18: The Spirit-Filled Home (Ch 1: Flesh vs. Spirit)

(00:00) Stephanie: Hello fellow travelers, and welcome back for Season 4, episode 18. Hello, Father.

(00:06) Marcus: Hello, Daughter.

(00:08) Stephanie: Happy New Year!

(00:09) Marcus:Yes, Happy New Year. It’s nice to be back at this again.

(00:13) Stephanie: It is, it is. I am so excited for all that we have in store for 2026. And yes, I have already, today, made the mistake of saying 2025, but for 2026, this is going to be a good year. I can feel it on multiple levels, but for the podcast in specific, I have fun plans I’m excited for. Before we get more into that, I did also want to invite people into our fun plans for the end of January. Do you want to tell them a little bit about the online conference?

(00:47) Marcus: We’ve got a special conference on a Friday night, and Saturday, the last weekend in January on heart-focused discipleship. What else would we do in the Deeper Walk? Yes, shocking. But we’ve got some great, great speakers joining us. Some people that we haven’t had with us before from Trueface, who’ve written The Path, and The Cure and some excellent books. We have Robby Angle. And he is the new CEO, president, executive director, or whatever his title is there. He’s the “Grand Poobah” of Trueface. He’s going to be joining us.

(01:24) Stephanie: If you’ve been with us for any amount of time on the podcast, you know we’re not good at titles, but we like people.

(01:28) Marcus: I know, he’s a great communicator, you’re going to love Robby. We’ve also got a Harvard educated, neuro-theologian, discipleship person, Jessie Cruickshank, joining us for the first time. So excited to have her and we’ll have a few Deeper Walk folks as well. We will have a conversation with Dan Allison and David Yarborough about the actual application to the local church. And, so yeah, it’s going to be a great event.

(02:03) Stephanie: And Bobby Harrington and Judy Dunagan.

(02:05) Marcus: Judy Dunagan, Bobby Harrington. We’ve got a great group. Bobby Harrington is the pastor of the Harpeth Christian church in Tennessee. He’s also the director of Renew.org and Discipleship.org. And Bobby’s become a good friend over the last couple of years and we are excited to have him joining us for the first time. So just a stellar lineup of speakers and once again, name your own price. So don’t let money keep you from coming.

(02:34) Stephanie: Indeed. Yes you are invited. Bring a friend and you can find out more and register at the link in the description below. So this year we are launching with kind of a book study on the podcast here. We are going to be going through what I think is a highly underrated book, and that is The Spirit-Filled Home by Dr. Marcus Warner. This book has everything from spiritual warfare to maturity, to how to walk in the Spirit, and Spirit versus flesh stuff. We’ll get into it more in a bit. I just wanted to start off by saying that no matter the stage of your journey, I’m unmarried and have no kids, and I very much like this book. So wherever you are in your journey, I think this book will be edifying to you, and I’m very excited. We also have what I’m calling a DIY book club kit that we’re putting together for it.The goal of the series will be so you can come back to it whenever you’re ready to do a book study through it, and people can listen to the podcast, and you can have your discussion questions – things like that. So links to more about that are also in the description. That’s all I will say about that for now. So, Spirit-Filled Home, Father, I’m so excited. Thank you for writing this book.

(04:03) Marcus: This was a fun book to write. I remember back in the day, it was kind of like, let’s take everything that I’ve learned about discipleship and apply it to marriage and family. And so what I almost unexpectedly realized was that as many people that were sharing it with other people just for the straight discipleship training, they were also sharing it for their marriages and their families. It really is kind of how we take everything that we teach related to heart- focused discipleship and applying it to the home.

(04:36) Stephanie: It’s true. Well, we all grew up in some sort of a family, in some sort of a home, and especially in this day and age my generation is always trying to figure ourselves out. So it just has multiple applications of like, I can see what is happening here or I can see, what’s happening in my friend right now. I can help them or things like that.

(04:59) Marcus: And it’s true, we are products of a home, are we not? Yes.

