You step off a ferry after two hours of rough water. Your feet land on concrete. The pier does not move. Your body says otherwise. For the next hour the ground rises and falls under you. Nothing moves. You feel it anyway.

Or a church bell rings for five minutes to mark a festival. The ringer lets go of the rope. The bell hangs still. You still hear it. The sound has stopped in the air. It has not stopped in your head.

Two facts sit side by side. To your experience, the motion is real. To reality, it is not.

That is what the flesh is like.

God does not say the flesh will feel dead. He says it died, at a place and a time.

"Knowing this, that our old man was crucified with Him, that the body of sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves of sin." Romans 6:6 (NKJV)

Then He gives a command.

"Likewise you also, reckon yourselves to be dead indeed to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus our Lord." Romans 6:11 (NKJV)

The shape of that command tells you something. If the flesh were dead in your experience, God would not need to tell you to count it dead. You would know. Nobody has to reckon a corpse to be a corpse. God gives the command because your experience and His reality do not match yet, and He asks you to side with His reality.

The word translated "reckon" is (logizesthe) λογίζεσθε — "count, consider, enter into the account." It is a bookkeeper's word. The bookkeeper does not create the balance. He records what is already true.

So where does the mismatch live? Not in your spirit. Your spirit is in Christ, and in Christ the death happened at the cross. The mismatch lives in your soul: your mind, your memory, your feelings. That is where the pier still rocks. That is where the bell still rings. So Paul tells us exactly where the work happens.

"And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God." Romans 12:2 (NKJV)

One more thing. Do not be surprised when the feeling gets louder right after you count the flesh dead. That is the last gasp of a man who has lost the fight and wants you to think he has not.

When the flesh calls, do not argue with the feeling. Feelings do not answer arguments. Name the feeling for what it is: a body that reports an old motion, a mind that replays a stopped sound. Then say what God says. The flesh is dead in Christ, at the cross.

Your feet are on the pier. Believe the pier, not the sway.