Who’s in Control?

Many years ago — well, I would have been about 9 years old, so maybe I should say many MANY years ago — back when digital calculators were so new people needed instruction books on how to use them, my parents gave me a Magnavox Odyssey video game console.

Now, you have to understand that, compared to today’s video games, the Odyssey was less than basic. In fact, it was the first video game console ever developed.

The fact they bought it for me is something of a surprise, since I know now it would have been an extravagant purchase for a family of limited means.

I don’t remember much about the games, except for the one that came programmed into the machine. It was an early variation of the game that later became known as “Pong.”

There were two controllers, and each of the two players controlled a paddle, moving it into place to hit a floating dot back across the screen, trying to cause the other one to miss. It was video table tennis in eight bits, or maybe only four.

And what I recall about this game was the fact that it had a bug: Each controller moved not only YOUR paddle, but also the opponent’s paddle.

You could easily ruin your opponent’s chance of returning your serve if you just kept twisting the knob that moved your own paddle.

And once I discovered that I could keep anybody from returning my serves, everybody stopped playing with me.

Hey, it’s harder to be an only child than you ever imagined.

Anyway, I want you to remember that terrible video game and the story about those controllers, because today, we’re going to talk about who’s in control of your life.

We’re continuing our study of the Book of Galatians today, picking up in verse 22 of chapter 5. Let’s read it together.

Galatians 5:22–26 NASB95

22 But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, 23 gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law. 24 Now those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. 25 If we live by the Spirit, let us also walk by the Spirit. 26 Let us not become boastful, challenging one another, envying one another.

If you’re controlled by the flesh, you’re going to do the kinds of things Paul mentions in verses 19-21. But if you’re controlled by the Spirit, you’ll bear the fruits of the Spirit, among which are the things listed in verses 22-23.

And don’t miss the fact that Paul contrasts “doing” — the thing that happens when we work — to fruit — that which is created within us not by our own work but by the work of the Holy Spirit.

One of my favorite commentators described an old, red oak tree in his yard that would hold onto most of its leaves during the winter.

When spring came and the sap began to flow inside the tree, new buds would develop. And the old leaves would finally drop from the tree, pushed off of it by the new growth.

“Similarly, the life of the Spirit normally expels the old dead habits of the flesh as the new life within grows stronger. Rather than trying to remove all of our former sinful practices ourselves, we should cultivate the spiritual life, and the Holy Spirit will deal with them. “ [Tom Constable, Tom Constable’s Expository Notes on the Bible (Galaxie Software, 2003), Ga 5:22.]

This is why you have so much trouble trying to deal with your sin on your own. This is why simply resolving again and again not to do whatever sin you struggle with is often unsuccessful. The flesh is weak, but it’s still stronger than your resolve.

The secret to success over your sins isn’t in trying harder. That’s DOING.

The secret to success over your sins is drawing closer to God, waking BY the Spirit, loving Jesus more and more, trusting Him ever more completely in ALL parts of your life.

As you learn to love Jesus more, as you walk in step with the Spirit, and as you draw closer to God, the Holy Spirit will deal with your sins. HE will bring GOOD fruit that will push out the dead old deeds of sin.

You know, I don’t spend a lot of time up here telling y0u to stop sinning. That’s not because I don’t WANT you to stop sinning, of course.

If you’ve turned to Jesus in faith that He took upon Himself your sins — and their just punishment — at the cross, then intentionally adding more sins to His shoulders makes a mockery of His grace.

But telling you — or even telling MYSELF — to simply stop sinning isn’t effective.

What IS effective is the work of the Holy Spirit within you. And His work becomes MORE effective the more you walk BY the Spirit, the more you love Jesus, the closer you draw to God.

That’s why I’ve said so often lately that my main job as a pastor is to help you learn to love Jesus more.

The better you understand the love He showed when He came to live among us as a man, the grace and mercy He showed at the cross, and the joy of the empty tomb, the deeper will become your love for Him. The more closely you’ll draw to His Father. And the more submitted you’ll become to His Holy Spirit.

And the more submitted you become to His Holy Spirit, the more your life will show the fruits of the Spirit, and the less it will show the deeds of the flesh.

