[Note: This is Part A of the sermon on Matthew 26:41. Delivered 1 November 1981, Montreal. Note: sermon 164 is numbered after sermon 162 in the series but is chronologically earlier (November 1981 vs. January 1982). Part B continues directly.]
We come to Matthew 26:41. You will recall that last week we looked at three passages in comparative exegesis in order to bring out the meaning of each, and the last of these was Matthew 26:41 — which we only touched upon without really expounding it. But this passage of the Lord's teaching is so important that it deserves careful attention. We are in the Garden of Gethsemane, in a very vital and profound moment of the Lord's life — indeed in his last moments on earth. In this fearful hour, the Lord Jesus sought a little fellowship and companionship from his disciples. But it was not to be had. The disciples were simply unable to give him the shoulder-to-shoulder help in the battle that they might have given. They could not stay with him. When it came to joining him in prayer, they fell asleep.
Perhaps that is no new experience to you and to me. Many a time you are trying to pray and the next time you open your eyes, you find yourself fast asleep. I say this so we do not take a condemning attitude toward these three apostles who sought to stay with the Lord Jesus in prayer and could not make it. The reason for this is given to us in verse 41: "Watch and pray that you may not enter into temptation. The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak." The disciples were willing to try and stay with the Lord Jesus in that fearful hour. The willingness was there; it was not lacking. But the flesh was weak, and the flesh prevented them from accomplishing what they sought to do.
Now, we need to understand this word "willing." It is a little too weak to translate the Greek word that stands here. The word actually means eager. The spirit is eager. The word is made up of two parts, and the second part, *thumos*, expresses vehement passion, very strong feeling. The Lord Jesus is crediting the apostles with much more than willingness. Willingness can mean: okay, I'll go along, barely across the line. But Peter said, "I will die with you, I will follow you to the end" — that is not just willingness, that is eagerness. This same word is used by Paul in Romans 1:15 where he says he is eager to preach the gospel wherever it is not yet preached — he is burning to get the gospel to people. It also appears in 2 Corinthians 8:19, where it describes eagerness to help the brothers and sisters in Jerusalem financially — not a grudging willingness but a real eagerness.
This principle is vital to understand if we are going to get anywhere in the Christian life, because we are talking not about philosophy but about an empirical fact — something that we can test and experience for ourselves as true. We are talking about the conflict between flesh and spirit, which is a part of our daily life. Unless we know how to overcome this problem, we will get nowhere spiritually, because the flesh will block us all the time. This happens from the very first moment you come into contact with the gospel. The moment you think of becoming a Christian, you will experience this reality: you may have the willingness to become a Christian, but immediately the flesh rises up and stops you. It says: don't be silly, don't do such a thing — okay, go to church sometimes, sing along with the songs, but don't get into this business, you might get hooked, and once you are on this hook, you can't get off. And the flesh has many reasons: your friends will laugh at you, your girlfriend might leave you, maybe God will send you to preach the gospel somewhere, what will your father say, what will your mother say, what will your boss say. From the first moment you come into contact with spiritual reality, there is the conflict between spirit and flesh.
When you think further about serving the Lord, the flesh is absolutely up in arms — it is screaming and shouting. Become a Christian, fine; go to church, get baptized, we can tolerate all that. But serve the Lord? Are you out of your mind? The battle becomes fierce, sometimes raging. And note the subtlety of the flesh: it will use any argument, spiritual or carnal, whichever is more effective on you. If you have a spiritual bent, it will use spiritual arguments against you. It will say: are you sure this is the will of God? And since most Christians do not know how to know the will of God, that single question settles it. You cannot proceed until you work out how to know the will of God — and that might take you five years — so the flesh puts you out of the race for that time. And when you finally work that out, the flesh will find something else to deal with you.
I think some time ago I mentioned the case of a person I knew who applied to Bible college. He struggled about it for a long time, the flesh putting every opposition in the way. But the day came that he filled in the form, sealed the envelope, stuck the stamp on — that was an effort, he had battled the flesh all the way — and he was on his way to post it. Whom should he meet but the local pastor? "What are you doing?" "I'm posting this letter to Bible college in Scotland." "Oh no, you don't want to go to Bible college." That was all the reason or excuse — whichever you like to call it — that he needed. A word closer to God, you couldn't get — at least, that was the way he thought of it. The application was finished. Notice the subtlety of the flesh: it will use whatever comes to hand, even a well-meaning word from a pastor.
