Well let me invite you now to turn in your Bibles to the New Testament scriptures as we continue to consider the teaching of Paul in the letter to the Galatians. And we are in chapter 5. You will remember chapter 5, 1 through 12, Paul is concerned about the loss of Christian freedom at the hands of legalistic false teachers who want to impose the strictures of the Mosaic law upon the Galatians. The loss of Christian freedom. Then in 13 through 17, Paul was concerned about the abuse of Christian freedom at the hands of those in Galatia who have swung or who were inclined to swing to the opposite extreme, having embraced their liberation from the condemnation of the law, they now conclude this liberation, this freedom, also must involve freedom even from the necessity to obey the requirements of God’s moral law. The loss of freedom and then the abuse of freedom.
And now here in the passage we are considering together this morning in verses 18 through 26, Paul turns to teach us about the proper use of Christian freedom. So the loss of freedom, the abuse of freedom, and now today we are thinking about the proper use of our freedom for the glory of God and for our own spiritual good as we learn to live a consecrated and holy life. We are going to unpack the teaching in these verses, 18 through 25, under three headings. First in verse 18, we’ll notice what Paul tells us about the power of holiness. Where it comes from – a life consecrated to the glory of God. The power of holiness. Secondly, in 19 through 23, the pattern of holiness. What it ought to look like. And then finally, 24 and 25, the practice of holiness. How do we do it? Okay, so the power, the pattern, and the practice of holiness. Before we look at those three headings, let’s pause and pray then we’ll read God’s Word together. Let us all pray.
O Lord, we wait upon You now for the ministry of Your Word and Spirit in our hearts and lives. We are like those disciples who respond to Jesus after so many deserted Him at His teaching. We confess, “To whom else shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.” So we come to You and we pray, O God, may those words indeed speak life and health and peace into all our hearts, for Jesus’ sake. Amen.
Galatians chapter 5 at the eighteenth verse. This is the Word of God:
“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 Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.
If we live by the Spirit, let us also keep in step with the Spirit.”
Amen, and we praise God for His holy, inerrant Word.
Recently here at First Presbyterian Church we had Thomas Dreyer with us. He is one of our supported missionaries. He reported to the congregation. Thomas is planting a multi-ethnic congregation in Randburg, which is a suburb of Johannesburg, South Africa. Among the many challenges that he faces in that difficult context, Thomas was telling me about the impact of the rolling power cuts that the government has been forced to impose upon the country. “The heat we can handle,” Thomas said, “but for small businesses particularly – restaurants and grocery stores – the effect of these power cuts, these power outages, has been disastrous.” And as I was thinking about our passage and Paul’s description of the Christian life, it struck me that for many of us, that’s an apt description of how we live – as if there were rolling power cuts. We go along well for a season, and then something changes and we are robbed of the energy needed to resist temptation and to embrace the call to Christian holiness. Paul is about to describe the Christian life and call us to produce the fruit of holiness but he starts – notice this in verse 18 – with a reminder about the fuel, the power source that will generate this holiness within the lives of God’s people.
The Power of Holiness
And so here, first of all, is the power for holiness. Look at verse 18. “But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law.” In the verses just prior to this, you may remember Paul has been explaining that the flesh, which is Paul’s shorthand for the remaining corruption of the heart that continues in a Christian even after their conversion, the flesh on the one hand and the Holy Spirit dwelling within us on the other hand, now wage a continual and irreconcilable war. The one against the other in our hearts. We want to do what our Spirit-informed consciences tell us will bring honor to God, but our flesh longs constantly to turn away and to indulge its wicked passions and desires. And so we are locked, Paul says, in this daily battle in our lives.
Now you will remember the legalists, the false teachers in Galatia, their solution is to require the Galatians to submit to the Mosaic Law. They want them to see the law as the secret key to a life that will please God. But Paul here in Galatians 5:18 is saying that if you trust in Christ alone for your salvation, you are no longer under the law. The law ceases to be the thing you rely upon to make you holy. In fact, Paul is teaching us the law never could make you holy. The law on its own is utterly powerless against the flesh. The law says, “Thou shalt not,” to which our flesh glibly replies, “Oh yes, I shall.” And so the secret to overcoming the flesh can’t be reliance on the law. And so what is it? How do I overcome the flesh? Well Paul says, “I do it by reliance on the Spirit of Jesus Christ who now dwells within my heart. Only He can empower that holiness for which the law makes its demands.” So that now, now when the law says to a Christian, inhabited by the Spirit of holiness, “Thou shalt not,” we hear not just a prohibition – “Thou shalt not” – we hear also a promise – “Thou shalt not” because God has supplied us with more than just the command; He has supplied us with the power more and more to align our hearts and wills and affections and words and works with all that God requires. And now the law says indeed, “Thou shalt not,” the Spirit of holiness helping you. And that’s what Paul means here when he says, “If you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law.” He’s saying, “Don’t look to the works of the law as the solution to the overwhelming power of the flesh.” That is a sure-fire path to rolling power cuts in your Christian life. You must be led, directed, governed by the Lord Jesus Christ in His Spirit through His holy Word. It’s the only way.
