This is part 2 of a series; The Selves is part 1.
You are not your body. You live in it, exactly like God lived in His temple but was not the temple. Because of that, this body is expendable (2 Corinthians 5:2-4). And while, obviously, what it needs matters… it matters a lot less than your body tells you it does!
Let me put it this way. When you’re riding a horse for awhile, and the horse gets tired… do you feel tired? Of course not. He is tired – and he tells you so, by walking slower, trying to rest more often, and so on.
And you should care about this, of course; because “a righteous man regards the life of his beast” (Proverbs 12:10). But ultimately, his tiredness is his own problem. As long as it doesn’t do him permanent injury, what you need matters more to you, right?
Obviously, you absolutely should care that your beast is in pain, or hungry, or tired. However, the beast is your servant – not your master. And the needs of the soul should come first, and you must insist on that.
Remember, Jesus said “Don’t be afraid of those who kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul” (Matthew 10:28 WEB). If you are condemned to be burned at the stake, men can kill your body, but souls cannot be burned in fire. Which meansYOU cannot be burned in fire!
This means that you – the real YOU, your soul – has never been cold. It has never been hot. It has never been in pain. When you miss a meal, your soul doesn’t feel hungry. Your soul doesn’t get sleepy at night. And when your SOUL sleeps… your body dies! (Ephesians 5:14).
So the “needs” and particularly the “wants” of the body must be put into perspective, balanced against the needs of the soul – and if you can’t give both the beast and the soul what they want… well, the soul should come first, always. Which is why Paul said…
1 Corinthians 9:27 (GWV) …I toughen my body with punches and make it my slave so that I will not be disqualified after I have spread the Good News to others.
It is this sort of detachment from the wants of your own beast that you need to master. He communicates his problem to you, and yet you, yourself, feel nothing but compassion – not the actual pain.
So that you can make decisions that sometimes the beast doesn’t like, for the good of the whole self. Thus you must rule over the beast, and bring it into captivity; but once that’s done, you need not unnecessarily deny it pleasure provided such pleasure doesn’t harm others or get in the way of the soul’s goals for the self!
TRUE SELFISHNESS
Our self is, in the absence of our soul, nothing more than an animal; and unfortunately, even with our soul, it’s often just an animal – as David was ashamed to admit (Psalms 73:22). Because any time the soul lets the beast nature make decisions for it, the self is as if it were no better than an animal.
Animals care about food, comfort, mating, and sometimes territory, their children, their social group, and in rare cases their masters – because these are things that can be considered part of their larger “self”.
And this is not evil, for which of us is not interested in themselves? It is normal to be selfish, for even God Himself is selfish – He said clearly that the worlds were created for His own pleasure (Revelation 4:11). And it is His pleasure to bring us to salvation, and give us the kingdom (Luke 12:32).
The fact that God’s selfishness benefits us doesn’t make it any less selfish. He clearly said He did all this for Himself! So being selfish isn’t wrong. It’s just… well, selfish. And the problem with selfishness isn’t so much the selfishness itself, as the shortsightedness which accompanies it.
Look at it this way; wanting something is selfish. And since you want it, you steal it; you are now happy, because you have it – the self is pleased. But then you get caught, and after 5 years in prison, you come to realize that the selfishness that led you to steal actually worked against the self in the long run.
Your selfish choice hurt the self! Which means, ironically, that an unselfish choice would have actually been MORE selfish in the long run! Something the beast, consumed with the present, wasn’t able to see!
Thus if you truly wanted the best for yourself, you would take care of the self by not letting your heart persuade it to take shortcuts to success, and instead make it do things the right way so that it can have all the things it wants for the long term!
1 Peter 3:10 (WEB) For, “He who would love life, and see good days, let him keep his tongue from evil, and his lips from speaking deceit.”
People lie because they fear conflict, fear judgment, fear being thought of badly. But when they are inevitably caught, they have greater conflict, harsher judgment, and are thought of even more poorly! Which means their short-sighted selfishness was actually anti-selfish!
