"The heart is like a music room. Grand instruments lie about the great room. The instruments themselves are not good or bad, righteous or unrighteous, godlike or satanic. They are either pure or impure, depending on which musician the soul lends its instruments to. The spirit unto Righteousness, or the flesh unto sin and death.
The first step upward is to take the decision of abiding in Christ seriously and make it your every moment's focus. The first step downward is to take it lightly, and deem the instrument room a non-exclusive room for the enjoyment of many.
Before Christ arrives, the room is overrun with the flesh. No matter the design and desire you may have to restore the room to its rightful use and allow God once again to play upon the harps and lyres, the flesh holds a position of control. The Law of Sin is preeminent in the room, meaning the flesh holds the trump card in every hand. It is the flesh who plays upon the instruments of man's personality, bringing about a picture of either the heights of human glory or the human debauchery, but in either case only a picture of sin, of self-advertisement, and the produce of the flesh.
What Christ accomplished was a remedy for the state of the soul and heart. He has removed the flesh's ugly stranglehold over the heart. When we in faith, ask God to enter our heart as Savior, King, and Lord, nothing can stand against His authority and His power. But He can only enter as far as we allow. Thus commences the great battle of the soul, the great battle over the inner life of man. If we continue to yield and allow God His rightful place, he purges every last vestige of fleshly control and establishes His kingdom in totality. But if we stop short and attempt to keep ourselves on the throne, God will merely have set us free, but we will remain in the chains of the flesh and Sin.
We will be mastered by something, either sin unto death, or obedience unto righteousness. We will have faith in something, either in ourselves unto destruction, or faith in God unto a transfigured life which brings glory and honor unto christ. We must lose faith in our Self in order to gain faith in Christ in us. We must relinquish our hold in order to realize the fullness of the effect of Christ gaining foothold and establishing His holy Kingdom within. Who has the stronghold on my heart - me or Christ?? If it remains me, then the flesh will remain empowered. But if it be Christ, the flesh will be embalmed and silenced within, skulking to the far corner of my existence, and hogtied with the bands of disregard and contempt."
Further thoughts for contemplation
I have read of a young lion whom nothing could awe or keep down but the eye of his keeper. With the keeper you could come near him, and he would crouch, his savage nature all unchanged, and thirsting for blood -trembling at the keeper's feet. You might put your feet on his neck, as long as the keeper was with you. To approach him without the keeper would be instant death. And so it is that the beliver can have sin and yet not do sin. The evil nature, the flesh, is unchanged in its enmity against God, but the abiding presence of Jesus keeps it down. In faith the believer entrusts himself to the keeping, to the indwelling of the Son of God. He abides in Him and counts on Jesus to abide in him too. The union and fellowship is the secret of a holy life. "In Him is no sin. He that abideth in Him sinneth not."
Man has a way which he perceives to be correct and proper, but God must prove that man's opinion is unholy and wholly unlike his own. God must redefine "correctness" in man's existence. God's ways appear follishness to man's natural mind, but in reality, God's ways are "right and correct" and it is man's ways that are actually foolish, incorrect and wrong. The "right" idea is, by scriptural definition, the perfect and inviolable opinion of God; never wrong, never perverted, never polluted, and always, without exception CORRECT! God is right, His Word is right, His Word become flesh is right, and everything that opposes this "right" is, without exception always WRONG! Therefore, the "way that seemeth right unto a man" must be relinquished in order for man to become as he ought to be.
"There is a way that seemeth right unto a man,
but the end thereof are the ways of death." Prov 14:12
"Every way of a man is right in his own eyes:
but the Lord ponders the hearts." Prov 21:2
"For the Word of the Lord is right;
and all His works are done in truth." Psalms 33:4
When we become honest students of ourselves, we will readily admit that we are each capable of the most despicable deceit and immorality. And it is that honesty that moves us to cry out to God, "Try me, examine me, search me - if there be anything, anything at all within me that is hindering your grace from rescuing me, please please Lord, shine your Spirit light upon it. Let me see clearly the state of my soul, so that I may not delude myself into a false life, an empty spirituality, and a hollow form of godliness. May I not feel secure anywhere but in the arms of your Grace and the abiding life of Christ."
By Eric Ludy "The Set-Apart Life Discipleship series" pg 318
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