed away; all things have become new.

But the new creation still lives in a body with a memory. The flesh and the spirit are at enmity with each other, and the flesh keeps trying to remind you of what you used to do. So becoming new isn't the end of the story. God still has to teach you how to walk in the new man.

A Word You Don't Apply Is Just a Dream

That teaching starts with posture. David asks God for a teachable heart, borrowing the Amplified Version's wording of Psalm 119: a prayer for the ability to learn.

Then he presses on the part that's easiest to skip. The Word of God can change your whole life, but only if you become a doer of it and not just a hearer.

"If you don't apply the Word of God, it's just like a dream," he says. "You're just having a dream."

It's the same reason faith without works is dead. God, as David puts it, wants to take his people off milk and give them meat.

A Life Worthy of the Calling

In Ephesians 4, Paul, the prisoner of the Lord, urges believers to live a life worthy of the calling they've received. The Amplified Version spells out what that life exhibits: godly character, moral courage, personal integrity, mature behavior, and gratitude to God for salvation.

Godly character, David explains, is the characteristics of God: righteousness, lived out. He doesn't pretend it's common. Today, he says, leaders, pastors, and the people of God alike are falling short of it.

Moral courage is where the slow compromise happens. We want to fit in. We want the system to like us and the world to like us, and we're willing to lower our moral standards to get there. David gives the excuse a voice: "I'm not hurting nobody. I'm just having a little this and a little that."

 That, he says, is how the enemy works. A person is drawn away and enticed by his own desires, and before long he's compromising God's Word a little at a time.

Sometimes courage means leaving. "There have been many friends I had to walk away from because their lifestyle wasn't conducive to where God was taking me," David says. Sometimes it's people; sometimes it's places and things. Abraham's family worshiped idols, and God called him out anyway. David believes God is calling believers out of their old behaviors the same way, so they can walk in a new life and set new standards.

Integrity When Nobody's Looking

Of everything on that Ephesians list, personal integrity gets the simplest definition: "Personal integrity is when nobody's looking."

He describes the inner negotiation many of us have had. Nobody sees it. Let me just take this. Just a couple of things. Integrity is the voice that answers: No. Don't do that.

"If people don't see it, God sees it." That's why he keeps returning to the psalmist's prayer: Lord, deliver me from secret faults.

The means of change is the Word itself. Romans 12 calls believers to present their bodies as living sacrifices, not conformed to this world but transformed by the renewing of the mind. For David, it's the Word that does the renewing. If we don't let it work on our hearts, he warns, we'll keep acting out the old behaviors God has told us to put away.

Colossians 3 names them. Because you died with Christ and your life is now hidden with him, put to death what belongs to your earthly nature: sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires, greed. Rid yourself of anger, rage, slander, and filthy language. That, David says, is the old man.

Come a Little Higher

Hebrews 12 tells believers to throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and to run with perseverance, eyes fixed on Jesus. David doesn't want to be entangled anymore, and he believes God is calling his people to come a little higher.

The flesh will keep remembering the old life. The new one has to be walked out: in the Word you actually apply, in the people and places you're willing to leave, and in what you do when no one is watching. God, David says, is telling his people to put that stuff away. 

"God is doing a new thing."