I sometimes hear Christians tell me they feel able to relate to the person of God the Father. After all, we have some sense, don’t we, of what a father is, or at least ought to be. And we can relate to the Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God. But the Holy Spirit now, He is abstract, impersonal, and awfully hard to relate to. But I think Galatians 5 can help us with all that, don’t you? Paul is showing us that the Holy Spirit is in fact the intimate friend, the constant companion of every Christian. And only with His help will we be able not to gratify the desires of the flesh. Of course just like the Galatians, we turn very easily, very readily to all sorts of substitutes and alternatives to help us with our battle with remaining sin instead of to the Spirit of Christ. So we find ourselves equating our religious performance with true heart holiness, or we reduce what holiness means to a bare obedience to the external letter of the law. And we excuse our twisted motivations and we overlook our wayward hearts. That’s why we experience these rolling power cuts on the path to holiness. The engine of true holiness runs on only one fuel. There is only one path to purity, only one way to walk with God, only one strategy for sanctification. You must cry to God for the fresh assistance and live daily depending upon the ministry of the Holy Spirit. We must be Holy Spirit people. Spirit-led. Spirit-filled. Spirit-empowered people. There is no progress in the Christian life, in Christian godliness, by any other means.
And so that’s the first thing we need to see here. The power of holiness. Where does it come from? Not from ourselves, not from our religion, not from the works of the law, but from the supply of the Spirit of Jesus Christ.
The Pattern of Holiness
Now look with me at verses 19 through 23 and notice the pattern of holiness. What does it look like? Remember, Paul wants us neither to lose our Christian freedom to legalism nor to abuse our Christian freedom to licentious living, but rather to use our freedom in pursuit of true holiness. Not only are we free from condemnation, we’ve been set free for consecration. Of course saying that is all very well and good, but how are we to know what a consecrated life ought to look like. Calling us to be holy without showing us what holiness is, would be like dropping us in the middle of the desert and telling us to make our way home without a map. And so we could say, verses 19 through 23, are a road map of Christian holiness. A roadmap of Christian holiness. They show us what it looks like.
Works of the Flesh
Look at the text. First of all, verses 19 through 21, tell us about the works of the flesh. In terms of our roadmap metaphor, we could say these are all the wrong turns and the dead ends that we might take along the way. It’s not an exhaustive list, of course. Verse 22 ends, “and things like these,” so this is a sample of the main categories of sin that continue to plague the human heart, even your heart and my heart.
Sexual Sins
We could break them down perhaps into four broad groups. First of all, in verse 19, there are sexual sins – sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality. These are the sins that have been largely normalized, even celebrated, in our particular cultural moment. We live in a time where people define themselves by their sexuality. Sex isn’t merely what people do anymore; sex is constitutive of what it means to be a human. And as a result, the only determiner for so many people of what is right and good is, in this whole area of sexual ethics, has become the self. But Paul is saying that whole way of thinking really belongs to the works of the flesh. And if the works of the flesh characterize you, he says those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God. Sexual sins.
Religious Sins
Then the next category – religious sins. Verse 20 – idolatry and sorcery. Idolatry, as you know, is every form of false worship. Sorcery refers to popular superstitions and magical practices current in Paul’s day and we find plenty of them in our own as well. Let’s remember that idolatry of course includes every form of false religion. It even includes so-called churches that reject orthodox truth – those who deny the Trinity, who strip Christ of His deity, who dismiss the authority and reliability of the Scriptures, who reduce what it means to be a Christian to a vague spirituality and a culture of politeness and a general call to be kindly and accepting of the moral choices of all people equally. But Paul warns us these are works of the flesh. They’re dead-ends. They’re wrong turns. Don’t go that way.