(05:02) Stephanie: Yes, so it’s very good. Well, let’s talk more about that. So chapter one is called “Flesh versus Spirit.” So that’s going to be sort of the theme of this episode. But before we dig right into “Flesh versus Spirit”, I just want to get the author’s origin story here. What inspired you to write this book?

(05:22) Marcus: When I was a pastor for seven years, I would probably say that 50% of the counseling appointments people scheduled with me were about their marriages. And so when that happens you just begin to develop certain things that you cover when you’re going to be in those situations. And I found myself routinely just telling people that choice number one, you have choice number one when it comes to this is, are you going to do this in the flesh or do this in the Spirit? I realized that I just got blank stares from people. Like I have no idea what you’re talking about. What in the world is the difference between flesh and Spirit? How does that work?

And so I realized, okay, well that’s part of the issue right now. You’re trying to do marriage in the flesh, you’re trying to do your parenting in the flesh, and don’t even have a category in mind for what it looks like to do this in the Spirit. So I’m like, choice number one is, let’s do this in the Spirit, not in the flesh. So let me explain how you do that and what that looks like. So that was the origin of this. Eventually it turned into the foundational material for weekend retreats that we did. I probably did twenty-five of them over a series of about five years. The feedback on them was really, really good. So that’s the origin story of where the book comes from.

(06:42) Stephanie: Huzzah! Well, let’s push even more into that. You started talking about people’s blank stares at what is Spirit-filled versus flesh-filled, or choosing to do something in the Spirit versus the flesh. So, a little theology, what do you mean by Spirit-filled?

(07:01) Marcus: I grew up with the idea that Spirit-filled essentially just meant obedient. Make good choices, do the biblical thing, be obedient. And there was no concept of the idea that there was a relational element to walking in the Spirit. And so we try to explain to folks that your first priority in walking in the Spirit is, let’s do this God’s way. That’s the first core element. Let’s do this God’s way, not your way. And instead of asking the question, how do I get what I want, which is the flesh question, the question is, how do I make sure God gets what he wants? So that at the end of the day whether I get what I want or not is secondary to, did I do what God wanted me to do? Did I handle this God’s way?

And so I would say the bottom line of walking in the Spirit means that I did this God’s way and I can be at peace knowing that I have done what God has asked me to do. Because at the end of day you can control that. You can’t control whether or not things improve in your relationship. You can’t control whether or not your family turns out the way that you want them to. What you can control is, did I do what God asked me to do? And so that’s what we’re diving into with Spirit-Filled Home.

(08:16) Stephanie: That’s so clear-cut, I love it. And we’re gonna keep unpacking this idea of doing things God’s way versus doing things our way. Because oftentimes, in order to understand what you should do, it’s helpful to understand what you shouldn’t do. Or in order to understand what something is like, you understand what something is not like. You see this all throughout the Old Testament and even just with the laws, like, “Thou shalt not do x,y,and z.”  And you know, don’t mix this. And you start pressing into looking at the why? Anyway, I’m going too deep.There’s a lot of truth that can be discerned in looking at how something tends to operate, even when it shouldn’t be operating that way. So on that note, the flesh wants what it wants and it doesn’t care how it gets it. We want to do things how God wants us to do it, but how does our flesh want us to do it?

(09:21) Marcus: So the reason we say the flesh just wants what it wants, is that sometimes we think that the flesh only wants bad things. And that’s not true. The flesh often wants good things, but it really wants those things. And so what we find is that when my flesh wants something and my spouse’s flesh wants something, those things might not be bad, but we are so determined that we are going to get what we want. And now we have a combat. When James says, what is it that causes wars among you? What is it that causes these battles between you and the conflict in the home? And I’m like, most of the conflict in the home is coming because my flesh really wants something and your flesh really wants something, and our two flesh “things” are working against each other. Because in the end I just want what I want. And so now I’m gonna come up with whatever strategy I think I can use to get what I want.

