Romans 7:1-6,
1 Or do you not know, brothers–for I am speaking to those who know the Law–that the Law is binding on a person only as long as he lives?
2 For a married woman is bound by law to her husband while he lives, but if her husband dies she is released from the law of marriage.
3 Accordingly, she will be called an adulteress if she lives with another man while her husband is alive. But if her husband dies, she is free from that law, and if she marries another man she is not an adulteress.
4 Likewise, my brothers, you also have died to the Law through the body of Christ, so that you may belong to another, to Him who has been raised from the dead, in order that we may bear fruit for God.
5 For while we were living in the flesh, our sinful passions, aroused by the Law, were at work in our members to bear fruit for death.
6 But now we are released from the Law, having died to that which held us captive, so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit and not in the old way of the written code.
Colossians 2:16-23,
16 Therefore let no one pass judgment on you in questions of food and drink, or with regard to a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath.
17 These are a shadow of the things to come, but the substance belongs to Christ.
18 Let no one disqualify you, insisting on asceticism and worship of angels, going on in detail about visions, puffed up without reason by his sensuous mind,
19 and not holding fast to the Head, from whom the whole body, nourished and knit together through its joints and ligaments, grows with a growth that is from God.
20 If with Christ you died to the elemental spirits of the world, why, as if you were still alive in the world, do you submit to regulations–
21 “Do not handle, Do not taste, Do not touch”
22 (referring to things that all perish as they are used)–according to human precepts and teachings?
23 These have indeed an appearance of wisdom in promoting self-made religion and asceticism and severity to the body, but they are of no value in stopping the indulgence of the flesh.
A true Christian, that is, a follower of Jesus Christ, lives as the above Scriptures describe. He does this by walking by the Spirit, not the flesh. For the flesh was crucified with Christ, and the true Christian no longer walks by the flesh, but by the Spirit.
Anything less is double-mindedness, and bordering on hypocrisy.
Jon David Banks, God’s most unworthy servant
jondavidbanks.com 