I'm excited to go to God's Word with you this morning. God's Word is so rich and full of everything we need to be thoroughly equipped for every good work.
And so it's our privilege to spend the next few moments in that Word, interacting with it and being changed by it. Today we come to Galatians 5 verses 16 through 24, well-known passage of Scripture on the fruits of the Spirit. Galatians 5 verses 16 through 24, hear now the Word of the Lord. But I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh. For the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh.
For these are opposed to each other, to keep you from doing the things you want to do. But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law. Now the works of the flesh are evident. Sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, orgies, and things like these. I warn you, as I warned you before, that those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God. But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.
Against such things there is no law, and those who belong to Christ have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. Let's pray. Father, we desperately need to understand these words, these sentences, these paragraphs.
Teach us what they mean. Teach us how to heed what you are saying here. Lord, we want to successfully battle our flesh, which so often disrupts and distracts us from living lives that are holy and honoring to our gracious Lord. So would you use the time we spend in your Word now to enlighten our minds, to soften our wills, to open our hearts to receive rich food from you.
I pray in Jesus' name. Amen. Have you ever seen one of those visual puzzles that has several close-up pictures of common objects, but the pictures are cropped so closely that it's difficult to identify what the object is? And so you turn over to the answer page and you see the full uncropped picture and suddenly it becomes obvious what the object is.
You can't identify the part until you see the whole, but then as soon as you see the whole, you wonder how you could have ever not recognized what the object is in the cropped picture. Scripture is sort of that way. It's made up of many parts. Old Testament parts, New Testament parts, historical parts, poetical parts, doctrinal parts, Hebrew parts, Greek parts. In fact, the Bible is such a vast book with so much diversity and variety in it that our experience of it, our interaction with Scripture most typically is at the level of the individual parts or a group of parts rather than at the level of the comprehensive whole. We study the cropped, zoomed-in pictures more than we study the answer page that shows us the whole picture. We study and interact with nine verses at a time in Galatians 5 rather than all 31,102 verses from Genesis to Revelation.
And it really comes down to a practical necessity, right? I mean, I can't read the whole Bible every morning in my devotions, and so I have to divide it into manageable sections, into parts. But what we need to always keep in mind is that just because our experience with Scripture is more typically characterized by interaction with the parts, we must always seek to understand those parts in relation to the whole. The parts comprise the whole, and the whole informs the parts, so there's really a mutual dependence that exists between the sentences and paragraphs of Scripture and the whole of Scripture. Now, I must have heard a dozen, maybe two dozen sermons on Galatians 5 and the fruit of the Spirit over the course of my life, and I suspect most Christians here this morning could say the same thing. This text is a familiar passage because of its relevance and because of how foundational the ideas and instruction in this paragraph are to the Christian life on a very practical level. So, we could once again go through this portion of God's Word and define the list of vices that Paul includes and define the list of virtues and then maybe think about some points of application and call it a day. And that would not be time wasted. Time spent interacting with the Word of God is never time wasted.
But this morning I'd like to do something just a little bit different. I'd like for us to walk very briefly through our text, more or less verse by verse, and make sure we've grasped the zoomed in cropped picture, the isolated part, if you will, but then I'd like for us to zoom out and spend some time considering the text of Scripture, this text of Scripture in light of the whole of Scripture. Where does Galatians 5 fit into the grand scheme of things? How do other passages of Scripture inform our understanding of this passage of Scripture? How does the rest of the Bible shape the way we view and apply this part of the Bible? As we discover the big picture, we will better understand the meaning and application of this part that we call Galatians 5.
So, let's dig in. We begin with a brief explanation of these verses in their immediate context. Paul has just turned the corner in his letter as he begins focusing on the practical implications of the doctrine of justification. He's just made the point that though we are free in Christ from the law's condemnation, we ought never to use that freedom as a license to sin. Instead, we ought to give ourselves to the very thing that is the highest fulfillment of the law, to love others as we love ourselves.
That's what we considered last week. But no Christian lives up to that high and holy standard. We don't love others like we should. We don't even love God as we should. We love sin. We love our lust.
We love our anger, our selfishness. How then are we ever to find the ability to live up to the standard of righteousness that Paul says ought to characterize those who are in Christ? Well, the answer is right there in verse 16. But I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh. Now, the word flesh in this paragraph refers to our sinful nature, the natural disposition towards evil that is inherent in every human being since the fall. And while Christ's atoning work has dealt a decisive blow of defeat to the flesh, a defeat that will culminate in its total eradication on the last day, the passions and desires of the flesh are still present, though dying, even within the regenerate heart. But this does not mean that Christians should walk around all doomy and gloomy with a pessimistic shadow of defeat looming over us.
