What Dying to Self Looks Like
“I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me.”[1]
God told me I should read the Bible and would teach me the meaning of what I had read.
Using a King James version of the Bible, I might have better understood what I was reading if I had read it in a foreign language! But I believed God, and sure enough, God revealed the meanings of the scriptures I read.
As years passed, I read through Genesis to Revelation many times and began teaching others what God had taught me. I still use that same Bible to this day. The pages are dog-eared, with notes all over them. They have turned to a sepia color from being thumbed through for 40-odd years.
God taught me that understanding comes from God’s Spirit inside me. The insight from the Spirit travels through our brains, creating a pathway to our conscious and subconscious filing systems. When we act on this knowledge, we use various parts of our physical minds and bodies to utilize the awareness God has made known to us. Without these pathways and our various physical body parts, the Spirit would be unable to use or apply the interpretation given to us.
‘Dying to self’ would not make sense to the average human without God providing some perception in our minds.
For example, being ‘crucified with Christ’ makes no sense until God explains the meaning. Dying to self might be easier understood with some words like these:
“As we die to self, we no longer try to get our own way or try to get people to look up to us. We stop offering unasked-for advice as if in self-importance. We think we always know better than others. We let go of trying to make an impression on others. We find freedom from a self-focused life.”[2]
“Without God’s revelation to our minds, we mostly spend our lives conjugating three verbs: to want, to have, and to do. Craving, clutching, and fussing, we keep ourselves in perpetual unrest.
When we die to self, we are no longer obsessed with self. That is the thing.”[3]
We comprehend this kind of language, and we can apply what we come to recognize through the use of the brain pathways and our various physical body parts revealed by the Spirit. Otherwise, we would be sitting under a mango tree, sucking our thumbs and wondering how we go about applying God’s words. We might then take the initiative to ask God what to do, and if we could hear God’s voice, we would listen to God saying, “ Use your head – that’s why I gave you one.”
God does not bypass our human faculties – God uses them. I used to think that praying to God resulted in God doing the work and me sitting under the mango tree. No, not at all; we pray, and God gives us realization through the Spirit in us, and WE take it from there.
There’s more. We have a voice in our head mumbling without ever ceasing. Medical science calls this voice ‘the ego.’ We believers call it ‘the self’ or ‘the flesh.’ Many say It’s ‘the Devil.’ But NONE of these expressions is you. Consider this:
“The most common ego identifications have to do with possessions, the work you do, social status and recognition, knowledge and education, physical appearance, special abilities, relationships, personal and family history, belief systems, and often also political, nationalistic, racial, religious, and other collective identification.”[4]
If any of the above controls a mind, here is the result:
“The mind governed by the flesh is death, but the mind governed by the Spirit is life and peace. The mind governed by the flesh is hostile to God; it does not submit to God’s law, nor can it do so. Those who are in the realm of the flesh cannot please God.”[5]
None of these is you because your mind, which has the Spirit of God managing it, is like this:
“… but we have the mind of Christ.”[6]
Scriptures urge us to control the thoughts in our minds and convert them into Godly thoughts:
“And be renewed in the spirit of your mind; And that ye put on the new man, which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness.” [7]
Death to self is not listening to self-speak; but obeying the Spirit of your mind.
Until next time
Love and Blessings
Peter-James.