Interpersonal Sins
And then third, the largest group you’ll find in verses 19 and 20. Sexual sins, religious sins, now he mentions interpersonal sins – enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy. And I think it’s particularly challenging – my own heart, I wonder if yours is too, is especially rebuked by this part of Paul’s list. Maybe we live a sexually chaste life, we are religiously orthodox, we know our catechism, we’re good churchgoing folks, but boy do we know how to hold a grudge. Or perhaps we have a poisonous tongue. Or our insecurities make us jealous and we find ourselves looking at talented people as rivals. Or maybe our children are afraid to step out of line or say the wrong thing in our homes because we fly off the handle into fits of rage. Or could it be that at church we have our people, and so if your face doesn’t fit or you are not one of us, sure, we’ll be nice enough to you if we see you in the corridor, but we don’t really want to know you and we don’t have any room for you. These are works of the flesh, Paul says. And what a rebuke to our hearts that after sexual sins and religious idolatry, next on the list, and the longest part of his list, deals with how we treat each other.
Personal Sins
And then notice the final category there in verse 21. Sexual sins, religious sins, interpersonal sins, maybe you could call this last group personal sins. Sins that have to do with how we manage ourselves – drunkenness, orgies, and things like these. The issue here is self-control, self-discipline. The Bible, as you know, nowhere condemns the mere use of alcohol, but everywhere condemns drunkenness. The orgies Paul talks about there means he is referring to wild parties of uncontrolled passion and indulgence of every kind. He imagines a person who has no internal limiter, no ability to say “No” to his or her own sinful desires, someone who has no self-control, who is ruled by their lusts. Gluttony. The far too free use of alcohol. Sexual promiscuity and the casual indulgence of all our pleasures. Don’t they sometimes get a free pass because we see everyone who is at that party on Friday night in church on Sunday morning? And so it’s all socially acceptable then, isn’t it? But it’s not acceptable to God. “These too,” Paul says, “are works of the flesh, and those who do them will not see the kingdom of God.”
By the way, you noticed I’m sure that the results of the flesh in our lives, Paul calls, “works” – do you see that language? They are works of the flesh, whereas the results of the Spirit’s ministry are called fruit; the fruit of the Spirit. I don’t think we should make too much of that distinction, but I think we can say this much. The products of the flesh are called “works,” I think, in order to highlight a dark and malevolent agency standing behind them, busy all the time, trying to derail our Christian lives and shatter our Christian witness by generating everything in us that opposes godliness. The flesh – Paul has personified the flesh before in this chapter and so he thinks of the flesh almost as if it were an enemy agent, hiding in our hearts – the flesh, he is saying, is hard at work doing all it can to destroy us. So don’t think your secret sins are harmless just so long as they don’t affect anyone. That’s often how we excuse our sin, isn’t it? “Nobody knows. Nobody sees. Nobody gets hurt. So no harm, no foul.” Right? But we know from Paul’s list here that that’s just a convenient lie we’re telling ourselves. Our sins are never harmless. They always have a way of spilling over into all sorts of other areas of our lives, not least in our relationships with one another and the fellowship of the church. Sin, you see, is deadly. It’s deadly.
Several of our members in the last few months have received cancer diagnoses, and not one of them has shrugged and said to themselves, “Well hey, I’m not infectious. Nobody else is going to get sick from my cancer so it doesn’t really matter that I have cancer.” No, they take action, sometimes painful action, surgical action even to cut it out. And that is the attitude that Paul is writing to awaken in us as he exposes the sinfulness of our sin to our view. Not to paralyze us, not to discourage us, but to call us to action.
The Fruit of the Spirit
But of course holiness has to be about more than confronting a list of negative prohibitions, of conforming to a list of negative prohibitions, rather. It also has to be about living out an array of positive graces. And so look now at verses 22 and 23 and the fruit of the Spirit. First of all there is love – love to Christ and love to our neighbor – which Paul has told us fulfills the law. Then joy – not just a mere flash of temporary happiness, but the abiding satisfaction and delight of the heart in who God is for us in Jesus Christ. Joy is the settled affirmation of your soul that God is good all the time, enabling you to acquiesce in all His holy will. Love, joy, then peace – the inner serenity that arises from knowing we have been reconciled to God and “there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” It doesn’t arise from our circumstances because our circumstances align with our comforts. Nor does it undermine when our circumstances turn into crises. Our peace rests on the work of Jesus Christ, our adoption into the family of God and the presence and ministry of the Holy Spirit in our hearts.
