Walk by the Spirit
Walk by the Spirit
Galatians 5:13-26
by William Klock
Freedom is a funny thing. We often think of freedom as being able to do whatever we want, but people who find themselves free to do whatever they want—and who follow through on it—pretty universally end up being the most miserable people on the planet—because that kind of selfish freedom is nothing more than the sinful human heart gone wild. It’s rebellion unchained. Think of the tycoon or movie stars who look like they’ve got everything, but end up miserable, friendless, and addicted to drugs having found out their freedom has only made them and the people and world around them worse. The sinful human heart, the flesh as Paul puts it, can simply never be truly free on its own.
Paul understood this all too well himself. The Lord had delivered his people from slavery and set them free, but he also gave them his law in order to guard that freedom. Even then, they became enslaved all over again and were no better off than the pagans enslaved to idols and evil powers. And that’s because, as Paul has said, the law was given by God to magnify sin—to concentrate it, to pile it up all in one place so that God, in Jesus the Messiah, could deal with it once and for all. But that’s just it. Jesus has dealt with sin. So Paul’s been warning the Galatian believers: You can’t go back to the law. You’ve got to keep moving forward in the Messiah towards God’s new world. To do anything else—even to go back to the good, God-given law—to do anything else is to abandon the new life of the Spirit and to go back to the flesh. This is where Paul starts in the second half of Galatians 5. Look with me at Chapter 5, verse 13:
When you were called, Brothers [and Sisters], you were called to freedom.
You were called to freedom. Paul’s deliberate evoking the memory of Israel being called by the Lord out of Egypt—taken from “slavery” to the “free slavery” of the gospel as he puts it in Romans 6. Because, he goes on:
You mustn’t use that freedom as an opportunity for the flesh. Rather, you must become each other’s servants through love.
As Paul puts it in 1 Corinthians, “all things are lawful, but not all things are helpful”. At the heart of the human problem are idolatry and selfishness. We’ve become enslaved to them and Jesus has set us free. In fact, Jesus has come to set creation itself free from its slavery to our idolatry and selfishness. That’s where God’s plan has been headed from the beginning. What does God’s new world look like when everything has been set to rights? Well, it looks like the cross of Jesus. It looks like this Messiah-shaped love that gives of itself for the sake of others. The Galatian believers knew this once. It’s what drew them to the gospel in the first place, but now they’re starting to turn on each other, so Paul reminds them: “you’ve got to become each other’s servants through love.” They’re thinking about going back to torah, to the law, so Paul reminds them in verse 14:
For the whole law is summed up in one word, namely this: “Love your neighbour as yourself.”
Israel longed for the day when the covenant curses of Deuteronomy would be lifted and the promise would be fulfilled—that day when God’s people would finally be able to really and truly “do the law”. Think of that rabbinic saying that if all Israel would keep the law in full for just a single day the Messiah would come and set everything right. Think of Paul and the Pharisees trying and trying and trying so hard to keep the law and no matter how hard they tried, they failed. Now, in Jesus and the Spirit it’s finally happened. In Jesus and the Spirit the Lord has renewed his covenant with his people. The Spirit has transformed their hearts, causing love for God and for each other to well up like it never had before. Paradoxically, as they’ve been set free from the law, they’re suddenly finding that they’re keeping it. Or they were until this controversy over circumcision came up. In turning back to the law, all the old evils of the flesh were coming back. So verse 15 comes like a slap in the face:
But if you bite each other and devour each other, watch out! You may end up being destroyed by each other.
Paul knew that the divisions making their way into the Galatian churches as a result of these false teachers, weren’t just leading to anger and resentment. It was going to—if it hadn’t already—turn into actual violence. We don’t know exactly what was going on in these churches, but for Paul to talk about them biting and devouring each other means that this had escalated way beyond these folks just giving each other angry looks when they passed in the street. It makes sense. We who have never faced persecution and who live two thousand years distant from the pagan world of the Greeks and Romans and of Caesar’s “Jewish exemption”—we don’t really have any idea how high the stakes were for these people. The Jews and the circumcision folks could very well have been on the verge of bringing it to blows if they thought the gentile believers were going to bring the Roman officials down on them. The danger was real. When you consider the things that cause church fights and even splits today, it’s hard to blame the Galatians. I’ve seen church fights and people leave over really petty things like the colour of the carpet, chairs versus pews, hymns versus choruses, modern language versus traditional language, masks versus no masks. They were facing real, actual danger.
