1. All God’s children must learn to obey Him, even as Jesus on Earth had to learn in His human nature to obey His Father in all things (Heb. 5:8; John 8:29). The natural person of believers is incapable of obeying God, for their “flesh” (the earthly body and soul acting on its own) desires only to do what it pleases (Rom. 8:7, 7:18; Eph. 2:3). Therefore our obedience must be learned by repeated acts of the will in freely choosing moment by moment the obedience of Jesus’ perfect human nature in us (Eph. 4:24; Col. 3:10). The Holy Spirit can then reinforce the flow of the Lord’s obedient life in us (Heb. 5:9; Phil. 2:13). Christ has been made unto us all things, including the obedience that the Father desires (1 Cor. 1:30; Col. 3:11). Believers need to let Christ manifest the life of obedience in them, for He is the only life in them (Isa. 26:12; 2 Cor. 4:10-11; John 14:13-14, 19; Col. 3:4).

2. The earthly soul life must be replaced by the soul life of Jesus’ perfect human nature in us (Matt. 16:25). This exchange is called the salvation of the soul (Luke 21:19; Heb. 10:39; James 1:21; 1 Pet. 1:9). The Holy Spirit cannot protect us when we allow the devil and his demons to work through our old self (Gen. 4:7; Eph. 4:27; 1 Pet. 5:8-9). We give legal permission to them to inhabit the darkness in us because of sin (Eph. 5:11).

3. The glory of Christ’s love meets all of the believer’s true needs (John 17:24; Phil. 4:19). The enemy is capable of stimulating our natural desires so that we feel we must have certain earthly gratification and have them now (1 Pet. 1:14). We can come to rely upon these substitutes and to love them instead of loving the Lord (1 John 2:15-16). We can discover that “the love of Christ [for us] controls us” (2 Cor. 5:14); that His love is better than wine (Earth’s best stimulants) (Song of Sol. 1:2); and that His “love never fails” us (1 Cor. 13:8). It is no sacrifice to choose that which is of God in Christ – eternal, divine, truly pleasurable, and satisfying – instead of that which is temporary, created, a counterfeit pleasure, and a false satisfaction (James 4:3-4; 1 John 2:17).

4. Every believer must “forsake…his thoughts” because “every intent of the thoughts of his heart [is] only evil continually… from his youth” (Isa. 55:7; Gen 6:5; 8:21). The Holy Spirit transforms us by helping us set our renewed minds (no longer conformed to this world) on God’s interests (Matt. 16:23; Eph. 4:23; Rom 12:2).

5. The Lord Jesus said that the path that leads to true life is narrow and restricted to walking step by step in Him who is the way (Matt. 7:14; 1 John 1:7).

6. Paul tells us that the imaginations and speculations of the mind of the natural person are vain and futile because they focus upon “the creature rather than the Creator” (Rom. 1:21, 25).

7. God said that the root of sin in mankind is in the thoughts of our hearts (Gen. 6:5). Jesus reiterated that truth (Matt. 15:18-19).

8. Paul says that the unruly mind can be reclaimed for Christ by casting down speculations and every proud argument that is contrary to the true knowledge of God in Scripture. The believer then takes control of every thought to make it obedient to Christ (2 Cor. 10:5).

9. The young apostle Peter was headstrong, bent on going wherever he wished (John21:3). Jesus told him that when he grew old, he would have to follow his Master in the way of the cross where he did not wish to go (John 21:18-19).

10. An example of this word is spoken by Moses to the children of Israel to “listen obediently to the voice of the LORD your God.” (Deut. 15:5).

11. God’s “eyes are too pure to approve evil, and [He] canst not look on wickedness with favor” (Hab. 1:13). “Your iniquities have made a separation between you and your God, and your sins have hidden His face [intimacy] from you” (Isa. 59:2). The light of God cannot fellowship with darkness (1 John 1:6).

12. “Delight yourself in the LORD; and He will give you the desires of your heart” (Ps. 37:4). “In Thy presence is fullness of joy; in Thy right hand there are pleasures forever” (Ps. 16:11). “Thou dost give them to drink of the river of Thy delights” (Ps. 36:8). “God has prepared for those who love Him,” things never seen or heard before, things beyond imagination (1 Cor. 2:9).

13. Having “emptied Himself, taking the form of a bond-servant,” He became “obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross” (Phil. 2:7-8; Heb. 2:10; 12:2-3). Perhaps the worst suffering was the shame He endured from people believing He had been rejected by the Father (Matt. 27:42-44). He kept choosing at each trial to entrust “Himself to Him who judges righteously” instead of justifying Himself (1 Pet. 2:23). Jesus’ perfected human nature, fully joined to His divine nature, is within the believer as his new nature: complete in Christ and becoming complete in its expression through His disciple (Col. 2:10; 3:10).

14. God created first in heaven the prototype of every animal that ever lived on Earth, and it still exists there in a perfect state (James 1:17; Heb. 8:5; 9:23). In the case of dinosaurs and other animals that ate meat on Earth instead of the grass and plants that God provided for them (Gen. 1:30), they remain in heaven as the gentle herbivorous creatures that He made them. He will restore the carnivorous animals now on Earth to this condition during the Millennium (Isa. 11:6-9; Rom 8:19-21).

15. Many have spiritual bodies that look like the physical form of human beings (Dan. 10:16, 18), but others are unique creations of God, as are the four living creatures around the throne in heaven (Rev. 4:6-8) or the wheels (Ezek. 1:15-20).

16. The Holy Spirit opposes the flesh in believers; He presses the power out of it in order that He may bring forth the obedience of Christ (Gal. 5:17; Rom. 8:12-13; Col. 3:5). The outward discipline that the Spirit custom designs for each of us is meant to bring us to accept God’s “sentence of death within ourselves in order that we should not trust in ourselves, but in God who raises the dead” (2 Cor. 1:9; 4:10-11). This process is like pressing out the juice of grapes, leaving the “flesh” or pulp lifeless. Some Christians refuse to accept and carry this individual cross as Jesus continually bears His private cross (Matt. 16:24). Therefore they have to continue in chastisements from God for years (Heb. 12:5-6).

17. Children in human families learn to obey by being disciplined or trained by their parents, and so do the children of God. Divine discipline also is meant to bring us to receive the gift of repentance, so that we change our attitude and direction and return to peace and right relationship with our heavenly Father by sharing in His holiness (Heb. 12:10-11).

18. Sometimes angels must strongly oppose us, as the angel with the drawn sword blocked Balaam’s path (Num. 22:22-35). An angel also wrestled with Jacob at the ford of the Jabbok (Gen. 32:24-31).

19. When the sons of God are revealed in the last days as those who “will shine forth as the sun in the kingdom” (Matt. 13:43), “the whole creation,” including the angels and the redeemed in heaven, will share in “the freedom of the glory of the children of God.” (Rom. 8:18-19, 21-22; Col. 3:4). Christians have received “the promise” of the Spirit (Acts 2:39), who brings forth Christ as that “Something better for us so that apart from us they [the redeemed in heaven and the angels] should not be made perfect” (Heb. 11:39-40; 1 Pet. 1:10-11). All heaven also awaits the victory Jesus won over Satan and his host at Calvary to be enforced by the overcoming church, so that all of God’s enemies will be cast out of that part of heaven that they occupy (Eph. 3:10; Rev. 12:10-12).