How much has your life been wounded by the anger, the hostility, or the insensitivity of another person?

It's hard to grow spiritually when you're estranged from your husband or from your wife or from your parents.

The papers are filled with stories of warfare and of threats of even worse, worse, 20th century man lives

with a nuclear sort of damacles over his head worrying about whether or not he's going to be able to exist for another generation.

But the very things that contribute to war take place at a much smaller scale every day at the level of interpersonal relationships.

How much has your life been wounded or hurt by the anger, the hostility, or the insensitivity of another person?

And God is profoundly concerned about that. The great commandment is not simply to love God but to love each other.

And as we grow in grace, we are called to grow in that direction of the establishment of human relationships that are whole, rather than fractured, that are edify rather than destructive.

It's hard to grow spiritually when you're estranged from your husband or from your wife or from your parents.

But not only is the problem of the fall of human nature a problem for my spiritual growth because I have to live in a company of people

who are hostile towards my spiritual growth, who are rooting for me to fail, who rejoice when I stumble, but the biggest enemy of my own spiritual growth is who?

You've heard the axiom, you're your own worst enemy, and we should add to it, and what a formidable opponent who knows your weaknesses more than you do, who knows where to attack yourself inwardly more than you do.

And so we talk about the warfare that goes on between the flesh and the spirit, that's not between the body and the soul, that's between the disposition of the heart of the old man, that your pre-regenerate desires.

When you are converted to Christ you are not instantly cleansed of sin or healed of the desire and disposition for sin.

That old man is putting up a death struggle now with the new man that has been quickened within you by the Holy Spirit.

One man put it this way that a Christian life is like a chicken with its head cut off.

Have you ever seen a chicken with its head cut off or heard of what happens to the chicken with the head cut off?

You chop off that chicken's head and what does it do?

Just flop over and a couple of flothers of the feather instead?

No, the involuntary muscles, that chicken starts running and squawking all over the barn yard without a head.

Blood everywhere is the mess.

Creating all kinds of chaos and all kinds of destruction, now for all practical purposes, that chicken is dead.

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