So if they had truly wanted to see good days, they shouldn’t ever lie. Because the only way to feed their selfishness properly is by making their heart learn the golden rule!
THE PRESENT
Thus, it’s not the selfishness of the heart that’s the problem – it’s the timeframe of that selfishness; the fact that the beast only cares about one time: NOW. Animals live entirely in the present, and so does your own heart.
Animals have no concept of tomorrow, and only a very dim grasp of yesterday. If you give a dog a large pile of food, will he eat just what he needs, leaving some for tomorrow? Or will he eat until he bursts, and then starve tomorrow?
Proverbs 13:25 (WEB) The righteous one eats to the satisfying of his soul, but the belly of the wicked goes hungry.
The righteous person eats until his soul judges he has had enough. An animal eats until the belly literally cannot hold more food – until the BODY is satisfied! Which is why a wicked person goes hungry, because like a dog, he ate all his food at once and wasted it!
So the beast must be ruled – someone who thinks of tomorrow must rein in the baser instincts of the animal for its own selfish good! And yet this is not to say that you should deny it pleasure for its own sake; you shouldn’t hate your own flesh, you should love it and cherish it (Ephesians 5:29).
Yet that is exactly what many religions, seeing the corruption of their lower natures, have concluded; the Greek ascetics, the Catholic hermits, the Indian gurus and many others concluded that denying the flesh was the path to salvation; but what does God say?
Colossians 2:23 (GWV) These things look like wisdom with their self-imposed worship, [false] humility, and harsh treatment of the body. But they have no value for holding back the constant desires of your corrupt nature.
So we must rule the beast, but not abuse the beast. It must knowwho’s boss, but it need not suffer daily simply to prove its submissiveness. Because being miserable is not the same as righteousness; and sufferingis not salvation.
There will be some suffering involved along the road to becoming like God, but it will always be for a purpose greater than simple self-denial. Because denying the flesh just to deny the flesh does not help you change the desires of that heart!
Consider training a spirited horse; like your heart, he is selfish. And you can break him with whip and spurs, and force him to carry you into battle. But as soon as he can escape your oppression, he will; his heart won’t have changed. No one would mistake his fear of your whip as evidence of a good nature!
But teaching that same horse that obedience to you is the best way to get what he, himself, wants – and yes, that disobeying you causes him discomfort that he does not want – will change his nature. It will teach him that he is happiest when doing your will – thus, your will becomes what his heart most wants to do! (John 5:30).
Likewise, we must train the body to be our willing servant; and we may, at times, need to use a metaphorical whip to get its attention (Proverbs 26:3). You may need to deny the flesh to bring it to heel, and after so many years of spoiling it there will be a lot of resistance.
But this is for a purpose, not suffering for its own sake. Because the end goal of training any animal, most especially your own body, is to teach it that good things follow good behavior, and bad things follow bad behavior.
Thus, its own selfishness is harnessed to obey your will, for by caring about what happens to itself, and learning that obeying you causes good things… it will selfishly obey you to get those good things! Even if that means it must act unselfishly, and care for others, in order to receive its selfish reward in the end!
So “regarding the life of your beast”, caring about what it wants and needs, is necessary; but being so soft-hearted you give it whatever it asks for, demands, or pouts until it gets, will create an evil, stubborn, spoiled beast! Which… you’ve probably already done.
BUT I’M NOT A BEAST!
You may be doubting everything I’ve said here. “I’m not a beast! I’m a person!” you may be thinking. Which is, again, why I like Ecclesiastes 3:18 so much, since people believe exactly the opposite of what it says! “As for the sons of men, God tests them, so that they may see that they themselves are like animals.”
But how can I prove that your beast doesn’t obey you? Easy! Try to do things the soul likes and your beast hates. Here’s a challenge for you – go, right now, and take a cold shower. All the way cold, no hot, and just get in. Oh, you can do that? Well, that wasn’t the whole challenge! While you’re in the cold shower, relax. Set a timer, and do so for a full minute.