No, the Christian life will be victorious. Verse 16 assures us of that. Even though the desires of the flesh reside in us, we have a way, a means of keeping our flesh in its place, and it's called walking by the Spirit.
Now, the Spirit here refers to the third person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit with a capital S. Paul reiterates verse 16 in verse 18. He says, but if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law. For the unregenerate, the law only makes a person more aware of their sin, more aware of their guilt, more desirous of doing what the law won't let them do. But if God's Spirit is your leader and you're following his leadership, walking by that Spirit, you will not be enslaved to the law, which is just another way of saying you will be free to not sin. The Christian life then is intended to be an ever-increasing road toward greater and greater righteousness and obedience and holiness. In fact, Paul gets very specific in verses 22 through 24 with what that holiness will look like. As we walk by the Spirit, the same Spirit with a capital S will produce in us love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. And then Paul adds, against such things, there is no law. There are no laws prohibiting these virtues of the Spirit because these virtues are all good things, sanctioned things, holy things. So life in the flesh is a life full of rules prohibiting things that you want to be doing as a sinner, but life in the Spirit is a life of freedom to do everything you want to do as a saint, precisely because God has changed your will, your nature. You're free to obey because you want to obey and have been enabled by the Spirit to obey. The Christian life then is a life of ever-increasing victory over the flesh and the world and the devil.
But there's another side to this equation that's not quite so positive. The Christian life is also a battle because while victory is the ultimate outcome of our faith, it is not always the immediate outcome of our faith. We live in a time when the kingdom of God has been inaugurated but not yet consummated, like a new president beginning a new term in the White House. He is the president.
He carries all of the authority of that office, but it will take time for his policies and executive orders to have their full effect. Theologians call it the already not yet aspect of our time in redemptive history. Already but not yet. Christ has already come to make atonement for sin and ensure victory, but he's not consummated that victory for all to see. And so in the meantime, our walking in the Spirit is a battle. It's a fight with ups and downs, victories and defeats, righteous days and less than righteous days. Verse 17 highlights this battle. Paul says, for the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh, for these are opposed to each other to keep you from doing the things you want to do. Our flesh is dying but still resistant to, opposed to the Spirit, and so we fight against those inward desires that contradict God's holy standard. And just as he does with regard to the fruit of the Spirit, Paul gets very specific about the vices of the flesh. Verse 19, now the works of the flesh are evident.
Sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness and orgies, and things like these, which means this isn't a comprehensive list. It's just an example of some of the things the flesh leads us to do. Paul goes on, I warn you as I warned you before that those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God. And this means quite bluntly that if you habitually engage in works of the flesh, that is in sinful behavior and attitudes, you will not be saved on judgment day.
So if we were to try and summarize verses 16 through 24 in one sentence, it would be something like this. God will ultimately make his children holy, but that process of being made holy will involve a fight to the death with our sinful nature, a fight which can only succeed by the power of the Holy Spirit in the life of the Christian. If you have been a Christian for any length of time, you know the frustration of being in this already not yet tension, of wanting to be free from sin but still struggling with sin. You want to be holy, but you realize your thoughts and motives and actions are often far from being holy. You know the right thing to do, but you cannot find within yourself the ability to do it.
You know what is vice and what is virtue, but you continually find yourself on the wrong list, in the wrong column. You're living in verses 19 and 20 instead of verses 22 and 23, and you would love nothing more than to be rid of sin forever and enjoy the perfect peace of a clean conscience, of deliverance from sin's attraction and appeal, of freedom to do as you please along with the desire to always do what pleases God, but instead you're just left with this desperate prayer, oh, wretched man that I am. Who will deliver me from this body of death? And here in Galatians 5 tells us in one single command what the solution is to our lack of holiness. He simply says, walk by the Spirit. Walk by the Spirit.
And so we Christians scramble into motion. Ah, I know the secret now of not sinning anymore. I need to start walking by the Spirit.
How do I do that? I take the steps to walking in the Spirit so that I can implement this in my daily routine. I've tried not sinning, and that doesn't seem to work, so now I'll try walking by the Spirit. And just like that, we turn the command to walk by the Spirit into a new law, into a new means of justification through works. But the whole point of Paul's letter to the Galatians is that sinners cannot save themselves. Surely Paul isn't just replacing one law with another. So how are we to understand this crucial command to walk by the Spirit without falling right back into the old ways of legalism?