That’s what sanctification — becoming more like Jesus — is all about.

But from the beginning, SIN has been about failing to trust God, failing to LOVE Him enough to trust Him completely.

Failing to trust that the things He’s forbidden are destructive to us, even when they appear to us to be neutral or even positive and “natural.”

Failing to trust that when we give up glorifying ourselves and gratifying ourselves — that when we remove SELF from the throne of our hearts and allow Jesus to occupy that space — we can finally begin to be made into the selves we were always intended to be.

I want you to notice how the characteristics of verses 22 and 23 are all other-directed.

The deeds of the flesh Paul mentions in verses 19-21 are all about self — self-gratification, self-glorification, self-advancement and the like.

But the fruits of the Spirit he mentions in verses 22 and 23 all have to do with how we relate to one another and to God.

And that’s because a life lived in the Spirit — a life lived BY the Spirit — is a life that continually denies self. It’s a life that continually sets aside all those things that build up ego and the tendency we all have to imagine ourselves at the top of the heap.

Remember this?

Matthew 16:24 NASB95

24 Then Jesus said to His disciples, “If anyone wishes to come after Me, he must deny himself, and take up his cross and follow Me.

Or this?

“Whoever wishes to become great among you shall be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you shall be your slave.”

That’s not just the way Jesus said WE should live. It’s also how HE lived as He walked by the Spirit.

And look how well these traits listed in verses 22-23 describe Jesus’ interactions with others.

There are many examples, but here are just a few:

To Mary and Martha and their dead brother, Lazarus, He showed love, weeping with the women over their loss before raising Lazarus from the dead.

With the family at the wedding in Cana, He shared His joy, turning water to wine so the festivities could continue.

To the terrified disciples on the storm-tossed boat, He brought peace, commanding the waters to be still.

To the woman caught in the sin of adultery, He showed kindness, whereas the religious leaders were ready to stone her just to try to entrap Jesus.

With the core group of His three closest disciples, He shared both His goodness and His glory on the mountain where they saw Him transformed and heard God declare: “This is My beloved Son, with whom I am well-pleased; listen to Him!”

To Peter, who’d denied Jesus three times during Jesus’ sham trial before the religious leaders, He showed faithfulness, restoring Peter and forgiving him for HIS UNfaithfulness.

To the woman at the well — married seven times and now living with a man who wasn’t her husband — He showed gentleness, right when everyone else, including her, would have expected Him to reply in righteous anger.

And throughout the three years or so He spent with His often-clueless disciples — who, like us, often failed to display His character in their own interactions — He showed patience and self-control, patiently correcting them and loving them without fail.

And it’s significant to note that the word “fruit” here is singular. As one commentator puts it, these are nine delicious flavors of one fruit.

The point is that ALL of these characteristics should be present and evident, to at least some degree, in the lives of we who follow Jesus in faith, we who are indwelt by the Holy Spirit.

In fact, as many of you have heard before, these verses were the catalyst for my own conversion. I’d made a profession of faith at the age of 7, but I’d chased after sin as hard as I could.

And then, at the age of 37, sitting on a riding lawn mower, I thought about the fact that I called myself a Christian and what that meant. And then the Holy Spirit reminded me of these verses, and I realized that none of this fruit was evident in my life.

And then I remembered Jesus’ saying that good trees bear good fruit — that we can, in fact, identify whether a tree is good or not by examining its fruit.

And that’s when I realized — right there on that riding lawn mower — that I was still lost. I realized that my profession of faith at age 7 simply had been an emotional reaction to an emotional sermon I’d heard.

I realized that it didn’t matter whether I’d prayed a prayer or walked the aisle or been closely connected to the church so many years before. It didn’t matter what I called myself.

What mattered was whether the fruits of my life bore evidence of the Spirit of God Himself working within me. And when I saw that I had no good fruit to show, I knew that I was still lost.

Good trees bear good fruit. Some years, they bear good fruit sparsely; other years in great abundance. But they never bear bad fruit.

So, Paul was, perhaps, thinking of Jesus’ parable of the fruits when he wrote these verses.

And he clearly also hadn’t forgotten about the main problem the Galatians faced when he wrote this letter, because in these verses, we see him once again contrast life under the Law and life under grace.