Stand under the icy water, breathe normally, relax, get wet all over, including your head… and then when the timer goes off, get out calmly. This will show you how hard it is to properly rule your beast. Because your beast will flinch, complain, try to rush you, hold its breath, tense, and you will find it very difficult to exercise true control over your body.
But you can learn to – I can – many others can. And these cold showers are actually, according to a lot of people, really good for you (Google Wim Hof, Cold Plunge, hot/cold showers, etc.) – so it’s something your soul should want, to make the body stronger and healthier; but something your beast will despise. So do it, and then tell me, “I’m a person in full control of my body; I’m not an animal!”
Or you could try fasting; something with thousands of years of proven health benefits in every culture, including modern science that your soul should approve of… and something your heart will absolutely loathe at first.
See, your soul doesn’t mind fasting; because it doesn’t eat food! But your beast worships a different god, the god of its own belly (Philippians 3:19). And so by denying it food, you are defiling its altar, polluting its idol! Something your soul should want to do, for its own sake!
Your beast likes to eat, and going without food is a quick way to teach it that it doesn’t HAVE to get its way all the time. That just because it yells “I’m hungry!” you don’t necessarily have to give it food. Who is in charge, again? Are you an animal or a person? This is how you know!
So to establish your dominance, start with a short fast; a day the first few times, then work your way up to longer fasts as necessary. But whatever you do, pick a reasonable goal you know your beast can do, but under no circumstances back off of that goal until you accomplish it! (Isaiah 55:11).
A fasting beast is a weak beast, and it’s easier to rule it and think more objectively because it’s simply too weak to argue after the first 4-5 hours. But if your soul is truly in charge, and able to keep the beast’s complaints in their proper place, the soul won’t even notice that it’s fasting because IT isn’t fasting!
So if “you” feel bad, then “you” is still your beast! And that means you have a lot of work to do! On the other hand, if you’ve distanced yourself from your beast, fasting is an excellent opportunity to see that – because your soul will be perky and awake, even while your body is weak and thinks it’s dying.
So find out today who rules over your self! Do it now! But do it, and see if your beast is in charge, or if you are! And once your beast endures cold water for the full time your soul chose beforehand, as measured by a timer – reward it with hot water!
Because you’re not trying to be mean to your body, and this is not a way of worshiping God through denying the flesh. This is not about denying the flesh for its own sake; this is establishing mastery over the flesh in a practice field so that when it REALLY matters, you can trust it to obey you without flinching, without hesitation, and without question.
YOUR BIOS
A soul is smart, in the way that a computer user is smart. Which is to say, they do a lot of dumb things but ultimately they’re better judges of the true goals of the user than the computer itself is. The spirit is smart, in the way that Windows knows HOW to do a lot of things, but not when to do them. And like Windows, it does annoying updates at all the wrong times that frequently break things.
But the beast is dumb, just like the BIOS – it’s just barely smart enough to keep the machine running, to give Windows a place to be smart, to give the user a way to make his dreams come to life. Without the BIOS, it’s nothing… but with the BIOS in charge, well, it’s also nothing.
Like the BIOS, this biological machine we call a body has built-in programming to protect it; fear of water, fear of big things, fear of unknown things in shadows, fear of falling. And when the soul tells it to get in the water, it is by nature terrified.
And that’s normal… but when I click “override”, when I tell my computer “yes, I do want to use administrator privileges”, I expect my computer to obey me. But most of you can’t make your beast do something it’s afraid to do.
They can’t override the beast’s fear of snakes, sharks, the dark, or whatever – and if they do, it’s after clicking “Yes I’m sure”, on a LOT of annoying popups in their mind! “No, I don’t want to download a better program from Windows Store”, “Yes, I’ll take the risk of installing this file”, “Yes, I do have permission to open this file!”
Windows does this because they don’t trust the user (and also, because they want the user to give them money). Likewise, when your beast doesn’t trust your soul’s judgment, and you tell it to say, pick up a tarantula, it will refuse. Because its fear is more important than your soul’s knowledge that this is not a poisonous spider!