And then some people bring in God as a flesh strategy, right? They’re trying to manipulate God into getting what they want, or they’re trying to use God and use the Bible to try to get their family to behave the way they want them to behave, because that’s what I want. And so part of this is realizing that I’ve got to actually lay down my right to get what I want. To tell God, you know, whether I get what I want out of this or not. Part of walking in the Spirit is this crucified life that says, I surrender my right for this to turn out the way that I want it to turn out. I am willing to submit and just handle it the way that you want me to handle it, regardless of the results. And that’s a big, big, big step, right? To be willing to say I surrender the right to not get what I want.

(11:15) Stephanie: And I just think, we’ve talked about this before in other series, but the trust, know, obey, cycle. As you’re talking about, Oh, I need to sacrifice what I want for what God wants, there’s some people that think, “That sounds scary to me.” Because part of obedience is trust, right? You’re trusting that if I’m obedient that you want what’s good for me, or you know what’s best for me. Could you just touch on that just a little bit?

(11:46) Marcus: Well, it is true. I like what Jim Wilder told me one time. He said, the only thing that people truly fear is an emotion they can’t handle. And there’s some of us that are afraid that we won’t be able to handle it if our kids don’t turn out a certain way. We’re afraid we won’t be able to handle the emotions if my relationship with my husband or my wife doesn’t go a certain direction. And so because out of the fear that I’m not going to be able to handle these emotions, it’s going to be too much for me, I will be overwhelmed. I lock down on making sure that I control this and that I get it my way. And part of it is because I’m trying to protect myself from experiencing things I don’t think I can handle. Well, you step in and the opposite of that is I need to trust God, that if I do things his way it may not give me what I want.

The very trust itself tends to help me with those emotions, but it doesn’t make them all go away. It’s actually gonna put me in a better position to be relationally and emotionally at peace, knowing that I’ve done what God asked me to do, and I can rest in that. So I connect those things together. When you talk about know, trust, and obey, it’s that part of knowing God and trusting God. I trust that if I do things God’s way, I’m not trusting that I’m gonna get what I want. I’m gonna trust that if I do things God’s way, he’s gonna act and he will take responsibility for what comes next. And the scary part for us is, is it gonna be bigger than I think I can handle? And that’s part of what we have to trust God with is that he’ll walk with us through it.

(13:36) Stephanie: So cultivating that relationship with him is so key to the Spirit-filled stuff. So we’ll keep on with that. But I digressed us. So we were talking about flesh strategies. We’re starting to get in there. Would you give us your paradigm for how the flesh gets what it wants?

(13:54) Marcus: So I basically look at this as a one, two, three.The way the flesh operates, you can think of it as three steps. The first one is desires. We said the flesh wants what it wants, well that’s desires. When you read in the Bible about the flesh, one of the core words you’re gonna see over and over again in these passages is the idea that it desires things. So step one is that the flesh just wants something. Flesh step two is strategy. And I get this largely from the passage in Romans which says the mindset on the flesh is death. And the mind set on the Spirit is life. There’s a difference between what is a mindset on the flesh versus a mindset on the Spirit.

Well, a mindset on the flesh is strategizing how to get what it wants, right? So a mindset on the flesh is how do I make this happen? How do I get what I want? And it’s not that I don’t make plans and I don’t strategize for success in life. There’s a difference. Even at Deeper Walk  we’ll put strategies together to be successful in what we’re trying to accomplish, but at some level I’ve got to lay it before the Lord and say, at the end of the day, not what my will, but yours be done. A strategy on how to get what I want basically is that I am now locked into what I am focused on and how I am going to get what I want. As opposed to a mind that is strategizing and locked into how do I do what God wants me to do? How do I do what God is asking me to do in this situation? So to me, that’s the difference between a mindset on the flesh, and a mindset on the Spirit.

And then the third step is that I develop patterns, and these patterns become habits. And so I can develop flesh habits or I can develop Spirit habits. And flesh habits are just routinely going back to the strategies I relied on that get me what I want. Whereas a Spirit strategy or a Spirit habit, is I have developed a habit of routinely turning to the Lord in prayer. With every new problem that arises, with every new situation that comes up, my mind instinctively turns to God. It goes, God, how do you want me to handle this? Where are you in all of this? What do you want me to know? How do I connect to you?

