Introduction

Enter loaded up with luggage…struggle to front of room.

Have you ever tried getting around carrying too much stuff like this? Very difficult.  I think this is something like what God sees when He looks at our lives...sees us carrying around a lot of stuff that prevents us from truly being free to follow Him and live the way He wants us to. We continue to fall short of His standards because of all this stuff.

<setting luggage down>Message I have today deals with the essence of what it means to live life as a Christian and how to deal with all this stuff

Begin by looking at Galatians 5 with me.  Gal 5:1-6

  So what’s going on here?  Paul says all this stuff about circumcision-Christ will be of no value to you, burdened by a yoke of slavery, obligated to obey the whole Law.  Now today…pretty much every male who is born in the US is circumcised right after birth.  Are we all disqualified then from the forgiveness Jesus offers us??  Outside of Jesus, the only way anyone can set their life right with God is to be perfectly obedient to God.  Is that the only option available to us men? We’re required to do something nobody has even been able to do?

No…here’s what was really going on.  When God chose the Israelites to be His people, He established circumcision as the sign of all men (along with their families) who belonged to God.  Now, after Jesus came, was resurrected from the dead, and told His disciples to be his witnesses to the world, God’s promise of forgiveness/reconciliation with God spread to other nations besides the Jews-known as the Gentiles. Jewish Christians in Galatia, however, were telling these new Gentile Christians that they needed to follow the old Jewish traditions and laws…they had to be circumcised to be acceptable to God.

Paul hears of this and gets really angry!  This was a big debate in the early church, and Paul-who himself was raised in the Jewish traditions vehemently opposed these guys. Look at Gal 5:12. He’s so mad about this, he suggests  they shouldn’t stop at circumcisions, but go back and finish the job! He also says in v.3-4 that anyone who lets himself be circumcised (anyone who is saying they are required to follow this law) is obligated to keep the whole law .  You who are trying to be justified by the law have been alienated from Christ; you have fallen away from grace.

He says you are ignoring what Jesus has done if you require people to be obedient to the laws.

Why is He so angry about this? God’s laws are important…He is in charge and has said this is how we should live. His laws are the best thing for us.  But..what these people had forgotten was that we can’t make ourselves follow God’s laws.  We all fall short.

Paul was mad because they were requiring people to do something they couldn’t do, and were causing them to ignore what Jesus’ death and resurrection enabled them to do.  He said, “It’s for freedom that Christ has set us free”.  Jesus came not just to tell us it’s important to Love God and love one another, but also to give us the means of living in a way that’s pleasing to God.

Imagine you are walking through the world, and as you go, you pick things up to carry along with you. After a while, you’ve accumulated a lot of stuff, and you’ve gotten used to carrying them around. you barely notice them.  You just assume this is what everyone does.  You may occasionally be bothered by one of these things and decide to set it down….but after a while you end up picking it back up....and maybe add a thing or two.

This is the typical person.  We’ve all got baggage we are carrying around, and we are often oblivious to it. We may sometimes recognize that something is not right, and try to make a change, but most of the time end up back in the same old habit.

But one day, say someone somehow shows you that you don’t have to be carrying all that stuff…You suddenly become aware of the fact that you are weighed down by a bunch of stuff.  You may not realize what it all is yet, but it starts to get uncomfortable, and heavy.  You start to feel weak under the weight of it all.

This is what happens when you discover Jesus.  You begin to become aware that your life is not right with God…and you want to change.

Now accepting how Jesus is and what He’s done for us, does not automatically cause you to drop all this stuff and start living right with God.

What Paul tells us in Galatians is to live by the Spirit. V16 says, … v17 goes on to describe a battle between the Spirit and our sinful nature.  (read v17) This is the essence of living the Christian life and what Paul is aiming at in this whole chapter.  We can’t please God on our own, but when Jesus died so that we can be forgiven, He set us right with God which opened the way for us to have a relationship with Him and opened our lives to the Holy Spirit.

It’s the Holy Spirit that teaches and enables us to live lives that are pleasing to God.

What God wants from us, and what Jesus has allowed us to do, is to learn to depend upon Him and “Live by the Spirit” rather than trying to please him by following the rules on your own.

So what does “living by the Spirit” look like? 

Sometimes all it means is learning to listen and trust the Holy Spirit.  He may begin to make you aware of something you should not be doing. It becomes uncomfortable.  You may set it aside…but after awhile you pick it back up.  The HS continues to prompt you to set it down. AS you learn to listen to the Spirit…you set it down for longer and longer until you no longer want to pick it up.

Sometimes it’s a bit more difficult than that.  Especially true with addictions we may have picked up. And I don’t just mean what we typically think of as addictions…like drugs or alcohol.  We can be addicted to all kinds of things….food, power, attention, worry…anything that we find ourselves just unexplainable drawn to and can’t seem to get enough of…these are much harder to let go of than bad habits. We’ve got to learn to really depend upon the Spirit to change our desires, ask God to help us rid ourselves of them, and learn to depend upon Him rather than these things….

…this is the reason Teen Challenge is so successful.  Teen Challenge is a Christian recovery program that has a much higher success rate than any non-Christian group.  The only difference is that Teen Challenge introduces people to Jesus and helps them learn to “Live by the Spirit” in order to get free of their addictions.

Sometimes the reason we do what we do and continue to fall short of the way God wants us to live goes much deeper.  We may have had experiences in life that have caused us to respond in ways that are not right.  We’ve got stuff buried deep in our hearts that we’re not even aware of, because we’ve told ourselves we’re not going to let that happen again. Or we’ve picked up ways of thinking and acting that just don’t line up with what God wants from us.  We can’t overcome these things by simply following rules of behavior.  We need the Holy Spirit to heal us from these things.  Sometimes the Spirit just needs to reveal these things to us...and prompt us to take action…To reconcile a broken relationship….to forgive someone who has hurt us….or maybe to dare trusting again or stepping out in faith again, because god doesn’t want you in fear, and worry and unforgivness….Sometimes it’s only when we deal with these things that we can actually be free to live for God.

Sometimes it takes a miracle for God to cause us to put one of our bags down. We just can’t see it until He takes it away.  <personal story>

There may be more ways in which the Holy Spirit works in our lives, but living by the Spirit means learning to hear God, seek God and trust God more and more each day.

Practically, we do this by studying His Word on your own or in groups to get to know him, by seeking Him through daily prayer, asking Him to show Himself to you, and guide you.

As you do these things you learn to give your life over to God’s Spirit.  This is the only way anyone can truly live a live pleasing to God.

Engage in this battle between your sinful nature and the Holy Spirit in your life, and you will find yourself ridding your life of sinful acts such as those Paul lists in Gal 5: 19-20.

Instead, you will reap the rewards of a life transformed by God: you will experience the fruit of the Holy Spirit: v22-23 and enjoy growing closer and closer to God.