Reflections on Dying to Myself

As I grow older, I am becoming ever more aware of a dark root, a cancer that is festering in my heart. Everything bad that I do, think, and feel survives to serve this thing. It's the self, the flesh. It demands my worship and sacrifice to appease its burn. I hate how I feel like I'm in service to it so often. I know God wants to purify this, it's the one thing that He wants most to eradicate in me. A.W. Tozer described it this way:

Every man with moral intelligence must be aware of the curse that afflicts him inwardly; he must be conscious of the thing we call ego, by the Bible called flesh or self, but by whatever name called, a cruel master and a deadly foe.

I'm getting so tired of it. This root manifests itself in so many ways, but most poignantly in my slavery to social approval. The desire to please man instead of God. I feel like that I've come so far in my walk with the Lord, but I've never been far enough to say that my flesh has been crucified, which is not really far at all. Again, Tozer writes:

For sin's human captives God never intends anything less than full deliverance. The Christian message rightly understood means this: The God who by the word of the gospel proclaims men free, by the power of the gospel actually makes them free.

How I long for this freedom. How I long for my life to be unbound so that the power and love of Christ may flow out from me. The hardest part is that there is no technique I can perform, no book I can read, no Bible study I can do that will bring this about. Only the Holy Spirit's work in me can make that possible. And just like the eradication of any physical cancer, the pulling out of this cancer will be painful. But, I do desire to say along with Paul: "I have been crucified with Christ, and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me."