And so what I find is that there are some people that turning to God is the last thing on their mind, when stuff like this comes up. And because their first step is always, I need to handle it, I’ve got to be in control. And that’s the flesh. The flesh always needs to be in control. And so those are the three steps. Desires, strategies, and they become habits or patterns. And what we want is to learn how to crucify those things. To learn how to walk in the Spirit instead, so that I’m turning to God instinctively in those times instead of trying to figure it out on my own.

(17:03) Stephanie: Can you give some examples of strategies? What do we mean by strategies?

(17:11) Marcus: The simplest way for me to think about this is that I think about a typical four year old kid. A four year old, they’re all flesh. They just know they want things and so they go through strategies to get them. And I think of a four year old who’s like, I’m going to be cute because when I’m cute, Daddy always gives me what I want. Or I’m going to throw a temper tantrum because when I make things unpleasant enough I get what I want. I’m going to pout or sulk, whatever it is. I’m going to divide and conquer. I’m going to tell Dad I want this, but I won’t tell Mom. There’s dozens and dozens of these strategies that kids use when they’re growing up. They kind of figure out which ones work and which ones work in which settings in which situations.

And so over time what happens is when you get married, you come to the marriage with a whole well-developed set of habits that have always gotten me what I want in life. And my partner comes into the marriage with a whole set of strategies and habits that have gotten them what they want in life. And we meet in the middle and our flesh strategies just start butting heads pretty quickly. And so a lot of the problems that we find in marriages and in our home is that our flesh strategies are in conflict. Not only does what we want come in conflict with each other, but the strategies that we use to get what we want come in conflict with one another. They become habits. So they’re kind of hard to break. And so we’ve got to learn how to crucify the flesh, change my habits, and begin building habits that are going to help me to live a Spirit-led life.

(19:00) Stephanie: And again, it’s not that the desire itself is always wrong or the strategy itself is always wrong. It’s perfectly okay to be cute or to express anger in a healthy way. When it becomes that I’m always an angry person and I get what I want because no one wants to deal with me, that’s a different thing. Or I turn on the cuteness because I’m gonna get what I want, but then if I don’t succeed the cuteness goes away, and something else comes out.

(19:30) Marcus:  And it works out. Some people flirt because that’s their version of being cute to get what they want. And so it just continues on throughout life as people learn how to put on the charm, and that charm gets them what they want. You know, but the Bible tells us that charm is deceitful and beauty is vain, but a woman who fears the Lord will be praised. And there are a lot of people who’ve relied a lot on their charm and their looks to get what they want in life. And so flesh isn’t always ugly. so it’s just worth pointing out that flesh doesn’t always mean that you’re doing something despicable. It just means that you are relying on yourself to get what you want and leaving God out of it.

(20:14) Stephanie: Yeah, self-reliance and disorderedness, because you can put a good thing in the wrong position. One of my favorite quotes in this chapter is, “a good test of personal maturity is to examine how you act when you don’t get your way.” And so we are going to continue talking about maturity throughout this series. I guess let’s move on to… not just recognizing your flesh strategies, but could you give us a tool to start cultivating walking in the Spirit?

(20:51) Marcus: We’ve talked about this tool a lot, right? It’s S.L.O.W.. We’ve had key chains with the word S.L.O.W on it. S.L.O.W is a pretty big deal around Deeper Walk. S.L.O.W  stands for a stop and seek. So sometimes it’s stop, sometimes it’s seek, depending on where you find it. Stop, Seek, Listen, Obey, and Watch. And this is a tool I began to teach people in these marriage counseling settings when I was pastoring. Like, well, what do I do? Well, you need to stop periodically and ask the Lord, what do you want me to do here? How do you want me to handle this? And you pay attention. And then if you obey what God is leading you to do, you get to watch what happens. And then you continue watching and praying. And as you watch and pray then you’re more apt to take time to seek God, to see what it is that he wants you to do.

