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This young woman is a Christian. Surprised? “How can a new creature in Christ act like Satan himself is controlling her?” you ask. It’s easy. We see it every day, don’t we? The Bible calls it “walking after the flesh,” and she was simply demonstrating her unique version of it for the whole world to see. It brings great dishonor to the name of Christ, but I could identify with her. I’ve done things even worse than that. As a result of learning the things I discuss in this book, however, I’ve seen Christ live through me to drastically reduce such episodes to a trickle of what they once were.

Have you ever pondered the question posed by Romans 7:15: “Why do I do what I do, when I really don’t want to do it?” I know exactly why. It’s because I sometimes walk after the flesh. But for a long time, I didn’t know what my flesh was. And how could I know I was free unless I got a handle on just what it was I needed to be free from? You likewise need to gain insight into your unique version of the flesh. That’s the purpose of this chapter.

On the surface, you might get the idea as you read along that this chapter deals with child-rearing; but I’m dealing with the structuring of your flesh. Since you began playing Lord of the Ring in infancy, that’s where it began getting choreographed, so I must deal with it there.

Caution: Make it your major purpose as you read this chapter to learn from the Holy Spirit what happened to you as a child; then let your secondary purpose be to see any mistakes you may be making with your own children. It’s primarily your flesh we’re interested in exposing.

Let’s start by coming to a common understanding of the term “righteousness.” This understanding alone could revolutionize your life. You can consider the term “righteousness” from two viewpoints: 1. righteous works (behavior); or 2. righteous identity (state of being).

It’s my conviction that most Christians think only of righteous performance—holy behavior—when they think of righteousness. Of course, godly behavior is important. Biblically it refers to “righteous works.” But the Word is very clear that there is a righteousness
that is absolutely unrelated to performance
(see Galatians 3:6-9 and Romans 4:9-13). It is a declaration by God of a person’s identity. He says that He will declare a person righteous under one condition—if the person is hidden in Christ by faith.

Using this definition of righteousness, then, it means that God
declares
a person accepted, “right” with Him. The tragedy is that most people who have been declared “all right” by God continue to strive to generate their own declaration of being “all right.” The Bible refers to this as “dead works.”

Next we need a biblical definition of “flesh.” In Philippians 3:3-9, we find a very clear explanation:

This passage leaves no doubt that the term “flesh” in this context refers to the Christian’s “old ways.” Please don’t misunderstand me: The term “flesh” does not refer to the Christian’s
body
in this context. The body is not the “bad guy.” God made the whole man and redeems the whole man—spirit, soul,
and body.
In other biblical contexts, the term “flesh” is sometimes used to refer to the body, but here the term simply means the Christian’s old ways.

I wish to make ten points concerning this passage that will give us a better idea of what it means to “walk after the flesh.”

In Philippians 3:9 we see Paul, the new man in Christ, stating that he has scrapped his “old ways” of generating righteousness for “a [different] righteousness not derived from law [
Saul’s
standard, which happened to correlate with Mosaic law due to the culture], but based upon the righteousness that is from above through faith in Christ” (author’s paraphrase). Make no mistake about it.
Perfectionism has its roots in establishing a righteousness of your own based on law—your law.

It’s not carnal for a Christian to be perfectionistic, but Paul’s motive for developing it was. Was Paul perfectionistic in his approach to godly living? Yes! But he was liberated from using perfectionism as a means of generating self-acceptance. He generated his self-acceptance through setting his mind on who he now was in Christ—acceptable. He then allowed Christ to live
His
life through Paul, using Paul’s perfectionistic, goal-oriented traits to bring glory to His name on earth, living out His life of agape love.

“Our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against [the forces of evil]” (Ephesians 6:12). I want to caution you as we begin to look at how this all may have worked out in your life that when I point out mistakes made by your parents and peers, you should direct your hostility toward the biblically identified target, Satan, and not toward your folks. It isn’t them you ought to be angry with; it’s the Evil One who has worked through your parents to try to destroy you. You want to know why your folks did some of the things they did? Go take a look at what happened to them when they were kids. But let’s not get mad at grandma and grandpa, either. If you trace all the garbage back to its source, who do you finally wind up with? Satan! He is the one who first deceived, who hates and destroys families. Direct your anger at him—that’s biblical.

Anyone can see that little Charlie got overtly rejected by his parents. What most fail to see is that the rejected child’s self-image is shaped by his experience so he winds up
feeling
as if his folks are
perfectly justified
in rejecting him. He reasons he’d reject himself, too, if the shoe were on the other foot, because he sees himself as a no-good bum who doesn’t deserve to be loved.

