Learning to Walk

Introduction

There is a big difference between being told what you’re doing wrong, and being told how to do something right, isn’t there? This point was driven home earlier this year when Hannah was attending a volleyball clinic. One of her previous coaches had been constantly criticizing her serves, saying that they needed to be “flatter”—they needed to pass more directly over the net, instead of arcing up high where the receiving team could get under them. Every time she served the ball, he would say, “flatten your serve, Hannah!”

Later on, she was attending a clinic at the Y, and there was a coach there from a different program. Hannah told her that she had been having trouble with getting a consistent, “flat” serve. Without hesitating, the coach said, “toss lower, swing faster”. She tried it, and instantly saw better results. She had been hearing for weeks what she had been doing wrong, but what she needed was to be told how to do it right!

Here in Galatians, Paul has been spending a lot of time warning his readers about the dangerous and destructive ways they are going wrong in their faith. He has warned them that they are “deserting” God (1:6), and that all the Law would do would be to enslave them to their sin again (3:9). Earlier in this chapter he warned them that if they “accepted circumcision” (that is, if they went back to keeping the Law of Moses as their standard of righteousness) that they would lose Jesus—His death, burial and resurrection would “be of no advantage” to them (v. 2). Attempting to achieve holiness by rule-keeping would result in them being “severed from Christ” and “fallen away from grace” (v. 4).

So he has spent a lot of time to this point warning the Galatians that they cannot obtain a righteous standing before God by their works—their only hope was to trust in Jesus Christ alone for their righteousness. Everything that they had been trying to do to be acceptable to God was in fact pushing them further away from Him.

And so at this point you might expect the Galatian Christians to respond, “Okay, Paul—you’ve made it very clear to us that we are going about this all wrong. But what help can you offer us to do it right?” After all, what the Galatian Christians were striving for was a good thing, right? They wanted to be acceptable to God in their behavior—they wanted holiness. The false teachers that were troubling them were able to get into their heads by exploiting their good desire for holiness before God: “If you really want to be acceptable to God, if you really want to be holy before Him, then follow these rules!”

We have that same tendency today, don’t we? If you have called on Jesus Christ for salvation and belong to Him by faith, then you have that same desire for holiness—you want your life to exhibit the glory of God, you want people to see Jesus living through you, to be drawn to Him because of the life that you live. We want our lives to exhibit the characteristics we read in verses 22-23:

Galatians 5:22–23 ESV

But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law.

Do you feel that desire today? Do you want this fruit to characterize your life? That’s a good desire.

But there are other desires in your heart as well, aren’t there? And those desires war against those good desires for holiness--

Galatians 5:19–21 ESV

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.

You want your life to exhibit love, joy, peace and patience and so on, but there is (as Paul says in Romans 7) “another law waging war against the law of your mind...” (Rom. 7:23). Paul describes that war there in Romans and here in Galatians 5 as the war between the Spirit and the flesh:

Galatians 5:17 ESV

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.

Every one of us was born with a natural inclination to sin—this is what the Bible means when it refers to our “fallen” condition. In the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve broke God’s command and fell into rebellion against Him—and so every one of us is born into that same rebellion. This is what Paul means by “the flesh”.

“The flesh” refers to our natural tendency towards sin and away from God’s will.

It’s important to note that Paul uses “the flesh” to refer to our natural tendency towards sin--not to our physical bodies. Much of the fuel for legalism comes from a misuse of the term “the flesh” to mean that your actual physical body is inherently sinful, and so holiness consists of rejecting, denying or limiting physical desires. So we see through early and medieval church history the practices of asceticism, of people going out and living alone and unprotected in the desert, denying themselves food or drink, or taking vows of celibacy to permanently deny themselves marriage and the sexual pleasure that goes with it.

And that same tendency is just as strong today, to equate the physical with the sinful. That is why so much legalistic holiness centers on what you do—what you eat, what you drink, how short your haircut is or how long your dress hem is, how close you’re allowed to sit next to your boyfriend or girlfriend (“Save room for Jesus!”). But what have we already seen about trying to become righteous by keeping rules like that? All those rules do is make us want to break them!

We cannot rely on our own natural abilities to prevent our natural tendencies to sin—Paul has already warned us that doing so will simply enslave us to those sins even more. What Paul is going to show us here in these verses is that

Believers can conquer the power of the flesh only by walking in the power of the Spirit.

He states it clearly there in verse 16:

Galatians 5:16 ESV

But I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh.

