Sermon Tone Analysis

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:

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--

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:

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:

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:

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:

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

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!

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