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 ROMANS 8:13 

"For if you live according to the flesh, you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the misdeeds of the flesh, you will live."

You cannot sanctify sin. The residue left from the cutting away of your old sin-nature is called "the flesh" in the New Testament. It is that twisted ball of urges and impulses associated with your old way of living, thinking and acting. The "flesh" does all it can to collude with old sin-habits to try and keep them as active as they were before you became a new creation in Christ Jesus. It's always to same old demonic lie, "You really need something more than what God has provided for your living fully."

Colossians 2:11-15 "When you came to Christ, you were “circumcised,” but not by a physical procedure. Christ performed a spiritual circumcision—the cutting away of your sinful nature. For you were buried with Christ when you were baptized. And with Him you were raised to new life because you trusted the mighty power of God, who raised Christ from the dead. You were dead because of your sins and because your sinful nature was not yet cut away. Then God made you alive with Christ, for He forgave all our sins. He canceled the record of the charges against us and took it away by nailing it to the cross. In this way, He disarmed the spiritual rulers and authorities. He shamed them publicly by His victory over them on the cross."

You cannot sanctify what God has already called you to crucify. Following Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior is not about "managing" sin, but mortifying it, seeing it as the cancerous poison it is. Sin is like leprosy. It causes you to become insensitive to the voice of God; it destroys your spiritual "nervous system" that the Holy Spirit uses to convict, to halt, to purge and restore your life. 

You have been told in God's Word to run from, to flee from youthful lusts that war against your soul. Read that again. Sin makes WAR against your mind, your will, and your emotions to kill, steal and destroy you intentionally. When you begin to see sin as your enemy, an invasive and destructive kind of spiritual terrorism, it changes the perspective on the fight. It causes you to stop relying on your own ability and to rely only on the power of His Life within you.

You have been given, follower of Jesus Christ, the power and authority of the resurrection Life of Jesus that is now at work in you. You need to step back and see that NOW, as a Christian, the Holy Spirit IS Life within you. You live because He is Life within you.

To submit to the Holy Spirit, you ask Him to crucify the works of the flesh in you that are so easy to fall into because it's how you used to live. Sin will never truly comfort, heal, restore, deliver and transform your life. It will only continue to distort, disease, diminish, and destroy life as God intends you to live.

The work God has begun in you He has promised to bring to completion. That work of mortifying the flesh and its ways is ongoing and pointed. The Lord has life for you to live into that is exceedingly, abundantly more that you could ever ask for or even ever imagine. That work in done in you and will be brought to completion by the power of the Holy Spirit NOW at work within you.

Crucifixion was not like a slap on the wrist. It was a death sentence. Whoever was crucified was not coming home for dinner after the ordeal. God wants to deal with our tendency to rebellion and unbelief with an eternal finality. Those who are now alive in Christ Jesus, live because God gave them eternal life, a life to be lived out in the here-and-now; lived on purpose.

You now have a destiny to be discovered and only discovered in God. He reveals it. It is a destiny that God alone can bring to pass. It is a destiny where you make NO space for compromise with your old lifestyle. It's you stopping to walk through life in your own blindness, bone-headed, irrational way that never ha s and never will make for Life.

To submit to the Holy Spirit is not some alternative means of receiving Life from God. It is the ONLY way to enter into and experience in the here and now the Life God intends for us: wholeness, virtue, holiness, purity, hope, confidence, joy, peace, patience, goodness, gentleness and self-control produced by the Love of God at work in all who will believe Him.

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