Carnal 0r Spiritual?

"And Peter went out and wept bitterly." Luke xxii. 62. THESE words indicate the turning-point in the life of Peter, — a crisis. There is often a question about the life of holiness. Do you grow into it? or do you come into it by a crisis suddenly? Peter had been growing for three years under the training of Christ, but he had grown terribly downward, for the end of his growing was, he denied Jesus. And then there came a crisis. After the crisis he was a changed man, and then he began to grow aright. We must indeed grow in grace, but before we can grow in grace we must be put right. You know what the two halves of the life of Peter were. In God's Word we read very often about the difference between the carnal and the spiritual Christian. The word "carnal" comes from the Latin word for flesh. In Romans viii., and in Gal. v., we are taught that the flesh and the Spirit of God are the two opposing powers by which we are dominated or ruled, and we are taught that a true believer may allow himself to be ruled by the flesh. That is what Paul writes to the Corinthians. In the 3rd chapter, the first four verses, he says four times to them, "You are carnal, and not spiritual." And just so a believer can allow the flesh to have so much power over him that becomes "carnal." Every object is named according to its most prominent characteristic. If a man is a babe in Christ and has a little of the Holy Spirit and a great deal of the flesh, he is called carnal, for the flesh is his chief mark. If he gives way, as the Corinthians did, to strife, temper, division, and envy, he is a carnal Christian, He is a Christian, but a carnal one. But if he gives himself over entirely to the Holy Spirit so that He (the Holy Spirit) can deliver from the temper, the envy, and the strife, by breathing a heavenly disposition; and can mortify the deeds of the body; then God's Word calls him a "spiritual" man, a true spiritual Christian.


Selected text from the deeper christian life by andrew murry