Freedom: Life in the Spirit - Flesh and the Spirit
By Dr. Tom Pace
Sunday, November 5, 2017
Galatians 5:16-25
We’re continuing our series today from the last part of Galatians. Last week we talked about sort of basic Christianity, justification by grace through faith. The idea that we’re made right with God not by being good people, not by being religious people, but only by God’s grace, God’s gift that we receive through faith.
So what does that mean then about how we live? Does that mean that being good doesn’t matter, that we don’t need to even worry about that? That it doesn’t matter at all? How do we deal with the things in our life that aren’t good? That’s what Paul teaches us about today. So let’s listen now as we hear the Scripture read from Galatians. The last part is where Paul talks about flesh and the spirit.
Live by the Spirit, I say, and do not gratify the desires of the flesh.For what the flesh desires is opposed to the Spirit, and what the Spirit desires is opposed to the flesh; for these are opposed to each other, to prevent you from doing what you want. But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not subject to the law.Now the works of the flesh are obvious: fornication, impurity, licentiousness,idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions,envy, drunkenness, carousing, and things like these. I am warning you, as I warned you before: those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God.By contrast, the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness,gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against such things.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 be guided by the Spirit. Galatians 5:16-25 (NRSV)

Join me in prayer: O God, open us up. Open our eyes that we might see, and our ears that we might hear. Open our hearts that we might feel, and then, O Lord, open our hands that we might serve. Amen.
I really have enjoyed that term “mucking out.” I just like it – it’s got a good sound to it. “Mucking out” It’s not like “cleaning out.” “Cleaning out” means when you clean out a drawer, or the garage. It’s clutter, going through things, or organizing things – that’s cleaning out.
Mucking out, you know, sort of rhymes with yuck. Muck and yuck rhyme. And mucking out is dealing with the yucky inside us. In a house of course. Yucky in a house. I suppose it could be true about a lot of different things. But I want us to think about it with regard to our lives and our spirits.
Here’s what Paul says: “Now the works of the flesh are obvious: fornication, impurity, licentiousness,idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions,envy, drunkenness, carousing…”
Works of the flesh are obvious. That list is not meant to be exhaustive but rather suggestive. In other words, there are lots of things that you just know that come from not a good place inside you.
Have you ever had that deal where you say something in a group of people that is just yucky? You say it and it’s mean spirited or oppressive or something? As soon as you say it, you think, “Where did that come from? Where did that come from?” Or Yuri Kuriel makes a racist gesture in the dugout? I mean – what a nice guy! You think, “Where did that come from?” Or you’re on the Internet and you see the little icon that has the caption “See pictures of celebrities you would not believe.” And you think, “I wonder what that would be?” And you click on it. You think, “What am I doing?”
Yesterday my daughter and son-in-law had a party for their two-year-old twins. It was a birthday party and all the cousins were invited. We have a bunch of two year-olds, four boys, and it was a Mexican fiesta theme, so we had a piñata. We gave four boys aged 2 - bats! Actually we ran out of bats so we gave them golf clubs. Not wise, generally speaking. So we tell them, “Go one at a time…” Yeah, right! They’re beating and we’re thinking, “This is not good.” My son-in-law was standing next to me and he said, “Lord of the Flies.” You remember that William Golding book we had to read in high school? It was about these English boys marooned on a desert island. They were very well trained and educated but they ended up being savages with each other.
You think, “Where does that come from? What is that?” Paul calls the source of all of that “the flesh.”
Now what does that mean? Well, let me tell you what it does not mean. It does not mean “our bodies.” There have been many heresies over the centuries that seem to imply this. They say that our bodies are somehow bad and our spirits are good and that anything that comes out of your body – hunger, sex, anything that is related to your bodily drives is somehow evil and wrong, and anything that tries to get you out of your body is right. And that’s a heresy. That’s not right and it’s not what Paul means at all. In fact Jesus was “made flesh” –he was “born among us.” God came in a human body. So it’s not our human bodies that are somehow bad.