But what does it mean to “walk in the power of the Spirit?” How do we learn to walk in that holiness that God calls us to as Christians, that holiness that we long for? Here in this passage Paul shows us three elements of “walking in the power of the Spirit” as Christians: Verses 16-18 teach us what it means to walk in the Spirit, verses 19-23 teach us to watch our own spirit, and verses 24-26 show us how we win by the Spirit.

First, we

I. Walk By The Spirit (5:16-18)

Look again at verses 16-18:

Galatians 5:16–18 ESV

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.

The Galatians were asking, “how do we win the war against sin?” And Paul’s answer is quick and to the point: “Walk by the Spirit”. The word “walk” in the original language literally means to “walk around”, and was used to describe students who would follow their teacher around (like Aristotle following Plato through the streets of Athens the way Plato used to follow Socrates). To “walk by the Spirit” means to “follow our teacher around”—we’re not just wandering aimlessly, we are paying attention to God’s leading (v. 18).

We are “walking by the Spirit” when we carefully listen to what God’s Spirit tells us in His Word, and by spending time in prayer and also with other believers. And it’s not just for an hour or two on Sunday mornings, is it? We are to walk this way—listening to God’s Word, following His lead, obeying what He says—everywhere we go.

And Paul goes on to describe the benefits of walking in the Spirit this way. First, he says that as we walk by the Spirit

We will not give in to the flesh (5:16)

When we walk by the Spirit, Paul says, those natural inclinations to sin will go unsatisfied. The old preachers used to say that every Christian has two dogs tied out in his yard— a dog named “Spirit” on one side and a dog named “Flesh” on the other. And those two dogs hate each other, and will fight constantly. And every day you go out in the yard with one can of dog food. The dog that gets the food will get stronger, and the dog that goes hungry will get weaker. When you walk by the Spirit, Christian, you are starving that dog Flesh, and he won’t have the strength to attack you or resist the Spirit. But if you feed the Flesh, he’ll get stronger and put the run on Spirit more easily the next time they fight.

And the point to remember is that every day you will feed one of them. There is no neutral ground. As one writer puts it:

Either we are submitting to the Spirit’s leadership, or we are gratifying our flesh. If we are submitting to the Spirit, we cannot gratify the flesh. You cannot pray and look at pornography at the same time. The way you deal with your sin is not simply saying “no” to the flesh, but also saying “yes” to the Spirit’s work. Platt, D., Merida, T., & Akin, D. L. (2014). Exalting Jesus in Galatians [Kindle]. Nashville, TN USA: B&H Publishing Group.

When we walk by the Spirit, Paul says, we will not give in to our natural inclinations to sin.

The second benefit to walking by the Spirit is that

We will survive the war (5:17)

As we’ve already seen, the battle between the Spirit and the flesh is an intense one. There is no neutral ground; there is no sphere of life where you can escape this battle. That old natural inclination to sin will always be present—it can be weakened, it can be starved, but it will never be conquered completely until the day you awaken in the presence of God in eternity (your “hope of righteousness” that you eagerly await—Gal. 5:5). In this life you will never be sinless but, as you are led by the Spirit in your daily life, you will sin less! Paul promises here that when you walk by the Spirit, you really can have substantial, significant and observable victory over the natural sinful desires of your flesh!

And third, Paul says that when we walk by the Spirit

We are free from the Law (5:18)

In our Scripture reading earlier from Romans 7, Paul describes this struggle between Spirit and flesh in terms of two competing laws:

Romans 7:22–25 ESV

For I delight in the law of God, in my inner being, but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, I myself serve the law of God with my mind, but with my flesh I serve the law of sin.

Two laws—the righteous and good Law of God’s righteousness, the righteousness that we want, that we long to see in our lives. And the “law of sin”—that natural tendency towards sin and away from God’s will as a result of our fallen nature inherited from Adam. That law of sin stamped in our fleshly nature “keeps us from doing what we want to do” (Gal. 5:17). But the wonderful promise here in verse 18 is that

Galatians 5:18 ESV

But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law.

Hundreds of years before Paul’s time the prophet Jeremiah spoke of a “new covenant” that YHWH would make with His people, that He would someday “put [His] law within them, and write it on their hearts” (Jer. 31:33). And now He has done it!

Romans 8:3–4 ESV

For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.

Here is the wonderful promise that God makes to us—that when you are walking by God’s Spirit, you are not under that law of sin! Where your heart used to be stamped with the Law that said “Obey Sin!”, now you have a heart stamped with the Law that says “Obey God!” And instead of that old inclination towards sin and away from God, now, you have an inclination away from sin and towards God!

