Pastor Bell's Words To Live By

As we become armed and dangerous, dangerous to the enemy that is, we must recognise who our greatest enemy is. The apostle Paul entreats us to adorn ourselves with the full armour of God and uses the Roman soldier’s outfit as a metaphor of how we are to dress for our spiritual battles. However he recognised early on in his walk with the Lord Jesus that our greatest battle is with ourselves and the ability to control our natural desires. It matters not where you go in the world, the inability of human beings to control their ‘flesh’ has far reaching consequences. Now for me this is crucial since one of the greatest injustices imputed on people of African descent was the breakup of the nuclear family unit. The rape and dehumanising of young African women by slaver, to produce a generation of fatherless off-springs who then go on to perpetuate the cycle, highlights the problem.  Two hundred years after abolition of the slave trade in Britain (1807) and nearly two hundred years after the abolition of slavery in the British Empire (1834), we are still seeing the effects of lack of control of the flesh. In fact the slave masters were disposed to taking the strongest men in the community from plantation to plantation to produce off-springs who would be ‘good’ workers. Alas today we have many Black men who think it ‘cool’ to carry on this tradition and boast about the many children they have fathered rather being a father to all their progenies. And so the apostle Pauls writing the first letter to the Corinthian church castigates them for their slackness. Sexual immorality should not be on the agenda of those who follow Christ (Ch 5). Are we not aware that our bodies are ‘temples of the Holy Spirit of God’? (Ch 6:15). Should you then be joined to every woman who takes your fancy? And if you are joined to them don’t you know that you are forming a spiritual bond [a soul tie] with them that allows them to download all their brokenness into you?

Since we have ‘this’ hope in Christ that ‘makes us nor ashamed’, let us fight against the flesh with all out might and teach our youngsters to do the same.  In concluding the argument against sexual promiscuity, the apostle encourages those who find it difficult the exercise self-control and remain celibate to marry rather than to yearn after the opposite sex (Ch 7). This advice is applicable to all of us and particularly those of us who are a part of the Diaspora. If you are having difficulty fighting the flesh, then marry one person, this is the word for today. Read 1Cor 5, 6&7.