Now I will say that a lot of times in the midst of temptation when you stop, and you listen and say, God, tell me what to do. And you’re like, I’m not hearing anything. I don’t get anything. So let me put it this way. Generally, you might have drawn a blank in your head, or you might have a thousand thoughts in your head. What you’re looking for is any thought that comes to mind that if you were to follow it, it would lead to the fruit of the Spirit. In other words, you might have a dozen different thoughts going on in your head.

And some of them are, they always do this, they’re always treating me this way. It’s never gonna work out. But you have one thought in there that says, why don’t you remind them how much you love them. You’re like, where did that thought come from? It gets so out of sync with all of the other ones that you’re like, okay, there’s a good chance that’s the Holy Spirit. Because if I actually did that and I actually followed that one, then that would probably produce the fruit of the Spirit. Or if it’s you need to go just take a break, calm down. There are different things. So one of the ways that you recognize Holy Spirit thoughts is they’re a little surprising. They’re usually out of sync with all of those thoughts that are supporting the flesh. And so you learn to begin to recognize and discern, okay, the Lord is giving me a direction here that is gonna take me in a different way. I will give you a story illustrated from my own life. When you were a little kid we lived in Texas.

I can remember very distinctly that we were praying for our neighbors and that God would give us an opportunity to share Christ with them. And one Sunday night, my wife, Brenda, your mom, came and said, Oh guess what? We’re going out to eat with our neighbors. Well, it was Sunday night and I had other plans for my Sunday night. I was tired. I didn’t want to go out with my neighbors and I just kind of had a little meltdown. Like you made this plan without me. Blah, blah, blah. And I remember getting in the car and driving off to get a few groceries. And as I’m driving I have this random thought in my head, which is, haven’t you been praying for this?

And I was like, yeah, probably true. The only problem right now is that you’re throwing a fit. I’m like, well, I can’t really argue with that either. And so by the time I came back I knew what God wanted. Which is, trust me, go and do this, which is actually what you’ve been praying for. I apologized to my wife and we went out and had a great time with them. We had a really delightful experience. And in the end, I wasn’t worn out by it. I was actually energized by the time together and I got to watch what happened. I got to watch God work things out. And a few weeks later, I did end up having a chance to share Christ with our neighbor. But that’s an example. It’s like I started off completely in the flesh. I was just upset with Brenda for doing this without me. I was upset with the fact that I was losing my rest time on a Sunday night before I had to start early the next day. And God was like, yeah, no, that’s all flesh. Let’s handle this in the Spirit. And so I got a chance to listen, obey, and watch what happens.

(25:34) Stephanie: That’s a really good story. I’m going to have you give some final thoughts for our episode here. And I just also want to remind everyone to check out the conference at the end of the month. And if you’re listening to this after the fact you can catch a replay,if you’re like, that sounded cool and I missed it. We are so pleased to offer this podcast free across the world. Thank you to each of you who are partners with us to keep us on the trail, whether that is in prayer or volunteering. I don’t know if anybody knows this, but we have transcripts. We have transcripts for the podcast. Those are volunteer curated transcripts. So thank you to those volunteers. Thank you to everybody who keeps us going, for sharing episodes with friends, and through your donations. You’re all epic and it is a privilege to be on the trail with you. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you. All right, Father, any closing thoughts for chapter one?

(26:37) Marcus: You know, I just think this is a great way to start a new year. I was just talking about this, and that you remember how foundational it is to life. This is the difference between walking in flesh and walking in the Spirit. That’s a pretty foundational training for the Christian life. And I think it’s always good to renew those things, to review them, and to kind of assess where we’re at. And so I would encourage you that whether you’re dealing with marriage issues or not it’s a good opportunity to go through the book. To get a refresher on, yeah, I need to rethink if I’m really handling this in the most mature way possible.Because I find that walking in the Spirit and maturity are directly connected.

(27:23) Stephanie: Alright, good word. See you back next week.