Think of it like a spooked horse; when a horse sees a dark scary shape in the woods, and doesn’t trust his rider, he acts to save them both (but mostly himself) by ripping the reins out of the hands of the rider and galloping in the opposite direction.
So focused on the terror of the thing it thought it saw, that it is blind to the pain of the barbed wire it charges through! Utterly uninterested in the branches slapping the rider as it charges away; the rider would never do these things or go to these places that the horse takes him… but he’s no longer driving the body!
And when your soul doesn’t drive the body, you’re not acting in the likeness of God; you’re acting in the likeness of an animal. Your self, the sum of your fractions, is, in that moment… no better than a frightened horse.
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION
You’re in training to become a child of God, a spirit being. No spirit being can allow themselves to be pushed around by an animal, because if you can’t even rule over an animal, you can never rule over people!
You cannot change your heart into something more than what it is – a selfish and not terribly smart creature. But you can use that selfishness to shift its focus from short-term, harmful-to-others selfishness and teach it that the best path to fulfilling its lusts in the long term is by being unselfish in the short-term!
If you’ve ever trained a dog to do tricks, taught a bird to speak, or ridden a horse, you understand how this works. The ONLY thing you were missing is the realization that you had a beast inside of you! One that must be trained properly, just like a dog or a horse!
Like training any animal, you must reward good actions and punish bad actions. Exactly how this is done varies with the trainer and with the animal; but at the end of the day you must teach it that the best way to get what it wants is obey you – using its own selfishness against it.
To train a dog, you must make it understand that if it sits, it gets a treat. If it rolls over, it gets a tummy rub. Likewise, your body must understand that if it obeys you, it gets warm water; if it flinches at the thought of cold water, stalls, and tries to argue… it gets even colder water for even longer.
But saying an animal is “trained” is a relative word. Is a horse you need spurs to ride as well trained as one who rides by the touch of the reins alone? Is a horse that needs a bit in its mouth to amplify your orders as good as a horse that can be ridden without tack at all?
So likewise you might be able to handle cold water but not spiders; skydiving might not terrify you, but mayonnaise may give you nightmares. You may be able to make your beast obey you while you have people watching, but not in private; so unless your beast will obey you even at the cost of its own life… you’ve still got work to do (John 12:25).
Yet Jesus proved that the selfish heart can be perfectly ruled (Hebrews 2:16-17, 4:15), even to the point of willingly going to an unjust death (Isaiah 53:7). Jesus did not drag His beast, kicking and screaming, to the altar; He asked, and it went – trusting His soul’s judgment that this was for the good if His whole self and all other selves in the universe!
It did this because, while Jesus ruled His beast, it didn’t end there; for He ruled, but did not oppress. He ordered, but simultaneously earned the trust of His beast by caring for the life of His beast! That’s why He “came eating and drinking [wine]!” (Luke 7:34)
Proverbs 12:10 A righteous man respects the life of his animal, but the tender mercies of the wicked are cruel.
He didn’t deny His beast anything that it could reasonably have, provided it didn’t hurt itself or others… but neither did His “tender mercies” let it push Him around. Jesus’ beast wanted its own way, just like yours does. It wanted the soul to spoil it, just as yours does.
But Jesus rode His beast, and never let His beast ride Him. Something you and I have not consistently done! Jesus proved that your beast can be “ridden” perfectly, and trained so well that it needs no bit nor reins; that it could learn to trust His soul to the point that His will became its will.
Likewise, your beast should cheerfully and willingly obey any command your soul gives it; whether that’s to touch a spider, risk your life to save a stranger… or to be martyred for your beliefs. Whatever your soul judges that your self needs, simply the touch of our higher nature should be enough to make our beast obey.
If that’s not the case with you – and you’d be the fantastically rare exception if it is – it’s time you started today getting your body in the habit of obeying your soul – and teaching it to trust you to take care of it.
You’ll be surprised who you are, when your beast is no longer in charge of your self.
Continue to Part 3: The Spirit