Mortification Is About Indwelling Sin, Not the Physical Body

Some people associate mortification with the medieval Roman Catholic practice of “mortification of the flesh,” which employed ascetic techniques such as self-flagellation and wearing rough clothing. Others equate mortification with less severe forms of asceticism, prescribing vows of fasting, solitude, poverty, or celibacy as the path for fighting sin—as if food, companionship, possessions, or sex were evils in themselves.

But Scripture cautions against this approach to spirituality. Paul alerts us to the danger of false teachers who “forbid marriage and require abstinence from foods
that God created to be received with thanksgiving” (1 Timothy 4:3). In another passage, he warns against those who say, “‘Do not handle, Do not taste, Do not touch’” with the goal of promoting “self-made religion and asceticism and severity to the body” (Colossians 2:21–23). These people advocate spiritual advancement through a lifestyle of bodily renunciation. But Christianity is not against the body. As C. S. Lewis said,

Christianity is almost the only one of the great religions which thoroughly approves of the body—which believes that matter is good, that God himself once took on a human body, that some kind of body is going to be given to us even in Heaven and is going to be an essential part of our happiness, our beauty,and our energy.

No, our physical bodies are not evil. God made the body and sent his Son to redeem it. What, then, does Paul mean when he says, “If you live according to the flesh you will die, but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live” (Romans 8:13)? By “the flesh,” Paul doesn’t mean the physical
body, but indwelling sin, the sinful disposition of the fallen human nature. By “deeds of the body,” he doesn’t mean all the deeds of the body, but those that are sinful. This is the obvious interpretation when we compare Romans 8:13 with two other verses. Colossians 3:5 says, “Put to death therefore what is earthly in you: sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry.” This list of sins clarifies that when Paul says we should put to death “what is earthly in you,” he means sinful deeds and desires. This interpretation is even clearer in Galatians 5:24, which describes our relationship to sin in terms of crucifixion. We’ll take a closer look at why Paul compares mortification to crucifixion in chapter 7, but for now notice what he says is crucified: “And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.” So, “the flesh” is our fallen and sinful disposition towards evil, which has passions that war against the desires of the Spirit (Galatians 5:17), and those desires must be killed. The focus of mortification, then, is not our physical body, but our sinful desires and the sinful deeds they produce.

Adapted from Licensed to Kill: A Field Manual for Mortifying Sin by Brian G Hedges