It happens. Some pressure is applied to the church and we forget the Spirit and let the flesh take control and pretty soon we’re biting and devouring each other. Brothers and Sisters, when we do that we destroy our unified, Messiah-shaped gospel witness to the watching world. Instead of displaying the sacrificing and reconciling love of Jesus, we simply hold up a mirror and show the world it’s fallen, sinful, selfish self—and why would anyone be attracted to that? Remember what we’re about. The church is called to live the gospel, to live the life of the Spirit so that the watching world can see God’s glory and his new creation in us.
But how do we do it? We fail often enough that we have to ask. How do we live this Messiah-shaped love, because it obviously takes more than just a head knowledge of the gospel. Paul is clear that we can’t go back to the law. Going back to living by rules might seem like the easy answer, but as he’s been saying, that’s just another form of slavery. It was good for the old evil age, but Jesus has inaugurated the age to come and everything has changed. And we know that freedom isn’t just doing whatever we want or whatever feels good, because that just makes us slaves to the very flesh that has corrupted creation. Here’s what Paul writes in verse 16:
Let me say this to you: Walk by the Spirit, and you won’t do what the flesh wants you to. For the flesh wants to go against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh. They are opposed to each other, so that you can’t do what you want. But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law.
You can almost hear Paul taking a deep breath as he gets ready to give us this fresh imperative. This is what he’s been building towards: Walk by the Spirit. Don’t just live by the Spirit. That kind of sounds like something you could do by osmosis. No, walk by the Spirit. Make a choice with every step you take, with every distraction, with every possible turn that presents itself to you, make the choice to walk by the Spirit and not by the flesh. At this point we might get into trouble if we misunderstand and think that by “flesh” Paul is talking about the material world or our physical bodies and that by “Spirit” he means our “souls” or some kind of “spiritual” existence apart from the flesh. The Greeks thought this way. The material world and the physical body, they thought, were evil—dead weight keeping us down—and so they aspired to a spiritual existence free from the material world and the physical body. Brothers and Sisters, that’s pagan thinking, not Christian (or, for that matter, Jewish) thinking. God created the world and our bodies and he called them good. They don’t need to be done away with. In our rebellion against God, we have corrupted ourselves and the world. What the world and our selves need is his redemption, his renewal. That’s what this biblical language of new creation and resurrection look forward to. What God has done for Jesus in raising him from the dead, he will one day do for us—and for the whole world. The gift of his Spirit is the down payment on that hope. One day God will raise us as he raised Jesus, to the kind of life he intended for us in the beginning, but in the meantime, he’s poured out his Spirit on us and his Spirit “fixes”—at least in part—what our rebellion once broke. And so, Paul would say, on the one hand is our flesh, which represents our rebellion against God, our sin, our self-centred and dehumanising way of life, and on the other stands the Spirit who, if we will only walk with him, will lead us into God’s new creation.
I think Paul had in mind Moses’ exhortation to Israel as they were ready to enter the promised land: I set before you death and life; choose life! But that’s impossible to do, Paul warns, if you turn back to the law. To turn back to the law is to turn aside from the gospel, to turn aside from the crucified and risen Messiah, and that means that to turn back to the law is to reject the very Spirit given to lead us into God’s new creation. You can’t walk backwards into the kingdom of God, Brothers and Sisters. But, he says, if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law. I think Paul’s being deliberately provocative, because he’s using the imagery of the Israelites being led through the wilderness by the pillar of cloud and fire—what many would say was a manifestation of God’s Spirit all the way back in the exodus. And here he says, if you are led by that same Spirit who led Israel back then—remember how Jesus has changed everything—if you are led by that Spirit today, he will not lead you back to the law.
At this point Paul contrasts what these two sorts of lives look like, the flesh on the one hand and the Spirit on the other. Look at verses 19-21:
Now the works of the flesh are obvious.
In other words, everyone knows these things—not just Jews, who have the law as a standard of good behaviour—but even the pagans know these things aren’t good. Everyone knows the world is not the way it should be and everyone knows that these are the sorts of “works” that have made it the way it is, the sorts of “works” that hurt others, that destroy our relationships—even that destroy ourselves. And so Paul launches into a litany of human evils:
They are such things as fornication, uncleanness, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, hostilities, strife, jealousy, bursts of rage, selfish ambition, factiousness, divisions, moods of envy, drunkenness, wild partying, and similar things.