But there is a much more subtle form of rejection that’s rampant on planet earth. Let’s call it “covert rejection.” (My friend Charles Solomon has written an excellent book on the subject of rejection. I highly recommend
The Rejection Syndrome
[Tyndale].)

In the case of the person who is being overtly rejected, all the cards are up on the table, and by the teen years most children see very well that they are being rejected. In the case of covert rejection, however, most kids never discern what’s happening to them. It simply seeps over their personalities like a slowly gathering fog they can’t identify, much less verbalize to someone else. The
emotional results are the same
for both types of rejection, though, so the covertly rejected child might say, “I
feel
as if they don’t love me,” whereas the overtly rejected child might say, “I
know
nobody loves me.”

If a parent seems to drive himself to perform perfectly in most things he tackles, seems to have perfect performance standards for himself, and insists that his child also perform perfectly, he will unwittingly teach his child that he’s inadequate. The child will begin to accept as “fact” the notion,
I can’t do anything right! No matter how hard I try, I always foul everything up.
Then his feeler gets stuck, and he begins to feel this way about himself constantly.

The ones who are thirsty for their folks’ acceptance adopt the Avis Rent-A-Car posture, “We try harder,” and develop into perfectionists themselves. Those who are not, go 180 degrees in the opposite direction, becoming impulsive in their search for acceptance.

When the perfectionist gets saved he will typically become quickly bound by law,
his
law, the law of having to perform perfectly as a Christian in order to accept himself. It’s a standard that he’s trying to live up to in order to generate and maintain self-acceptance.

A child who receives no physical love from her folks will
not
learn that
It’s very difficult for my folks to demonstrate physical affection.
She will learn
I’m unlovely.
She will then begin to feel unlovely. If dad avoids holding his little girl on his lap, snuggling her, holding hands while strolling, and so on (all in a healthy way), she will learn about herself in the process, not about dad. If overt affection from her dad is missing, she has a good chance of developing into an adult who has hang-ups about relating to males in a physical love relationship, either being sexually promiscuous or perhaps finding it difficult to relate easily to husband, sons, or male friends. When she becomes a born-again believer, this will become a part of her unique version of the flesh. The Evil One will try to control her through these patterns.

Little kids spell love t-i-m-e. “Spend time with me,” their words and actions cry out. “If you
don’t
spend time with me,” they reason, “then whatever you
do
spend time with is worth more to you than I am. Therefore, I am worth less than that is. Therefore, I am
worthless.
” It matters not
how
you ignore the child. You can do it by working all the time, golfing all the time, soul-winning all the time, or you can be at home but just never interact with him. The emotional results will usually be the same. He’ll feel worthless.

The child doesn’t deduce this through a logical reasoning process, but it all comes into him at the gut level nevertheless. We hear it said that it’s not the
quantity
of time a parent spends with his child that counts, but the
quality.
(This statement is often heard from the lips of successful, busy men and women.) You don’t get quality time, however, unless you get it by traveling the road of quantity. The intimacy will evolve as a by-product of sharing many good times together. I know of no shortcuts.

How many Christian men and women have I counseled who are either spending their lives in a frantic search to maintain a sense of personal worth, or, at the other extreme, who cannot tolerate success or praise if they do receive it?

Some parents are like the Ford Motor Company’s advertising slogan: They always have a better idea. No matter how well the child does, they have a habit of suggesting how he could have improved. They rarely praise him. The idea is to consistently give him a “better” way he could have done it after he has already chosen and carried out his own idea. This is an alternative way of producing the same emotional results described above. This communicates to him that he is stupid. If he believes it long enough, his feeler will get stuck. A commonly observed illustration of this is the parent who harps about the only C grade his child receives on his report card while virtually ignoring the As and Bs.

Verbalizing to a child that he is stupid, ugly, clumsy, uncoordinated, lazy, “just like my sorry brother-in-law,” and so on gives him solid evidence that he really
is
a loser. Pointing out to a daughter that she’d be “beautiful with a sack over her head” should fix her feeler up just dandy for relating to males later in life. The devil ought to be able to take that kind of garbage and make her either promiscuous or frigid—promiscuous to “prove” her femininity or to obtain male acceptance, or else frigid, convinced that she is totally unfeminine.

Nonverbal ridicule is accomplished by waiting until an appropriate moment, such as when the child hands dad the wrong screwdriver. The idea is to do things like sighing deeply, rolling the eyes toward the ceiling, slowly wagging the head as if the load is almost too heavy to bear. This produces the same results as overt ridicule and may be even more destructive since it’s more subtle. That way the child accepts the total blame for his “stupidity” rather than being able to discern that perhaps he is being mistreated.