Fighting in prayer (Part 6)
Verse of the Day: Matthew 26: 41 " Watch and pray so that you will not fall into temptation. The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak"
As I said in the fifth part, man is made of spirit, soul and body. When we are converted and we accept Jesus as our Savior and Lord, we receive the Spirit of God that resides in our spirit. It is in the spirit that we discern the presence and the voice of God. Our spirit is supposed to obey completely to the Spirit of God, but it faces another influence from the flesh. The flesh is the combination of the soul and the physical body. The soul is made of emotions, feelings, thoughts, will and intellect. Many Christians do not know the difference between the flesh and the body because in several African languages, the flesh (the soul plus the physical body) and body have the same name.
The verse of the day (Matt 24: 41) tells us that the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. In other words, the spirit is strong but it is the flesh that is vulnerable. The devil knows that the human spirit is strong but he can attack it by means of the flesh for if the flesh is attacked, the spirit is affected because both are in the same body.
Why then Jesus says in the same verse that prayer helps us not to fall into the temptation of Satan? This is because when we pray, we trigger an exchange mechanism and communion between the human spirit and the Spirit of God. The more we pray, the more we accumulate power of the Holy Spirit who gives us the capacity to overcome the lust of the flesh. The spirit of the Christian who does not have a life of prayer cannot resist the lust of the flesh which lead him to fall into temptation by yielding to the traps of the enemy.
It may be abstract for some but I will try to go deeper in order to clarify the operation of the flesh. As I said before, the flesh is made of soul and the physical body. If a man looks at a girl’s body and sexually desires it, it comes from the sexual instinct in his body but there is also the intervention of the soul (emotions and feelings). It is this combination "body and soul" that the Bible calls "lust of the flesh" (Galatians 5: 1-17). The soul is the favorite asset of the devil to make us fall into sin. Every Christian should know that the devil often prefers to start at the level of our thoughts to influence our will and the two (thought and will) are in the soul. The will receives information from the thought and it (the will) allows us to take action. The devil knows that if we have the power to control our thoughts, there are a lot of chances that we will execute the will of the Holy Spirit present in our spirit. It is extremely important to know that even if we would control our thoughts, we can easily fall into sin because of the heaviness of the strength of the flesh. This force can only be broken by a CONSTANT prayer.
To be continued in the seventh part
Chris Ndikumana
