Ladies Retreat - Saturday Session 2 - Suffering and Death

This message is on the suffering and death of Jesus. Only with God, does the place of death become a place of life. (Matt 27, Ro 5:3)

We have been (past tense) crucified with Christ. It's done once, not over and over (Gal 2:20).

You may ask, if that's true, why do we still struggle? It's because we still have flesh. Why do we have to deal with flesh if it's put to death? The old man was put to death in our life, but our own flesh still exits.

An parallel of how this works would be if a car manufacturing plant was destroyed, there would still be cars made in that plan driving around on the roads.

Gal 5:17-21. The flesh and spirit are in opposition. We cannot do what we please. We can use the term self-life to describe the flesh. We like to rule over our own self life, but we're to lay it down before God.

We try to satisfy with self-indulgence like eating, spending money, etc, but only Jesus can satisfy our desires.

We try self-seeking, self-glorification and self confidence, but can we be confident in anything in our flesh?

We try self pity, complacency, self-consciousness, or thinking you're not good enough or smart enough. There is just as much pride in walking in self-condemnation as self-glory.

We are to recognize (reckon) that we are dead to so. It's not that we die daily, but that we recognize it. We don't have to walk in the flesh. Gal 3:13 - Without Christ's death, there would be no deliverance since we would still be under the law.

Ro. 6:6-7 - we are free from our flesh. Nothing good dwells in our flesh. We must recognize it's dead and realize we are free.

The pictures in this post are from the small groups. I enjoyed being in a small group with people from my church. Other conferences such as New Attitude and Urbana also had small groups. The difference there is that you will probably never see the people in your small group again. Being in a small group with friends is cool since we already understood a lot of where we were coming from and I think were more able to encourage one another.