Remember that the Judaizers had come to Galatia preaching a false gospel. They claimed that the mostly-Gentile new believers in that region of western Turkey did well to place their faith in Jesus.

But they said faith in Jesus wasn’t sufficient for salvation. According to the Judaizers, in order to be truly saved, the Galatians ALSO had to obey the Mosaic Law, especially as it concerned circumcision, dietary constraints and the Jewish feast days.

If you have your Bible handy, look back at verses 19-21, which we studied last week. All the deeds of the flesh listed in verses 19-21 are forbidden under the Mosaic Law.

So, if you’re going to argue that circumcision and the dietary laws and the feast days of the Mosaic Law must be kept for salvation, then you can’t have those sins in your life, either.

Remember that breaking one part of the Law of Moses was tantamount to breaking them all. The Jews didn’t get to pick and choose which parts of the Law to follow, and neither do we.

And what they were intended to learn from the Law was the ghastly extent of their sinfulness. But the Judaizers, like many of the Pharisees of Jesus’ time, had missed the point.

Instead of understanding that the Law could only show them their evil and condemn them for it, they looked at it as a means of proving their own righteousness.

And they believed that following it well should earn them God’s favor.

They mistakenly saw keeping the Law as a way of demonstrating their own merit to God, of earning their justification before Him. In other words, they were trusting in themselves for their salvation, not in God.

Paul gives that long list of sinful deeds of the flesh in verses 19-21. And he concludes it with the blanket phrase “and things like these.”

And with that list of distressingly common sins, he shows that the Law is actually against those who were trying to use it to justify themselves. Anything WE do to try to earn God’s favor is in opposition to His grace.

But for we who accept salvation by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone, the Law is no longer against us.

We’re no longer boxed in by the Law. Indeed, to the extent that we walk by the Spirit, we FULFILL the Law, just as Jesus did.

As you walk by the Spirit, the fruit-of-many-flavors begins to grow in you, pushing out the dead, old deeds of the flesh, enabling you to do what you couldn’t when you were lost and without the Holy Spirit.

Enabling you to live in obedience to the Law of Christ — love for God and others — which is, after all, the essence of the Mosaic Law.

So, we either allow ourselves to be controlled by the flesh or by the Spirit. We either walk by the flesh, or we walk by the Spirit.

But if you’ve followed Jesus in faith, you’ve crucified the flesh, Paul says in verse 24. But what does that mean? Paul uses this same terminology back in chapter 2:

Galatians 2:20 NASB95

20 “I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself up for me.

The flesh, with all its sinful selfishness and self-regard, has been nailed to the cross. Replaced by the Spirit of God within us. Now, we’re able to live life in the Spirit, to live the Christ-life, to live Christ-LIKE lives.

Paul adds some detail to this picture in his letter to the Roman church. Look at what he says in Romans, chapter 6:

Romans 6:6 NASB95

6 knowing this, that our old self was crucified with Him, in order that our body of sin might be done away with, so that we would no longer be slaves to sin;

We’re no longer under compulsion from sin. We’re no longer hemmed in by our evil passions and desires. If you’ve turned to Jesus in faith, sin is no longer your master.

Now, we’re truly free to live out the Law of Love through the enabling power of the Holy Spirit within us.

We have, as verse 25 says, been made alive by the Spirit. We who were dead in our trespasses are now alive in Christ.

Our cold, unresponsive hearts of stone have been replaced by warm hearts of flesh that can love God and respond to His calling.

But, sadly, not everyone who’s been made alive by the Spirit actually WALKS by the Spirit.

As one commentator puts it: “Men may be very anxious to get pardoned and become God’s children, and yet think that after that they [can] be content to walk in the flesh. Look at pride, temper, worldliness, jealousy, coldness toward Christ, so little personal love. These are all the works of the flesh, and may be found in a man living in the Spirit and yet not walking in the Spirit.” [Andrew Murray, The Spiritual Life (Chicago: Tupper & Robertson, 1896), 112–113.]

And this is where you play a role in your own sanctification. By choosing to WALK in the Spirit.

By choosing to love God more deeply by trusting Him more completely, by surrendering every part of yourself to Him without reservation.

