Americans talk a lot about freedom. We talk about living in a free society, and we react when we sense that someone is trying to take away, or restrict, our freedom. Freedom is at the very center of what America is about. But with all our talk about freedom, I’ve seldom heard much about what a truly free life looks like. For the most part, freedom is understood simply as a lack of restraint, the liberty to do whatever I want with my life. Supporters of the “right to die” often make their argument along these lines: “it’s my life, and I should be free to end it whenever I choose.” Freedom is negative, nothing more than a lack of restraint. Here are some wise words by Richard John Neuhaus: “Nothing good can be done without freedom, but freedom is not the highest value in itself. Freedom is given to man in order to make possible the free obedience to truth and free gift of oneself in love” (Doing Well and Doing Good, p. 169). Freedom is a gift of God, but it’s not an end in itself. It’s not the main thing. God has given us freedom so that we can live in loving obedience under His lordship.
Paul is concerned, in this letter, about freedom. Following Jesus Christ means being free from the Law. As we’ve seen, the Galatians were in the process of turning away from the gospel of grace and were hoping to please God by obeying the Old Testament Law. He begins the letter, after a brief introduction, with these words: “I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you by the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel–which is really no gospel at all” (Galatians 1:6). Over and over again throughout this letter, Paul shows the Galatians that by turning to the Law they are defecting from Jesus Christ. Rather than bringing them closer to God, this new direction is leading them away from Him.
Having made all his theological arguments, he says this at the beginning of chapter 5: “It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery” (5:1). The Galatians had been set free to follow Jesus Christ, and now they were bringing themselves into bondage to the Law. As we saw in the last sermon, Paul wants them to hold firmly to the freedom God has given them in Christ. But that raises a question: what does a free life in Christ look like? Is the freedom we’ve been given a simple lack of restraint, a lack of boundaries so that we can fulfill our dreams by doing whatever we feel like doing? In this passage in the last half of chapter 5, Paul gives us a picture of what the free life in Christ looks like.
Paul wants the Galatians to be living in the freedom of the Spirit. But there’s always a danger in preaching this message. Paul had been accused, over and over again, of lowering the standards of godly living by preaching the message of free grace: “It’s simply perverse to say, ‘If my lies serve to show off God’s truth all the more gloriously, why blame me? I’m doing God a favor.’ Some people are actually trying to put such words in our mouths, claiming that we go around saying, ‘The more evil we do, the more good God does, so let’s just do it!’ That’s pure slander” (Romans 3:8, The Message).
There are two opposite dangers in responding to the gospel of free grace. The first danger, and this is the one Paul is most concerned with in this letter, is legalism. We see the potential for abusing the message, so we try to guard against this danger by introducing stricter standards. Several years ago I read an article by a Mennonite scholar who was unhappy with the direction some Mennonite churches were taking. They had been influenced by the doctrine of free grace, he said, and as a result the centrality of the peace position had been weakened. In his view, a more legalistic approach to the gospel would make it easier to safeguard some of the Anabaptist distinctives which were being lost. Legalism is safer. It enables us to stay in control. The opposite danger is antinomianism, living as if our actions don’t matter, because God is going to forgive us anyway. This is what Paul is concerned about when he says: “do not use your freedom to indulge the sinful nature.” If we’re really worried about morality, we’ll be tempted to some form of legalism. And if we’re especially concerned about freedom, we’ll be tempted by antinomianism.
But what does Paul mean when he talks about freedom? Clearly it’s not the freedom to do whatever we feel like. That’s the way people in our society often use the word, but Paul has something else in mind. When we do whatever we feel like doing, it destroys us, because we’re going against the grain of our nature. We’re not capable of exercising absolute freedom, and when we try it leads only to bondage. Our freedom is defined by our nature as creatures made in God’s image. When Paul says “it is for freedom that Christ has set us free,” he’s saying that we’ve been set free to live in obedience to God by the power of the Holy Spirit. We’re created to be servants. We can’t help it. We can’t escape it. When we refuse to serve God our Creator, we just end up serving something else. True freedom is found in obedience to God our Creator and Lord, not in obedience to our selfish whims.
Here’s how The Message translates vv. 19-21, describing a life seeking freedom from God’s Lordship: “It is obvious what kind of life develops out of trying to get your own way all the time: repetitive, loveless, cheap sex; a stinking accumulation of mental and emotional garbage; frenzied and joyless grabs for happiness; trinket gods; magic-show religion; paranoid loneliness; cutthroat competition; all-consuming-yet-never-satisfied wants; a brutal temper; an impotence to love or be loved; divided homes and divided lives; small-minded and lopsided pursuits; the vicious habit of depersonalizing everyone into a rival; uncontrolled and uncontrollable addictions; ugly parodies of community; I could go on.” When we try to grasp for absolute freedom, the freedom to do whatever we want, whatever we feel like doing, we dehumanize ourselves and we end up living in bondage to our impulses. We set out trying to be free, and we find ourselves enslaved.