This word "weak" — "the flesh is weak" — in Greek means literally "without strength." The word is used constantly in the New Testament of physical illness, because when you are ill, you are without strength. In Acts 4:9 it refers specifically to the cripple healed outside the temple gate. The related verb and noun are used five times in John 11 of Lazarus's illness — the illness from which he died. And Paul says in Romans 5:6: "While we were still weak, Christ died for us." What does "weak" mean here? The non-Christian state of existence is described as weakness — weak because sin had dominion over them and therefore they were unable to help themselves. And in Hebrews 7:28, the high priests are said to be "subject to weakness," meaning they, like everyone else, were subject to sin and unable to win the battle against it in their own strength. The whole point of Hebrews is that the law could define sin but could not help you win the battle against it.
Now, the remarkable thing is that the flesh makes spiritual things very hard to understand. A person may be extremely intelligent but have great difficulty understanding spiritual things — not because of a lack of intelligence, but because the flesh, working within, constantly opposes spiritual understanding and virtually neutralises it. That is why understanding spiritual things has nothing to do with intelligence as such. I am no more intelligent now than when I first became a Christian, but today I can understand many things that at that time I found impossible to grasp — so high and far beyond that I had no idea what they meant. Today I can look at them and understand them at a glance. Not because I became more intelligent, but because as we went on in the battle against the flesh, it was no longer so effective in hindering spiritual understanding. You will often find that when you find something very hard to understand spiritually, you also find, like the apostles here, that it is very hard to stay awake.
The Bible speaks of carnal Christians — someone whose mind is still dominated by the old fleshly way of thinking, making spiritual things very hard to understand. I think of young people who have been indoctrinated since childhood in materialism, so thoroughly that their minds are completely dominated by the flesh and unable to think spiritual things at all. Paul says in Romans 6:19 that he speaks in simplified terms because of the weakness of the Roman Christians — he uses human terms because of their difficulty in understanding. He is speaking to Christians, not to pagans.
Paul addressed himself to this question in two books above all others. Romans and Galatians both deal with this matter very intensely. In Galatians, it is interesting to note statistically that the word "flesh" occurs exactly eighteen times and the word "spirit" also exactly eighteen times — the highest density of both in the New Testament. The question is: how can we overcome the problem of the flesh? Your spirit may be very eager, especially after a period of training when you have glimpsed some spiritual truth and there is fire burning in your heart. But unless you understand the spiritual principle involved, you will be put out of effectiveness for the rest of your Christian life. Every Christian, including the apostle Paul, starts out with the same situation — he has not one bit of advantage over us. Yet what made Paul the spiritual giant he was, while most Christians remain so average and powerless? He himself describes his own problem in Romans 7: "The good that I would do, I cannot do, and the evil that I would not do, that I find myself doing." Paul had exactly the same battle. But he overcame it — by the grace of God he broke the power of the flesh through the Spirit of God in his life. "I can do all things," he says in Philippians 4, "through him that strengthens me." Notice the word strengthens: against the weakness of the flesh, God's power was so triumphant in Paul that there was nothing he could not do. And the secret of how he did it is in Romans 8 — he has not kept it to himself, but shares it: by living under the control of the Spirit, he was able to break the power of the flesh and accomplish all that needed accomplishing.
When I look at the church, what grieves my heart all the time is that all I see is flesh — I don't see the Spirit. People are forever talking about money for a nicer building, money for missions. Where are the people in the missions? Are they making genuine disciples? When I look inside the church I see conflict, and the root of that conflict is always the flesh. I went to Calgary recently and found that all the churches are in conflict with one another — it is a disgrace, and the cause is flesh. What about the pastor who meets the board of trustees and says: "If you don't raise my pay, there is another church that will give me more — you make up your mind"? He will not say plainly that it is the salary drawing him. Of course not. He will find spiritual reasons. That is the flesh speaking in spiritual language. Every day in North America, Chinese churches are short of pastors, and if there is a job offer from a big church in the west where the money is good — well, go west, young man, go west, old man. Doesn't matter who. The gold is still on the west side.
[Continues in Part B]
# Crucify the Flesh — Matthew 26:41 (Part B) — Set the Mind on the Spirit; Spiritual Hobbyism; The Christian Invulnerable from Outside but Vulnerable from Within; Samson; Watch and Pray; How to Pray
[Note: This is Part B of the sermon on Matthew 26:41, continuing directly from Part A. Delivered 1 November 1981, Montreal.]
The calling of God is interpreted in terms of how big the salary is. "Why did you go to that church?" "Because God called me." "How do you know?" "Because the salary is better." That is flesh everywhere — but it will always be expressed in spiritual language. He will not tell you directly that it is the salary. This is what I mean: we do things in a carnal way but make spiritual reasons for doing it. We do this kind of thing all the time. And this is the thing we must learn to deal with. The church must be revived. Until God can find his men, his people, through whom he can release his power, it is all in vain.