Paul starts with a trio of words for sexual sins, maybe because sexual sins are so often the worst when it comes to the selfish use and harm of others for our own pleasure or maybe because they’re so often bound up with idolatry, which is what he mentions next: idolatry—the root of all of our sin—and sorcery—which is often the way pagans try to set the world to rights by the invocation of false gods and powers instead of turning to the living God. From there, Paul gives us a list of eight words that pretty well cover the whole gamut of antisocial behaviour and they do it so densely that it’s actually hard to differentiate between some of them: hostilities, strife, jealousy, bursts of rage, selfish ambition, factiousness, divisions, and moods of envy. Paul could easily have summed it all up in two or three, but he wanted to emphasise just how wrong the situation in Galatia was. They’d become focused on the flesh and it was playing out in a whole host of fleshly evils that were threatening to tear the churches apart as they demonised each other.
And then there are two final fleshy works. There’s drunkenness, to which today we could easily add all sorts of drug use—both legal and illegal—that deaden our senses, dull our intellect, and that make it impossible to follow the leading of the Spirit. And, finally, wild partying—orgies—that were common throughout the pagan world and were often the places where the other works of the flesh were celebrated and cultivated. And Paul says in verse 21:
I told you before and I tell you again: people who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God.
“People who do such things” is in the present tense, which is Paul’s way of stressing that he’s talking about people who make these things a way of life, not necessarily people who occasionally lapse into sin and repent. His point is that if these are the things that characterise your life, if you make a habit of selfishness, of idolatry, and of using and abusing others for your own pleasure or ambition, you will not inherit the kingdom of God. Why? Because these are the sorts of behaviours, the sorts of sins, that have made the world the mess it is. The gospel is about God, through Jesus, setting this broken world to rights and about his people having a part in that setting to rights. It’s simply impossible for those who are set on defacing God’s creation to have a place in the age to come. When the day comes for God to finally bring to completion what Jesus has begun, to finally bring that life of which the Spirit is the down-payment and foretaste, the works of the flesh and all those who practise them will be destroyed, will be purged from creation as part of its finally being set to rights. That doesn’t mean there’s no chance for repentance in the meantime. That, of course, is a major part of the good news about Jesus. Trust in him and your past is forgiven and his Spirit is poured into you so that you can bear his fruit and be part of God’s new creation, which Paul describes in verses 22-23:
But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. There is no law that opposes things like that!
The two lists speak for themselves. Imagine two communities, one characterized by the works of the flesh and the other by the fruit of the Spirit and you know right away which one you want to live in. Where the works of the flesh are all about “me”, the fruit of the Spirit are all about others. Most of these virtues require another person as an object in order for them to be lived out. And that’s the way of the kingdom. To love others is the way of a Messiah-shaped people. And he writes:
Against such things there is no law.
Whether it’s the people wanting to go back to torah or the local Roman officials or pagan neighbours angry that these new believers in Jesus have abandoned the pagan temples and rites, Paul’s saying: If you walk by the Spirit and bear this kind of fruit, no one’s going to be able to complain about you. In fact, you might just make them constructively curious about the gospel! But now, in verse 24, here’s the really crucial point:
And those who belong to the Messiah, Jesus, crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.
Through faith and baptism into the Messiah, the flesh—and all its disordered passions and desires—has been crucified. As surely as Jesus was dead and buried, so has your old self and my old self. And as surely as Jesus was raised to new life, God has poured his Spirit into us and set us walking straight into his new creation. The factionalism and divisions, the biting and devouring had no place in those Galatian churches. It was nailed to the cross with Jesus. The same goes for any works of the flesh that threaten the witness and unity of the church today. If we belong to the Messiah, we have crucified the flesh—past tense, done deal—and we’re now filled with God’s own Spirit. So…verse 25:
If we live by the Spirit, let’s line up with the Spirit. We shouldn’t be conceited, vying with one another, and jealous of each other.