Paul only presents us with two options in these verses. Either we are living by the flesh, with the kinds of results he lists in verses 19-21, or we are living by the Spirit. There’s no neutral position between these two. The flesh, or sinful nature, as it reads in the NIV, refers to the whole person in rebellion against God. The NIV uses the term sinful nature because it’s easy to misunderstand Paul’s use of the word flesh. He’s not talking about our bodies. Some of the works of the flesh include things that result from the misuse of our bodies: sexual immorality, impurity, drunkenness, orgies, etc. But the works of the flesh also include spiritual sins: idolatry and witchcraft, hatred, discord, jealousy, selfish ambition, envy. So the flesh doesn’t refer to our bodies, but to the kind of life that results from the Fall, a life lived in the corruption of sin and rebellion. Living in the flesh is living within the limited perspective of a world that is alienated from the life of God. Here’s what one Bible dictionary says: “The man whose horizon is limited by the flesh is by that very fact opposed to God.... The flesh in this sense denotes the whole personality of man as organized in the wrong direction, as directed to earthly pursuits rather than the service of God” (New Bible Dictionary, p. 371). When we become swallowed up by the values of our culture and live for ourselves, grasping for everything we can, we’re living by the flesh. When we’re living according to the flesh, we are at the center, and everything revolves around our own desires. When we’re living this way, our own needs and desires seem to be the only thing that matters, and if we think about God at all it’s only because we’re hoping we can use Him to get the things we want. Living by the Spirit is living under God’s lordship, with Him at the center of our lives, and living by the flesh is living for ourselves.
It’s important to notice Paul’s terminology in verse 22. He speaks, in verse 19, of the works of the flesh. These are the things that are produced naturally from our fallen nature. When we’re living on our own, apart from God, this is the natural result. These are the kinds of things the flesh is capable of producing. He says the same thing in Romans 8: “Those who live according to the sinful nature have their minds set on what that nature desires, but those who live in accordance with the Spirit have their minds set on what the Spirit desires. The mind of sinful man is death, but the mind controlled by the Spirit is life and peace; the sinful mind is hostile to God. It does not submit to God’s law, nor can it do so. Those controlled by the sinful nature cannot please God” (vv. 5-8).
In verse 22, Paul speaks about the fruit of the Spirit. These 9 qualities he lists in verses 22-23 are things that result from the Spirit’s transforming power in our lives. Here’s how it reads in The Message: “But what happens when we live God’s way? He brings gifts into our lives, much the same way that fruit appears in an orchard.” The works of the flesh flow from us, but the fruit of the Spirit comes about through influences outside ourselves. We can’t produce the fruit of the Spirit through determined self-effort. It’s no use writing these things down in your Day-Timer and determining that you’re going to learn to live like this no matter what. We can’t do it, and when we try, we only end up with counterfeits. We can produce qualities that look like the real thing. But the similarities are only on the surface. The real thing can only appear in our lives through the transforming power of the Holy Spirit. The free life in Christ is a life that leads to the kinds of qualities Paul lists in these verses.
So how do we get the fruit of the Spirit in our lives? Do we just wait passively and say, “oh well, there’s nothing I can do about it; I guess if God wants these things to appear in my life it’s up to Him to do the work”? No. It’s true that we can’t produce these things, any more than we can make fruit grow without those things God provides, like sun, water and the right temperatures. But there are things we can do to cultivate the fruit of the Spirit.
The first thing is to ask whether the Spirit is part of our lives. Paul says in Romans 8, “if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he does not belong to Christ” (v. 19). He says, in 2 Corinthians 5:17: “if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!” Is this true of you? Is there evidence in your life of this new creation? The Church easily becomes just a sub-culture. We learn all the rules and say the right things, and as long as we don’t get caught up in certain behaviors, we can assume that everything is fine. But it’s possible to spend a lifetime in the Church without ever becoming a new creature. It’s possible to spend a lifetime in the Church without ever knowing anything of the transforming power of the Spirit in our lives. We can be good moral people, who fit very nicely into the Christian sub-culture, without ever being reconciled to God. We may avoid the more blatant things, like “sexual immorality, impurity and debauchery, idolatry and witchcraft.” But what about “hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions and envy”? Paul is also speaking about these things when he says “those who live like this will not inherit the kingdom of God.” Do you have evidence of the presence of the Spirit in your life? Many people who’ve spent a lifetime in the church will one day hear Jesus say “Depart from me; I never knew you.”