And Paul goes on in verses 19-23 to show us how to know whether we are walking by the flesh or the Spirit—he shows us how to

II. Watch Our Own Spirit (5:19-23)

At any given moment in your life, Christian, you can know whether you are walking by the flesh, or walking by the Spirit. Whether you are obeying that old natural inclination towards sin and away from God, or that new inclination away from sin and towards God. Paul says it is “evident” which way you are walking—it is not a big mystery whether you are following God’s Spirit in you or the old inclinations of the flesh to sin. In verses 19-21 he tells us to

Watch for the works of the flesh (vv. 19-21)

Galatians 5:19–21 ESV

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.

Now it’s interesting here that Paul starts off this list of “the works of the flesh” (that is, the sins) that come from ignoring the presence of the Holy Spirit in you. He kind of “bookends” the list with kind of “big ticket” sins that everyone would immediately condemn—the kinds of sins that the false teachers would be especially strident about. Sexual immorality (the word there, porneia, is where we get our word “pornography” from), impurity (which the Jewish teachers were especially concerned with), sensuality (especially sexual excess and indulgence), as well as “idolatry” and “sorcery” which were specifically named as crimes bearing the death penalty in Exodus and Deuteronomy. At the other end of the list, he names “drunkenness, orgies, and things like these”. These are kind of “the big ‘E’ on the eye chart”, aren’t they? Things that anyone can see—they are outward sins that you cannot hide.

But then Paul adds right into that mix the sins that are easy to hide—sins that can be quietly nursed, sins that you can feed upon in secret while putting up a good display of godliness and “good Christian character”—you can’t hide the fact that you’re getting drunk every weekend and sleeping around, but you can hide the fact that you hate your fellow church member! It’s obvious to everyone if you are given over to sensuality—greediness, gluttony and selfishness—but that grudge you are nursing against your sister-in-law, for instance, can go undetected by others for a long time!

And Paul makes it clear that if you “do such things” (the idea here in the original language is “if you make a regular practice of such things”), you “will not inherit the Kingdom of God”. If you make it a habit to go along with that natural inclination to bitterness towards your brother or sister in Christ, you are not walking by the Spirit. And if that bitterness, that jealousy, those divisions and enmities and strife are a way of life for you, then you have no confidence by which to say you belong in the Kingdom of God—no confidence to say that you possess salvation in Christ!

We are called to watch our own spirit for the works of the flesh, and we are also to

Watch for the fruit of the Spirit (5:22-23)

Galatians 5:22–23 ESV

But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law.

Notice here that Paul uses the word “work” to describe what the flesh does in us—the works of immorality, idolatry, jealousy, fits of anger, and so on. If you follow those old natural inclinations to sin, your life will manufacture all of those sins. But what is the result of yielding to the Law of God in your heart through the Holy Spirit? The works of the Spirit?

No—here is the beauty of the work that God’s Spirit does in His people. He does not make you work—He works through you! Your old Slave Master Sin used to put you to work producing hatred, strife, jealousy, immorality, and the result of those works was that you suffered because of them. They took life out of you, they diminished you; they weakened you.

But now, as you submit to the work of the Holy Spirit dwelling in you, with the Law of God’s righteousness and holiness stamped on your heart, He bears fruit in you! Jesus Himself described our life in Him the same way in John’s Gospel:

John 15:4–5 ESV

Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in me. 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.

That love that you show instead of envy, that joy instead of hatred, that peace instead of dissension and division, that patience instead of outbursts of anger, that goodness and faithfulness instead of impurity and sensuality, that self-control instead of drunkenness—those things are not the result of “keeping all the rules”—they are the result of living in Jesus Christ!

Just as Paul said earlier in Galatians 2:20

Galatians 2:20 ESV

I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.

You see, the only way you can bear the fruit of the Spirit while living in the flesh is by living by faith in Jesus Christ, because only Jesus bore perfect fruit while living in the flesh. No one else ever did what Jesus did—no one else ever perfectly conquered sin and perfectly obeyed God at every single moment of their life until

Galatians 4:4–5 ESV

But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons.

And this is the power in which we walk by the Spirit—this is the confidence that we have as we watch our own spirit—that in this constant battle against the flesh we live in this life, we know that we will

III. Win by the Spirit of Jesus (5:24-26)

Look at verse 24:

Galatians 5:24 ESV

And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.