What does it even mean to walk by the Spirit? Well, this is where the big picture of redemptive history comes in. We're gonna leave Galatians 5 and look at the rest of Scripture in order to make sense of Galatians 5.
And this may be disorienting to some of us, so I wanna just reiterate what it is that we're doing and why we're doing it. So many Christians read their Bibles like they read Facebook or Instagram, as if each verse is a little independent post that stands alone without context, without a frame of reference. But the Bible is not a collection of memes to be read in isolation from each other. No, it's a cohesive story that encompasses literally all things.
It's what scholars and philosophers call a metanarrative, a story that sits above everything and explains literally everything. And if we don't understand the parts in relation to the whole, we end up distorting the story and the doctrines and the commands of the Christian life. Conversely, the better grasp we have on the big picture, the better we will be able to make sense of the individual parts like Galatians 5.
So how does the larger story of Scripture come to bear on our text today? Well, for starters, we need to recognize that Paul has been addressing Gentile Christians who have been wrongly influenced by Jewish theologians, theologians who have wrongly interpreted and misapplied the Old Testament. It is significant that the book of Galatians contains more references to the Old Testament per verse than any other Pauline letter with the exception of Romans.
This is an Old Testament-laden letter, which means that we cannot understand Galatians unless we understand it in the light of the Old Testament themes to which Paul constantly alludes. Now, that's of course true of any New Testament book, but especially one that's so full of Old Testament references and allusions. You'll recall that throughout Galatians, Paul's been grounding his arguments and illustrations in Old Testament themes. He's defined a true Christian as a son of Abraham, a child of promise. He's explained redemption in terms of deliverance from slavery, Hagar's slavery, Ishmael's slavery, Israel's slavery, the exodus from Egypt. He has alluded to Mount Sinai in the wilderness, to Moses and the Ten Commandments.
He's quoted Old Testament prophets like Habakkuk who said, the just shall live by faith. The Old Testament then is Paul's frame of reference for explaining the gospel and the Christian life. The Galatian readers would have seen themselves as standing in the same line as Old Testament Israel and rightly so.
They were certainly misconstruing God's redemptive purposes, but they were rightly seeing themselves as the recipients of Old Testament promises. So if the Old Testament has been Paul's frame of reference throughout his letter up to this point, we can safely assume that Galatians 5, 16-24 also has the Old Testament as its frame of reference. And while there are no explicit quotations from the Old Testament in today's sermon text, there certainly are indirect implied illusions to be found.
So I want to highlight some of the themes of redemption that originate in the Old Testament and find their fulfillment in the New Testament. And then I want to let us use those connections to inform our understanding of Galatians 5. Our jumping off point is going to be the command there in Galatians 5, 16, walk by the Spirit. And then the corollary statement that goes with it, verse 18, be led by the Spirit. The command to walk by the Spirit is active. It's something we do. The statement led by the Spirit is passive.
It's something that's done to us. Both are the key to putting our sin nature to death. Verse 16 emphasizes human responsibility. Verse 18 emphasizes God's sovereign work. So we can learn from the Old Testament about the nature of this relationship that the Christian has to the Holy Spirit.
Let's do that. Many Bible scholars have noticed the parallel between Paul's description of the Christian life in Galatians and Israel's exodus in the Old Testament. With regard to the leading of the Holy Spirit, Isaiah 63 describes how God put His Holy Spirit in the midst of Israel, Isaiah says, and led them across the Red Sea.
The Holy Spirit in the midst of Israel and then leads them across the Red Sea. This implies that the cloudy pillar by day, the fiery pillar by night, which was leading Israel, was a visible manifestation of the Holy Spirit. Israel did not need a map to navigate their way from Egypt through the wilderness to the Promised Land.
They didn't have to rely on their own sense of direction or their wilderness survival techniques. No, they simply had to follow the visible presence of God. All Israel had to do was keep in step with the Spirit of God. They needed to simply walk by the Spirit. Now, was Israel ever tempted to go back to their slavery in Egypt?
Sadly, yes. They often complained and murmured to Moses about how good they had it in Egypt, so they begged to return to slavery, just like the Galatians who had experienced an exodus of their own and wanted to return to their enslavement to the law. But to antidote to that, the means given to them by which to prevent this deadly return to slavery was to keep being led by the Spirit. Follow the cloudy pillar. Follow the presence of God. He will lead you away from enslavement and towards salvation 100% of the time.
Walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh. Not only did God provide His Spirit to guide Israel through the wilderness, He also gave them the sustenance they needed to keep following the Spirit. He fed them with manna.
He quenched their thirst with water. The New Testament connects both of these physical provisions to their deeper spiritual meanings. In John 6, Jesus says, Your fathers ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. I am the bread of life that comes down from heaven so that one may eat of it and not die. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever. And the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh. Just as God gave to Israel manna in the wilderness, so He gives us bread to eat. But our bread is the life-giving bread of Christ's atoning work.
Walking by the Spirit will lead us to the nurturing sufficiency of Christ. 1 Corinthians 10, 1 through 4 says, For I do not want you to be unaware, brothers, that our fathers were all under the cloud, all passed through the sea, all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea, and all ate the same spiritual food and ate the same spiritual drink, for they drank from the spiritual rock that followed them, and the rock was Christ. Just as God gave Israel water in the wilderness, so He gives us water to drink. But our water is the living water of Christ. As we walk by the Spirit through the wilderness of life in a fallen world, the Spirit leads us to the bread of life and to streams of living water.
He nourishes our souls with Christ. Did Israel have to turn around and fight Pharaoh and his army when they were cornered at the Red Sea? No, they simply had to follow the Spirit of God. Did Israel have to part the Red Sea in their own strength and make a way of escape? No, they simply had to follow the Spirit of God across dry ground.
Did Israel have to produce their own food and drink in the wilderness? No, they simply had to eat and drink what the Holy Spirit gave them. At every step, their survival and success depended on the Holy Spirit leading them. All they had to do was follow. Church Paul's command to walk by the Spirit, to be led by the Spirit, is not some new law that we must perform to save ourselves. It is the simple response of faith in a God who promises to save his children. Will we lapse back into old sin patterns and pine for Egypt from time to time?
Yes. Did Israel lapse back into the mentality of slavery and yearn for the perks of Egypt? But did those lapses cause God's Spirit to abandon them? Did God for one moment leave them to fend for themselves?
No, he was with them. Even in their faithlessness, he fed them. Even in exile, he never forgot his people. He never forsook them or gave up on them. God doesn't leave his children. He's with them, leading them, feeding them, chastening them, comforting them forever.
And he does the same for us. We lapse back into our old ways of longing for sin or thinking we can defeat sin with our own willpower, but God says, walk by my Spirit. Follow me, and I'll lead you to the promised land, to the place of freedom from slavery. So as we follow God's Spirit and use God's means of spiritual nourishment, Paul says that the fruit of the Spirit will be produced in our lives.
The works of the flesh will begin to vanish from our lives. So let's think for a moment about the fruit of the Spirit in light of this larger context of redemptive history, the fruit of the Spirit from Eden to Revelation. Isaiah 5 describes the old covenant community of Israel as a vineyard, a vineyard that enjoyed the utmost care and nurture, but in the end, this well-cared-for vineyard-produced wild grape. So the farmer removed the wall that protected his vineyard. He stopped nourishing it. He let it go wild. He let it get trampled by anyone and everyone.
He destroyed it. And this, of course, is a metaphor for Israel. Though God gave Israel everything she needed for spiritual fruitfulness, she squandered those benefits and multiplied her guilt. So God chastened his people. He let them fall to their enemies.
He let them be carried into exile. But then when all seems lost, we find a hopeful promise in Isaiah 11. Isaiah 11 says, There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse, and a branch from its roots shall bear fruit, and the Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him.
So here's this abandoned, trampled vineyard. It seems hopelessly unfruitful, but right in the middle of it, there's a stump, the remnant of a once-healthy plant, and from that stump, called Jesse, a branch begins to grow. In fact, that branch grows tall and strong and begins to actually produce fruits.
Now, we know who that branch is, don't we? That branch, a descendant of King David's father, Jesse, the one who is full of the Spirit of God, is none other than Jesus Christ. Jesus calls himself the vine in John 15. I am the vine, you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing. Jesus Christ has turned this forsaken vineyard into a prosperous, healthy vine once again.
But this is to be no obscure, insignificant vine. Isaiah goes on to describe what this stump of Jesse will become. Isaiah 27 says, in that day the Lord, with his hard and great strong wind, will punish Leviathan the fleeing serpent, Leviathan the twisting serpent, and he will slay the dragon that is in the sea.