How then does Paul deal with this matter? Let us turn to Romans 8:5–6. "For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit. To set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace." What Paul is saying here is not just about one act of setting the mind on something. The word means to preoccupy, to be preoccupied with. The fleshly person's mind is constantly preoccupied with worldly thoughts. What you think is what you are. Catch yourself at any moment during the day and ask: what am I thinking about? That is your spiritual diagnosis, your spiritual pulse. What preoccupies your mind, what fascinates you most, what your thoughts indulge in most of the time — that will tell you whether you are fleshly or spiritual.
Consider: when you are watching television, your mind is fully involved with what is on the screen. Anything that interferes with this preoccupation is a distraction, an annoyance. Everything else has to keep quiet while the hockey match is on — your eyes never blink watching TV, but your eyelids are heavy in prayer. When it comes to spiritual things, I find that such preoccupation is somewhat rare. Most Christians are so preoccupied with worldly things that even spiritual things can become an intrusion. Exam time comes and students disappear from church. Any student who needs those two hours to study for exams must really be in a bad way, because anyone who has done his work through the term will hardly need to skip church for those two hours.
There is another possibility — something which is not your preoccupation but which you still enjoy doing. What do you call that? A hobby. You may be an engineer but you enjoy gardening. Your gardening is not a preoccupation; it is a hobby you enjoy. Now, this is particularly dangerous in relation to the conflict between spirit and flesh. What many Christians have done is accept Christianity as a very interesting hobby. It is not their preoccupation. I wonder what Christianity is for you — what the gospel is for you, what spiritual things are for you. Is it a preoccupation or a hobby? I think a great part of the church is full of spiritual hobbyists. Spiritual things are not your preoccupation; they are a hobby you enjoy. You enjoy reading the Bible just like you enjoy gardening — very nice, very relaxing — and then you go back to your preoccupation. In this way, the flesh has really got us where it wants us. We have compromised on spiritual things so effectively and yet do not even know it.
Romans 8:6 says: "To set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life." Life has to do not with simply enjoying reading the Bible or enjoying fellowship with other Christians, or going to church because it is a nice place with nice people. As Paul says in Romans 12:2: we are transformed by the renewing of our minds. Not "reformed thinking" as the communists try to achieve — but a transformed thinking, a complete revolution of mind. Where once we set our interest solely upon material things, with that same passion and intensity, in the new man we set our interest upon spiritual things. Is the goal too high for us now? But look what Paul says: that is the road to life. In the Bible, salvation has nothing to do with easy believism. It has to do with a faith that transforms your whole way of thinking. Not just to believe that Jesus came, died, and rose again — that is all true, and we accept it. But as James says, the devil believes all that too, because he knows it is true. It does not save him. In him there is no renewal of the mind. Until the mind is renewed, let me say it plainly, the hope of eternal life is not within reach.
This brings us back, in these closing moments, to what the Lord Jesus is saying in Matthew 26:41: "Watch and pray that you enter not into temptation." We are not talking about transcendental meditation or some spiritual technique. We are talking about spiritual survival. In all my years as a Christian, attending very many churches, I have never once heard a message on watch and pray. Our churches do not seem to know how to survive under the present circumstances. The teaching that once you are saved you are secure and have nothing to worry about — that teaching leaves us wide open to spiritual attack, removes all our alertness, and tells us there are no dangers.
Let me tell you the truth. The Christian is invulnerable — cannot be defeated by any external attack. All the verses in the Bible on security are verses about security from external attack. Paul says at the end of Romans 8: neither death nor life, nothing in heaven, nothing on earth, nothing can separate us from the love of Christ. The Lord Jesus says: no one can pluck you out of my hand. The communists discovered that in China. They seized innocent people whose only crime was being a Christian, threw them into hard labor camps year after year — trying to pluck them out of Jesus' hand. Did they succeed? No way.
But the Christian is totally vulnerable from the inside. He has a fifth column inside of him: the flesh. And the flesh is always working with the enemy outside. That is why the Lord says: one thing can destroy you. What is it? Temptation. Temptation comes from the inside. It is not attack from the outside, not physical force, not external spiritual force. It is seduction — cunning deceit that gently leads you away. Samson is the perfect picture of this in the Old Testament. Nobody could beat Samson. The Philistines discovered that to their cost — he killed them with a jawbone of a donkey, he burst their ropes like thread. No one could capture him from outside. But what a foolish thing it is for a Christian to think: because I am not vulnerable from the outside, I cannot be taken from the inside. That is precisely what happened to Samson. He went down through temptation, not through attack. There was Delilah — soft-spoken, beautiful, with the latest shampoos and mascara and lipstick and perfume. And where she went, he followed — right into the trap. "Come on, Samson, do you love me? Why won't you tell me your secret?" And finally, through that soft gooey voice, she got him. He didn't watch; he didn't pray. So today we have teaching in the church that tells us not to worry, we are secure — a teaching that opens you to be taken from the inside even while you think you are perfectly safe from the outside.