As you walk more closely in step with the Spirit, His fruit grows within you, pushing out the dead old deeds of the flesh and replacing them with the character of Christ Himself.

But the WORK that’s done in and upon us is the work of the Holy Spirit, not ourselves. Which is why Paul concludes this passage with the words of verse 26.

If my Christlikeness is the work of the Holy Spirit within me, then what do I have to boast about? And how can I justify comparing myself to anybody else?

My job is simply to love Him more, to trust Him more, to submit myself ever more completely to the Holy Spirit, to walk ever more faithfully BY the Spirit.

And if we all really did that as followers of Jesus, think how different the church would be.

There’d be no more immorality, impurity, or sensuality, because we’d see every other person not as a means to our own self-gratification, but as individuals loved by and made in the image of God and, therefore, to be selflessly loved by US.

There’d be no more idolatry and sorcery — no more love for or trust in all the other things that try to steal our devotion to God — because our trust in Him would leave no room for trust in anything else.

There’d be no more enmities or strife or jealousy, because the joy we have in Christ would have displaced them.

There’d be no more outbursts of anger, because we’d be patient with others as Jesus was with His disciples and as He continues to be with us.

There’d be no more disputes or dissensions, because kindness and goodness and gentleness would color all our interactions with one another.

There’d be no more factions, because our faithfulness to one another and to God would make such divisions shameful to us.

There’d be no more envying, because of the joy and peace we have in Christ.

There’d be no more drunkenness and carousing, because we’d have the self-control that comes from walking by the Spirit.

This is what the kingdom of God looks like. And our calling as followers of Jesus — as ambassadors for Christ — is to display God’s kingdom here on earth, right here amidst the brokenness and sinful self-regard of the kingdom of this world.

So, what does all this mean for us from a practical standpoint?

Well, it’s going to mean different things for different people.

For one old friend of ours, it meant closing his incredibly popular fried-chicken restaurant in Portsmouth on Sundays. because he felt God calling him to greater involvement in his church. He had to trust that God would provide the income he needed to pay his employees and his bills with just six days of operations, instead of seven.

For one former pastor here, it meant leaving the comfort of home and the consistency of a weekly paycheck to move to Haiti with his family and start a ministry there. He trusted that as he pursued the kingdom of heaven, God would provide for their needs.

For some, it might mean forgiving the unforgivable and leaving ultimate justice in the hands of Jesus, the only One who is truly just.

Maybe it means not letting culture or politics or finances or status or fear or anything but God be in control of any part of your life.

Maybe it means choosing to be truly unoffendable in order to give the fruit of the Spirit the most room to grow in you.

Maybe it means submitting your life plans, your relationships with friends and family, your sexuality, your habits, your desires, your priorities, and your hopes to God, trusting that what HE has for you is better than anything the world can offer you.

For most of us, it means a little of all those things.

And this won’t be easy, because even though we followers of Jesus have the Holy Spirit within us, we also still have the sinful nature of the flesh within us.

And, as Paul warned earlier in this chapter, the flesh and the Spirit are in opposition to one another. They’re battling for control over you.

So, the question I want to leave you with today is this: Who’s in control of your life? If you’ve turned to Jesus in faith, have you given control of your life over to Him through His Holy Spirit?

Is Jesus sitting on the throne of your heart, or have you reserved a little corner of that throne for yourself?

Let me warn you that your flesh will never be satisfied with whatever part of your life you allow to be controlled by it. It always wants more. It wants the whole throne.

And it’ll wreck your fellowship with Christ — it’ll wreck your testimony to the world — in the process.

Let me encourage you this week to trust the Spirit of God with everything you hold most dear.

Trust that He knows who you are and who you’re meant to be. Trust that He loves you and has a plan for good for you.

Trust that every time you deny yourself — every time you set aside your own desires, your own ego, your own priorities and submit to HIS will in your life — He grows GOOD fruit within you, pushing off the dead old deeds of the flesh in the process.

Trust Him. Trust God. Trust Jesus. This is the way we love God more. This is the way we walk by the Spirit.

This is the way to become more like Jesus. And this is the way we display the kingdom of God in this broken world.

What have you been holding back from God? Give it to Him this morning. Let HIM be in control.