We have to win the war within, the battle inside ourselves. Your worst enemy is often right there inside of you.

While on this planet, there is that constant conflict between flesh and spirit.

What’s in you? Which predominates? Who are you, really? How selfless are you? How often is what you do dictated by pure love for others and the Lord?

Take time to take account.

Start with the basic question: What is the “flesh”?

It can mean the physical body. It can refer to this earthly life. Finally, it can be used to depict the sinful urges that reside within us.

It can be what’s inherited. A limp can be passed down. We stumble instead of leaping. We slog. Along the way, we compromise with the world.

When we compromise with the world we muddy the spirit.

Galatians 5:19–21 speaks of the works of the flesh, saying they include sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, orgies, and things like these.”

Paul then warns “that those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God.” All ye saints, help us!

Perhaps most simply understood, works of the flesh are things human beings naturally tend toward, things contrary to God’s design for us (Romans 1:28–29). Those who pursue lifestyles characterized by immorality, anger, divisiveness, drunkenness, and any excess are giving evidence, says Matthew 7:20, that they’re not of His salvation, which liberates.

No matter how “righteous” your indignation, anger without love is worldly.

Things like jealousy, pride, selfish ambition, materialism, and the yearning for renown are of the “flesh,” far easier than ways that are correct with the Lord. You feel it when there is an agitation (however slight) in your spirit. Money, media, entertainment, politics: You can’t get much more worldly than those.

What kinds of things does the “flesh” do? It insults. It answers an insult with its own. It deploys profanity, inanity. It wants you to “drive” the way you want to drive despite the speed limit. It calls you to eat whatever the flesh desires and in whatever quantity (as Scripture says, the flesh dictates). It loves impatience. What’s in you and shouldn’t be in you is what trips you up.

To such imperfection do spirits attach.

A remedy is surrender. Give it to Jesus. Another key is discipline.

Only with discipline do we clean the inner house.

Listen to your thoughts, to how you talk within yourself, for God too is listening.

Take some time to list all the things in your daily life and thoughts (and internet) that oppose the spirit. Cast out worldiness, “that ye put on the new man, which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness” (Ephesians 4:24).

For the only path that brings peace is the one away from the “world” and toward God.