Now, what then is watch and pray? Watching means staying awake, staying in the light, not walking in darkness where people sleep. John tells us in 1 John 2:8–11 what this means in very practical terms. "He who says he is in the light and hates his brother is in the darkness still. He who loves his brother abides in the light and in it there is no cause for stumbling. But he who hates his brother is in the darkness and walks in the darkness and does not know where he is going, because the darkness has blinded his eyes." The Lord Jesus says: do not enter into temptation. The Christian cannot be dragged into temptation from the outside, but he may enter into it of his own accord — just as Samson walked right into the trap by walking in the darkness. And the very practical instruction is this: learn to love other people. You know how difficult it is. But in learning to love another person, you are learning to overcome the flesh — that is exactly what it is. As you try, by the Spirit of God, to love another person constantly and persistently, you will find that you are constantly winning the battle over the flesh. That is a spiritual secret which sounds simple but is most amazingly effective.
We say to a child: you have a roomful of toys — why not give some to somebody else? And the child says: this one means a lot to me, and that one means a lot to me. She can't part with any of them. But if she could learn to love, to give, she would be winning the battle against self — because self and love are opposites to each other. Watch — it is not some hypothetical fixing of the gaze upon something. It is staying awake, and staying awake is walking in the light, and walking in the light, as John tells us, is to love. If, by the Spirit of God, you practice this constantly, you will begin to grow spiritually by leaps and bounds.
And then there is pray. When you come to prayer, you will know how the flesh opposes you — that nobody needs to be told about. The moment you kneel down, your knees are so painful, your back is so tired, your head is so heavy, and you suddenly remember that you had to do this thing and that thing. Spiritual reality is there right before you in that struggle. The thing we have to do is learn to enjoy praying. Now, when I said Christianity can become a hobby you enjoy, I didn't mean it is wrong to enjoy it — I only mean it is not enough. Learn to enjoy praying. How? Let me be very brief, as our time is gone.
The first point: learn to be absolutely honest with God. If when you kneel down your knees are sore, say: "Lord, my knees are sore, I can't stay in this position for very long." If you have trouble believing, tell him: "I really want to believe in you; I hear other people say you are the living God, but I myself have trouble about this — please help me." You are talking to the living God. Share every problem with him honestly. Tell him your back is sore. Ask if you may sit up to talk to him. Do you think the Lord said: "You can only talk to me in the kneeling position"? "Lord, I am sitting down now; I am more comfortable; I am continuing my conversation with you." Try praying like this, being absolutely open and honest with God, and you will be amazed at how God answers your prayer. He loves an honest person, a truthful person who doesn't come with fancy prayers that don't mean anything.
The second point: learn to be practical, which follows from the first. Don't say only what you think God wants to hear. Speak about the real problems in your life. Many young people, for example, have problems with sex. They dare not speak to other people about it, so they hide it in themselves. Why hide it from God? He knows more about sex than anyone — he created us, and sex is not something we invented. Read Genesis chapters 1, 2, and 3. If you want to understand the mechanics of a car, the best person to talk to is the engineer who designed it. Speak to God down to the very details of daily life.
The third point is this: be specific. Speak specifically to the Lord. Don't make vague statements that mean nothing and ask nothing in particular. You know how it is when someone comes to your house and you say "What would you like to drink?" and they say "Anything" — the housewife doesn't know what to do. There is no drink called anything. But if you say: "If it's convenient, I would be happy to have a cup of tea" — now she knows what you want. Give the Lord specific requests too. George Müller was most specific in prayer: "Lord, I need a loaf of bread." He was meticulous and recorded his prayers. He was able to say he had prayed fifty thousand specific requests and received fifty thousand specific answers. That is why he knew God as the living God. Once you make a specific prayer and see it answered, you will realise: oh, God is real. Hitherto you have asked nothing in my name — ask and you shall receive, that your joy may be full. That is the challenge the Lord puts to us. Live your life for me, fix your mind upon me, and I will take care of you and your needs, and answer your prayer far beyond expectation. Let us be quiet before God in prayer.