The way to overcome the flesh in our everyday experience is to turn to the Lord when the flesh solicits our attention. By so doing we mortify it. Nothing is so mortifying as not to be recognized, especially when you want recognition. The flesh is always wanting attention. When you turn to the Lord He will sustain you and the Spirit will help you. The Spirit is always against the flesh. He is your only power. The world around appeals to the flesh; therefore, it is of the utmost importance to keep apart from what would provoke or gratify it. Turn in your Bible to Rom. 13:14 and 2 Tim. 2:22. The Spirit occupies us with Christ and heavenly things, and thus in the power of what is superior, we are carried above what is inferior.

All this involves deep exercise of heart in God’s presence, but it is good to be exercised. Exercise promotes spiritual growth in the knowledge of what the flesh is in all its badness and subtle character, and also in the knowledge of what God is in grace to us. Thus we are saved from being puffed up with pride, which is so abhorrent to God and so ensnaring and ruinous to us, and are kept daily dependent on grace alone. If we yield to the flesh and allow it to overcome us, we shall have a guilty conscience. The Spirit of God will be grieved. We shall get out of communion with God. We shall lose spiritual power unless we at once turn to God in the confession of what we have allowed. Then the word to help us is, "If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness" (I John 1:9).