Love, joy, peace, patience – helps us endure and bear with one another. Complemented perfectly by kindness – which responds to others with generosity without regards to their deserving. Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness. Then goodness – goodness values the right and the beautiful and the true. Then there’s faithfulness – faithfulness follows through on all its promises. Faithfulness is constant and dependable. It is “stick-to-it-iveness.” Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, then there’s gentleness. Someone defined gentleness as “strength under control.” It is power directed to the service of the weaknesses of others. And then finally, self- control, which is the master grace that directs every other. It is the governance of my own appetites and wants, the willingness to put myself second. And “against such things,” verse 23 says, “there is no law.” That is to say this is the life to which God’s moral law actually calls us. This is what the law affirms. It does not negate it or rebuke it. It celebrates it. This is what God is calling for within us.
Now if you’ve ever watched a skilled artist draw or paint a portrait – and I’m very conscious of Carol sitting in the balcony who almost always is sitting drawing and sketching the whole time. So those of you behind her, look over her shoulder and you’ll see what I mean! It takes a bit of time for the picture actually to resemble the subject. The first few lines are perhaps suggestive at best. And then some features begin to emerge – details, contours. Maybe the artist adds some color, light and shade, dimensionality until at last in a skilled artist’s portrait, the likeness is unmistakable. And we’ve been watching Paul here paint a picture for us of a person who embodies all that God requires, of all these graces in their most full and beautiful expression. And with each new feature of the portrait, the subject becomes clearer and clearer until we know who it is that Paul is describing here, don’t we?
This is a penned portrait actually of the Lord Jesus Christ. “Having loved His own,” John says, “He loved us to the end. He loved me and gave Himself for me.” “For the joy set before Him, He endured the cross, scorning its shame.” “My peace I give to you.” And when the disciples misunderstood Him again and again and again, how patient He was with them to teach them and lead them on. He was an unfailing fountain of kindness for the lost, looking with compassion on the crowds, healing the sick, feeding the hungry. He was faithful to do all His Father’s will, having accomplished all that God had given Him to do. And was there ever displayed more self-control than in that moment when He lay meekly under the hammer of the Roman death squad and the nails were driven into His hands and feet. Here is self-control in its highest, purest expression. Surely the Lord and Judge of all the earth, judged and condemned and crucified. And as that colossal injustice was done upon Him, He doesn’t do what He might easily have done and leveled them all with a word. Remember, the glimpse of that very power that He gives us in the Garden of Gethsemane during His betrayal when they come to arrest Him, he asks the mob, “Whom do you seek?” and they say, “Jesus of Nazareth,” to which He replies simply, “I am He.” “Ego eimi” in Greek – “I AM.” And when they hear Him say, “I AM,” they fall to the ground. They are unmanned, overcome, brought low before the sovereign prerogatives of the great I AM Himself made flesh and standing before them. It’s a dramatic moment. And what it makes clear is that Jesus didn’t go to the cross because He was dragged there or forced there, helpless under the power of others, a mere victim. No, not at all. He was the master of all of it. And yet meekly He consents to bear the lash and the injustice and the hell of the cross.
Talk about love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. You read that list and look around for anyone, anywhere who embodies it and you will look in vain until you look at Jesus Christ. Only in Him can they be seen fully realized in a human life. And it is to this image, into this likeness Paul is saying to us that the Holy Spirit is constantly working to remake us and conform us as we trust in Jesus. Isn’t that thrilling? This is the business the Holy Spirit is about in your heart. He is going to make you like this. And so this portrait that Paul has been painting in words, a portrait really of Jesus Christ, he’s saying this is the same portrait He is also at work painting in your life so that when the work is finished and we stand in heavenly glory face to face with Jesus, He will see in every one of His people a beautiful portrait and picture of His own character shining back to Him to His great praise and glory.
The Practice of Holiness
The power of holiness; where it comes from – the inner ministry of the Holy Spirit. The pattern of holiness; what it looks like – it looks like Jesus. And then finally and very briefly, the practice of holiness. How do we do this? How will we begin to live like this? Look at verses 24 and 25. “And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. If we live by the Spirit, let us also keep in step with the Spirit.” You may remember back in chapter 2 verse 20 Paul said something very similar to this. “I have been crucified with Christ,” he said. And now here, “Those who belong to Christ have crucified the flesh.” Very similar. I wonder if you spotted the difference between the two expressions. It lies in the agent of crucifixion. Who is doing the crucifying? In 2:20, we are passive. “We have been crucified.” It is done to us by God in the moment we become Christians. But in our passage, we are the ones who do the crucifying. “Those who belong to Christ have crucified the flesh.” That past tense tells us crucifixion, the crucifixion of our flesh began in the moment we became Christians, but that past action has present and ongoing effects. Crucifixion, we might say, is a lingering death. Sin doesn’t die quickly or quietly.
