These are but a few of the multiple forms of "the flesh" to be discovered and taken to the Cross.  "In the Palace of Wurtzung there hangs a hall of glass.  It is called the Hall of a Thousand Mirrors. You enter--a thousand hands are stretched out to meet you, a thousand smiles greet your smile, a thousand eyes will weep when you weep; but they are all your hands, your smiles, your tears.  What a picture of the selfish man!  Self all round, self multiplied, and he is deceived" (Mantle).  It is of God's wisdom that we should not be burdened with the discovery of these many forms of the flesh life all at once.  Although emancipated at the life-center of our redeemed beings through the indwelling and infilling of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus, we are still in a fight--albeit on the victory side.  Vast areas of the flesh must yet be crucified.  We must become Christ-like.  As an old black Christian in Africa put it: "The Cross of Christ condemns me to become a saint." We left Egypt "in haste." Let Egypt leave us "with a vengeance." Look no more that way.  Not deliverance but death lies in that direction.  "Their horses are flesh and not spirit." Expect not to "run with the hare and hunt with the hounds." Calvary's floods of death are between us and that world.  We have been crucified with Christ.  There let us stand.  Be consistent.  Why halt between two opinions?  Why be double minded?  Why make provision for the flesh?  Why not pay your last respects to the flesh?  We are debtors, thank God, not to the flesh to live after the flesh.  You are His?  Then be His.  Be what you are.  Be out and out.  Obey God.  When God says, "Pluck out," don't try to salve your conscience with prayer.  When God says, "Cut off," crying will not do.

We are largely creatures of habit.  By birth we are selfish, and by long practice we have lived to please ourselves, We have long been debtors to certain fleshly tendencies.  We have settled down perchance (wicked notion) that it must be ever thus.  There are certain Canaanites that "would dwell in the land." They have chariots of iron.  Let us set out a few of the more common and subtle forms of the flesh which are manifest "hangovers" in many Christians.

You may always have been a murmuring, complaining Christian.  You sulk and feel sorry for your "sad, sweet self." But you need not do so.  "If the Spirit of him that raised up Jesus from the dead dwell in you," He will so quicken your poor mortal, murmuring frame that you will experience the power of the Cross to cancel the complaining.  There is a point to be observed, however; the victory will not be automatic.  It will be only: "If ye through the Spirit [note that you must co-operate] do mortify [make to die] the deeds of the body" (Rom. 8:13).

You are sensitive, "thin-skinned"?  Why not call it sinful pride?  The next time somebody reproves you, just say, "You don't know half the truth.  If you knew me you would say much worse." This may help you into harmony with the Cross.  It will at least be the truth.

The flesh reasons that if your circumstances were only different you could have victory.  But circumstances only reveal what is inside.  Our insistence here is this: that "the eternal substance of a thing never lies in the thing itself, but in the quality of our reaction toward it.  If in hard times we are kept from resentment, held in silence and filled with inward sweetness, that is what matters.  The event that distressed us will pass from memory as a wind that passes and is gone.  But what we were while the wind was blowing upon us has eternal consequences" (Amy Carmichael).
You may be a zealous Christian.  But have you gotten over a fleshly itch for a thrilling baptism of power?  Do you demand signs and wonders before you will believe?  The flesh seeks to glory in God's very presence.  Those who make such imperious demands upon God keep alive the very fleshly, selfish principle which must go to the Cross.  In Old Testament ceremony, the blood, representing death, always preceded the anointing with oil, representing the Spirit.  Do we forget that the Spirit comes from the Crucified in Heaven?  Five bleeding wounds He bears.  They still proclaim that the flesh with its passions and lusts was crucified.  Nadab and Abihu once offered strange fire before God--and died.

Are you given to gossip?  The principle of curiosity is like the troubled sea that cannot rest.  Does your tongue cast up a world of mire and dirt?  We know a true minister who sought to control his tongue by taking a red hot poker and searing it.  But the trouble was deeper.  It was a heart matter.  However, his attitude was