Back in Chapter 3 Paul asked, “Are you who began with the Spirit going to end with the flesh?” No. If we live by the Spirit, we need to line up with the Spirit. When he says “live”, Paul doesn’t just mean to go on existing; he means that through the Spirit, we who were dead in sin are now alive to God. Again, the life of the Spirit is the anticipation of the day when God will raise us to new life as he did Jesus. Brothers and Sisters, God has given us his Spirit to lead us through the wilderness and into the promised land, into God’s new world set to rights. That’s why Paul says that to live by the Spirit is to line-up with the Spirit—like using your compass to draw a line on a map to your destination. Follow the line—follow the Spirit, and he will see you through to God’s future. Don’t stray into conceit or jealousy or factions, just make the conscious decision to follow the Spirit.
What does that mean for us? Well, I think in our highly individualistic culture we tend to read this as little more than pursuing personal holiness. But when I read this familiar passage in context, what really jumps out at me is that Paul’s main focus here is on the unity of the church and the witness to Jesus and the gospel that grow out of that loving unity. The fruit of the Spirit, again, are virtues that shape a whole community into the image of Jesus and that show the world what God’s new age is going to look like. Paul’s overarching theme in Galatians is the unity of the church as a witness to the power of the gospel and the age to come. Even if the specifics have changed, the problems remain. I think, actually, that the Jew-gentile problem of the Galatian churches pales in comparison to the failures of the modern church. There have been times in history when Christians have been forced to separate from one another over serious matters of doctrine and practice—following Paul when he says to cast out the false teachers. But in the last couple of hundred years we’ve begun to divide over increasingly trivial issues. And then, for the last fifty or sixty years, as our culture has become obsessed with commercialism, we’ve carried that same consumer mindset into the church. Pair that with our tendency to separate over trivialities and it’s been a disaster. Christians flit from place to place, hardly ever thinking of what they bring or what they might contribute, but always looking for what they can take or what new experience they can have and, in return, churches have begun treating not only our fellowship and worship, but even the gospel itself as a commodity to be marketed, not to family members, not to brothers and sisters, but to religious and spiritual consumers—churches competing with each other for members who are themselves self-absorbed—the very opposite of the sort of communities Paul envisioned being shaped by the Spirit.
A Spirit-filled church is made up of brothers and sisters who give and who forgive. It’s a church full of diversity as people who ordinarily would have nothing in common are drawn together by the good news about Jesus, people who have made Jesus—not their interests or ethnicities or social class—their identity. A Spirit-filled church is a community that models not the old age of every man for himself, not the old age of divisions and factions, but that models God’s new creation in the midst of and for the sake of the old. A Spirit-filled church, bearing fruit, will offend as in its light the works of the flesh—idolatry, sexual immorality, drunkenness, and strife—are exposed for what they are, but at the same time a Spirit-fill church, bearing fruit, is the community of light and love everyone in this dark world is looking for. They ought to see it in us. Our life together ought to make the world constructively curious. People ought to be asking what makes us different. And then, Brothers and Sisters, we have our chance to tell them about Jesus and about the love of God for sinners. But we don’t have this community—not the way we should. So what do we do instead? We market our programs or the production values of our worship experience or our preaching or our politics. One church advertises, “We ain’t your grandma’s church!” and on the other side we traditionalists advertise, “We are literally your grandma’s church”. And, Brothers and Sisters, all the world sees are factions and divisions. Thanks be to God that in his grace, that’s not entirely true. Even with our failures and disunity, the world still sees the gospel in us—but not the way it should.
Think again of those Christians in Galatia. Their trust in Jesus and the gospel brought them into this new community of the Spirit and they turned away from, they withdrew from the pagan rituals and the false gods that permeated their society. Their neighbours, their families, the officials—Caesar—didn’t like it. Suspicion turned to opposition turned to persecution and eventually martyrdom. And yet little communities like this conquered that pagan empire with the gospel even as that empire did its best to stomp them out. Why? Because they lined up with the Spirit and bore his fruit, because that loving, self-giving fruit—particularly as it came under fire—bore witness to the glory of the cross and the love of a God unlike any god the pagans had ever known. Because those little Spirit-filled communities were full of a gospel hope in the world set to rights by a God who loves so much that he will give his own life. That hope drew them close together, it concentrated the light they bore, and that lit up the darkness. I pray, Brothers and Sisters, that that same light would shine from us to lighten the darkness as we, by God’s grace, walk by his Spirit.
Let’s pray: Stir up, O Lord, the wills of your faithful people; that we may produce abundantly the fruit of good works, and receive your abundant reward, through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.