And so how do you practice holiness? Well Paul is saying here you don’t play with your sin. You don’t excuse your sin. You don’t hide your sin. You don’t indulge your sin. You don’t compromise with your sin. You don’t bargain with your sin. You kill your sin. Crucify it. Steel yourself, he is saying. Turn a deaf ear to your flesh as it pleads with you for its life. It will make almost any promise to you, you know. It will cut almost any bargain with you. It will even allow you to put away lesser sins if only you will allow the deeper, greater sins that fester in your heart to live. But no, Paul says. You must kill it; give it no room to grow. Give it no room to thrive. Take steps, radical if necessary, to change your routine, your relationships, your habits, your screen time, your expenditure until you choke the life out of your flesh. It’s what the Puritans called “the mortification of sin.” Kill it. Mortify it. Put it to death. Don’t play with it, don’t excuse it, don’t indulge it, don’t compromise with it. Kill it.
There’s a positive side to this as well. Listen to the positive elements. You have to if you want to avoid a lopsided understanding of the Christian life. It will only lead you into austerity and severity. Growing in Christ can’t be just about what you disapprove, what you don’t do, what you won’t say. If that’s all you’ve got, it won’t be long before your testimony lacks all the sweetness and beauty of Christlikeness. And so Paul calls us not just to mortify the flesh but to the partner practice of what the Puritans called “the vivification of the flesh.” Cultivate your graces till they grow and blossom and bear fruit. If you live by the Spirit, verse 25, if you are a Christian at all it is because of the Spirit at work in you. He gave you life, and if you live by the Spirit, we need to go on and grow up by the Spirit too.
That really has been his point, hasn’t it, right throughout this chapter. Verse 16, “Walk by the Spirit and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh.” Verse 18, “If you are led by the Spirit you are not under the law.” And now here verse 25, “If we live by the Spirit let us also keep in step with the Spirit.” These three phrases are roughly synonymous. They’re equivalent – walking by the Spirit, being led by the Spirit, keeping in step with the Spirit. But the last phrase is striking because Paul is returning to the military motif that he has used a few times earlier in the chapter as we’ve seen. The word “to keep in step with” really is saying the Spirit is your commanding officer. You march at His Word. He sets the pace. He directs your steps. He requires you to step in time to the beat of His drum.
And He does all of this of course through the means of His Word. He beats out the cadence of your steps in the holy Scriptures. He governs the direction of your march by the holy Scriptures. His orders are heard only in the holy Scriptures. How will you cause your graces to grow and ripen? How will the life of Christ mature and radiate from your life? By what means will you become holy? Yes, you must kill your sin, but if all you ever do in your garden is kill weeds and you never plant anything and you never grow anything or cultivate anything what a dead and dreary place your garden will be. Sow the seed of the Word in your heart, store it up in your memory, work to live it out in your daily life, keep in step with the Spirit who gives you life by taking heed to the Word He has inspired and that He illuminates. To be direct, there can be no growth, none, with a closed Bible. No growth when you neglect the preaching of God’s Word. No growth when even though you do read it and you do hear it you do not believe its message or obey its precepts.
The power of holiness. All our holiness comes from the Spirit of Christ. The pattern of holiness. The Spirit of Christ is at work to conform us in the depths of our character to the likeness of Jesus Christ. And the practice of holiness. We must engage in the lifelong works of mortification – kill your sin – and vivification – cultivate those graces that bring God glory. This is the life for which you have been set free. May God help us all to live it. Let us pray.
Father, please have mercy on us and forgive us when we’ve cultivated our vices and killed our graces, when we ought to have been mortifying the flesh and vivifying the fruit of the Spirit. We bless You that You, by Your Word and Spirit, do not leave us alone but You are constantly at work within the hearts of Your children till at last we will surely one day shine with the perfect likeness of our Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ. So, O God, work in our hearts love and joy and peace and patience and kindness and goodness and gentleness and faithfulness and self-control, against which there is no law, in all of which Your law rejoices. Make us like Christ, we pray, for we ask it all in our Savior’s name, amen.