But, having become new creatures in Christ, knowing the power of the Spirit in our lives, the fruit of the Spirit still doesn’t appear automatically. Paul says, in verse 24: “Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the sinful nature with its passions and desires.” It’s easy to confuse this with what he says chapter 2: “I have been crucified with Christ.” He’s talking in chapter 2 about something that has been done to him, but in chapter 5 he’s speaking about something we have done in coming to Christ. John Stott does a good job of explaining this verse: “What does it mean? Paul borrows the image of crucifixion, of course, from Christ Himself who said: ‘If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me’ (Mk. 8:34). To ‘take up the cross’ was our Lord’s vivid figure of speech for self-denial. Every follower of Christ is to behave like a condemned criminal and carry his cross to the place of execution. Now Paul takes the metaphor to its logical conclusion. We must not only take up our cross and walk with it, but actually see that the execution takes place. We are actually to take the flesh, our wilful and wayward self, and (metaphorically speaking) nail it to the cross. This is Paul’s graphic description of repentance, of turning our back on the old life of selfishness and sin, repudiating it finally and utterly” (Only One Way: The Message of Galatians, p. 150). Remember this definition I quoted earlier: “the flesh denotes the whole personality... organized in the wrong direction.” Repentance is turning around and going the other way.
What he’s describing has often been referred to as the mortification of sin, putting to death those old habits that lead us into sin. It’s what Jesus was talking about when He said: “If your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell” (Matthew 5:29). When our sinful, self-centered tendencies begin to assert themselves, we refuse to submit. It may even help to visualize our old selves on the cross, having died to our old way of life. John Stott goes on to say this: “The first great secret of holiness lies in the degree and the decisiveness of our repentance. If besetting sins persistently plague us, it is either because we have never truly repented, or because, having repented, we have not maintained our repentance. It is as if, having nailed our old nature to the cross, we keep wistfully returning to the scene of its execution. We begin to fondle it, to caress it, to long for its release, even to try to take it down again from the cross. We need to learn to leave it there. When some jealous, or proud, or malicious, or impure thought invades our mind we must kick it out at once. It is fatal to begin to examine it and consider whether we are going to give in or not. We have declared war on it; we are not going to resume negotiations. We have settled the issue for good; we are not going to re-open it. We have crucified the flesh; we are never going to draw the nails” (pp. 151-52). “Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the sinful nature with its passions and desires.” Crucify the sinful nature, and then leave it there on the cross.
But that’s only the first step. We deny ourselves–we say “no” to our old, selfish way of life–and then we go on to walk with the Spirit: “Since we live by the Spirit, let us keep in step with the Spirit.” We walk in the Spirit by looking to Him, inviting Him into every area of our lives and seeking to live under His Lordship. Here’s John Stott once more: “This will be seen in our whole way of life–in the leisure occupations we pursue, the books we read, the friendships we make. Above all in what older authors called ‘a diligent use of the means of grace’, that is, in a disciplined practice of prayer and Scripture meditation, in fellowship with believers who provoke us to love and good works, in keeping the Lord’s day as the Lord’s day, and in attending public worship and the Lord’s Supper. In all these ways we occupy ourselves in spiritual things. It is not enough to yield passively to the Spirit’s control; we must also walk actively in the Spirit’s way. Only so will the fruit of the Spirit appear” (p. 154). We cultivate the fruit of the Spirit by refusing to allow the weeds of the flesh to grow in our lives and by seeking to walk daily in active obedience to God’s Word, trusting in His power to transform us into the image of His Son.
Here's a good description of what freedom means in the way Paul understands it in Galatians: “Christian spirituality forces a primary question: Is growth of the person totally open, as if we were clay to be formed? [In other words, is freedom in Christ open-ended, nothing more than a lack of restraint enabling us to do what we want?] Christianity firmly insists that the answer is no. The apt analogy is the relationship of acorn to oak. If an acorn were given ‘freedom,’ it could not become a maple. Instead, the options would be to become a healthy oak or a contorted self-contradiction. So with humans, for the ‘image of God’ is so structured within each person that the options are (1) to love God with all our hearts, souls, strength, and minds, or (2) to become twisted, tortured, and frustrated creatures” (W. Paul Jones, The Art of Spiritual Direction, p. 31). So these are the choices: “to become twisted, tortured, and frustrated creatures,” the kind of people described in the works of the flesh. Both legalism and antinomianism lead in this direction. The other choice is “to love God with all our hearts, souls, strength, and minds,” to become the kind of people God created us to be, the kind of people who increasingly bear the fruit of the Spirit. The message of free grace sets us free to be truly human.
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