Here is the point that Paul is making in this passage:

You will never be able to bear the fruit of the Spirit while you live in the flesh unless you live in Jesus Christ

If you are here this morning trying to produce this kind of goodness on your own, you are doomed to failure—not only that, you are damned to failure. Because there is no work of your sinful flesh that can produce anything other than condemnation before God. This is not about you trying harder—this is about you acknowledging that there is nothing you can do to make up for your sin before God.

But when you cry out to Jesus Christ in faith, confessing your sin to Him and believing in your heart that His death on the Cross satisfied the wrath of God against you, you belong to Him. And belonging to Jesus means that your old self—that old life in the flesh, with its passions, desires, strivings, bitterness, envy, immorality, and all the rest of it—is dead and buried. Left behind in the grave, with no more power over you. You do not bear the fruit of the Spirit because you try, you bear that fruit because you live in the One who died! You did not work to earn that love, joy, peace, patience or kindness that grows in your life,

Jesus purchased that victory for you (5:24)

He has already lived a perfect life in the flesh. Never once did He succumb to a sinful desire, never once did He listen to the whisperings of the sin nature—even though He was tempted in every way that we are, He never sinned (Hebrews 4:15). In fact, when you look at the list of “fruits of the Spirit” here, are you not looking at a description of Jesus Christ Himself? Live in Him, Christian, and you will become like Him!

But perhaps you are hearing all of this today, and you look at your life and do not see the Christlikeness that you want. You see far more works of envy and jealousy and bitterness than fruits of love, joy, peace and patience. And the fruits that you long for in your life look hopelessly small and weak compared to the sin that you battle every day. And you wonder if you will ever see victory over that sin—you wonder if the fruit of Christlikeness you long for will ever appear the way your yearn for in your heart.

There is a promise from God for you here in verse 25. Jesus has purchased that victory for you, and

The Spirit applies that victory to you (5:25)

Galatians 5:25 ESV

If we live by the Spirit, let us also keep in step with the Spirit.

The word translated “keep in step” here in this verse is different than the word “walk” back in verse 16. The word here is borrowed from a military term, which translates as “following single file behind a leader”. Here is God’s gracious, patient and loving promise when you feel like you do more stumbling than marching in your Christian life—when you feel like all you do is fall short of His holiness, and are beaten time and time again: Just keep putting one foot in front of the other.

Did you come here this morning on the heels of another failure in your walk? Did that old besetting sin get the best of you again last week? Did you give way to anger, bitterness, lust, envy or dissension instead of bearing fruit of love, joy, peace, patience or self-control?

Here is the Good News for you—Jesus has already purchased your victory in holiness! He is not standing on the sidelines yelling at you for what you did wrong that you messed up your walk! He is calling to you to tell you how to do it right! He is saying, “It’s all right! Just get back up and keep in step with My Spirit! Keep putting one foot in front of the other, and you will walk right into the holiness I have already bought for you!” He won’t give up on the work He began in you, Christian—even though you feel like you will never arrive, He is at work in you! And with each step you take in obedience to His Word, with each moment that you rely on His Spirit living in you to give you strength to follow, your life will look more and more like Jesus every day!

John Newton, the author of Amazing Grace, used to say about himself, “I am not be the man I ought to be, I am not the man I wish to be, I am not the man I hope to be—but by the grace of God I am not the man I used to be!” Christian, you may feel like you are not the person you ought to be, but praise God that by His grace you are not the person you used to be! Sin is not your master anymore—those works of the flesh are no longer your works! So when you stumble (and you will!), get back up, and fall in step with the Spirit. One foot in front of the other, listening each day for His voice, leaning on Him for the strength to carry out the destructive works of the flesh less and less, and to bear more and more the image of your Savior Jesus Christ!

BENEDICTION

1 Thessalonians 5:23–24 ESV

Now may the God of peace himself sanctify you completely, and may your whole spirit and soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. He who calls you is faithful; he will surely do it.

QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION

Paul says in this passage that we must “walk by the Spirit” as Christians. What are some ways that you can “walk by the Spirit” this week? In your Bible reading, your time spent with other Christians, your times of prayer? How will you make room for those things this week?

Read Galatians 5:19-20 again. Which of those “works of the flesh” are you most prone to have appear in your life? Take some time this week and ask God to give you His Spirit to fight against those sins.

Take some time this week and memorize Galatians 5:24: “And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires”. Do you “belong to Jesus” by faith? How does belonging to Him help you in your battle for holiness in your life?