So revelation bells should be going off. This is end of days kind of talk, the stuff of the closing chapters of Revelation. Isaiah goes on to describe the scope of what this stump of Jesse will become. In that day, a pleasant vineyard, sing of it, I the Lord am its keeper, every moment I water it. In days to come, Jacob shall take root, Israel shall blossom and put forth shoots and fill the whole world with its fruit. This stump becomes a fruitful vine that covers the whole world, all creation. Jesus Christ working through the agency of the Holy Spirit will have produced a fruit-bearing vine that encompasses every tongue and tribe and nation.
So this story of the vine is so much bigger than the Old Testament nation of Israel. This story of the vine is the story of the human race. In Genesis 1, we see Jesus Christ speaking creation into existence by the power of the Holy Spirit and the result of that first creative act is a man, Adam, standing in the garden of fruit trees. God commissions that man to tend the garden, but he fails. Adam, through his disobedience, ruins not only his soul, but all of creation with it. And years and centuries and millennia pass, and then a new Adam appears, another man in a garden. Only this garden was not pristine, like the first Adam's garden, it was ruined by generations of sinners doing what sinners do, producing wild grapes, multiplying works of the flesh to the great displeasure of God. The second Adam first atones for the sins of sinners, and he sends the Holy Spirit of God to recreate man into what he was always intended to be. Christ, through the Holy Spirit, produces fruit. Spiritual virtues, holiness in the lives of all who are connected to the vine. And the final picture is one in which Jesus Christ, the second Adam, stands in a pristine garden surrounded finally with healthy, holy trees producing godly, joyful fruit.
Isaiah 51 finishes the analogy. It says, for the Lord comforts Zion. He comforts all her waste places and makes her wilderness like Eden, her desert like the garden of the Lord.
Joy and gladness will be found in her, thanksgiving and the voice of song. Revelation 22, one through five, describes this from the perspective of the new heavens and the new earth. It says, then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city.
Also on either side of the river, the tree of life with its 12 kinds of fruit yielding its fruit each month. The leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations. No longer will there be anything accursed, but the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and his servants will worship him. They will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads, and night will be no more. They will need no lamp or sun, for the Lord will be their light, and they will reign forever and ever. Brothers and sisters, that's where all of this ends up.
It's a place of victory and fruitfulness and joy unspeakable. But until then, we fight. Now, here's what I want us all to know and believe this morning. The struggle we have with our dying sin nature today will not derail the redemptive purposes of God that have been in effect since before the foundation of the world. The presence of a fight with our flesh is no threat to the final victory that God promises. In fact, that fight is the normal experience of every person who is saved by the blood of Jesus Christ and indwelt by the Holy Spirit. One pastor put it this way. He said, If the conflict between the flesh and the Spirit is strong in your life, you should not become discouraged and think that we aren't Christians because we're engaged in the struggle against sin.
The opposition between the flesh and the Spirit is the normal Christian life which is not marked by perfection yet, but by war. One of Martin Luther's friends said to Luther, I have promised God a thousand times that I would become a better man, but I never kept my promise. From now on, I'm not going to make any more vows.
Experience has taught me that I cannot keep them. Unless God is merciful to me for Christ's sake and grants unto me a blessed departure, I shall not be able to stand before Him. And Luther's response to his friend's testimony was this.
His was a God-pleasing despair. No true believer trusts in his own righteousness. Beloved, the New Testament does not promise perfection during the already but not yet last days, but it does promise progress. The instruction Paul gives us in Galatians 5 is not to try harder to produce the Holy Spirit, what only the Holy Spirit of God can produce, any more than His command to Israel was to try and fight off Pharaoh's encroaching army. It's not to go squeeze out love and joy and peace and patience and all the rest.
The command is not to produce the fruit of the Spirit. The command is to walk by the Spirit, to be led by that Spirit. That means we are to look not to ourselves but to God's Spirit within us. We're not to rely on our meager moral successes, but in Christ's perfect righteousness.
We're not to trust in our own ability to do better tomorrow. We're to trust in God's promise today to forgive sin and wash us of all unrighteousness in Christ. One pastor said, confront your faithlessness with God's faithfulness in Christ. That's what it means to walk by the Spirit. And as we do this, we will gratify the destructive sinful works of the flesh less and less until the day when we will sin no more. Weeping may tarry for the night, but joy comes in the morning. So fight the good fight of faith in Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit in you. Let's pray. Father, help us to believe these things. Help us to experience these things. Keep us until the day of your return. And thank you for the Holy Spirit. I pray in Jesus' name. Amen.