But what does Paul mean by “the flesh?” There are two things he means. One is what is sometimes translated “our lower nature,” that lower nature within us. Sometimes it’s translated “the sin nature” or “the fallen nature.” I like the way Eugene Peterson translates it in his translation of the Bible called The Message. He says, “Our selfish inclinations.” That there’s something inside us that sort of grabs us and we begin to live out of that place that lower nature, that selfishness. That “Me first,” “self-first,” or “me and my family- that’s all I care about. Forget about everyone else – it’s me, it’s us.” It’s greed, it’s lust, it’s all of those things that are just so selfish in their focus. That’s the selfish inclination, the lower nature, the flesh.
Now there’s another thing that Paul means and this is kind of counter intuitive. He also means that “living out of the flesh” is living out of your own strength, your own ability, the sort of “pull yourself up by your own bootstraps” kind of attitude. I can do this on my own strength.” Notice he calls it “The works of the flesh.” It’s a work, it’s something you do by your own strength.
Every year we’ll have New Year’s resolutions and you say, “I’m going to be a better person. I’m going to be a better person. I’m going to be disciplined. I’m going to work harder. I’m just going to work harder. I’m not going to be so mean spirited to people and I’m not going to gossip. I’m going to be more positive. I’m going to try harder; I’m going to work harder. I’m going to try much harder.”
Now listen, in that word what do you hear over and over again? It’s “I.” “I’m going to do this, it’s about me.” You see, even when you see that it’s striving for something good, it’s still self-absorbed. Self-focused. It’s all about me.
We listen to motivational speakers who tell us, “You’re a good person. And you say, “Yes, I am.” But it’s still like walking around taking our temperature all the time thinking, “How am I doing?” That’s the flesh. And both of those things are both so self-focused.
Let me contrast that by talking about a young man I met not too long ago. He was a young pastor and I was so impressed with him. He’s smart, has a twinkle in his eye. He went to a new church about a year ago, which was a much larger church for him. I said, “So, do you like your new job?” He said, “Like my job? I’ve never really thought of it. This is just what God’s got me doing right now.” I thought, “See, he’s not worried about taking his temperature all the time, thinking ‘How am I doing? Am I happy? Am I not happy? Am I liking it? Am I doing well?’” No, he’s not worried about any of that. It’s just thinking, “How can I be about serving God in this moment?” I listen to him saying that and I think “Why can’t I be more like that?” I’m on the other end. I think, “I ought to be able to do that. I think I can do that!”
We just become so inward focused, that’s the flesh. Now here’s what I would tell you. You can’t get rid of it, you can’t shake it. I’m going to say it again, the same exact sentence, but I need to put a little different emphasis on it. You can’t get rid of it and you can’t shake it. You and I are “self-a-holics.” We’re “sin-a- holics.” And we can’t shake it, not by our own strength that’s for sure.
Some of you are in recovery in a Twelve Step group of some sort for a variety of different things. You know the first three steps of the Twelve Steps. One – To admit that you’re powerless, that your life has become unmanageable and you’re powerless over alcohol. Powerless over sin. Powerless over whatever it is. You can’t beat it. That’s Step One.
Step Two – Acknowledge then a Higher Power, that a Higher Power can return your life to sanity.
Step Three – Surrender yourself to that Higher Power.
You see, you can’t shake it, the answer isn’t “I’m gonna beat those works of the flesh! I’m gonna quit gossiping, by golly!” Or put a rubber band on your wrist and every time you gossip – you whack! I’m gonna beat it! That’s not planned.
So there’s an opposite view. Paul begins the whole thing in verse 17: “And what the Spirit desires is opposed to the flesh; for these are opposed to each other, to prevent you from doing what you want.”The opposite of the flesh then, is the Spirit.
I don’t know if you saw the interview with the young woman who was a survivor of the Las Vegas shooting. She was shot in the face. She’s 37 years old and she was at the concert and she managed to make it into the Tropicana Hotel. These people took her and really at risk of their own lives, put her in a certain kind of chair and leaned her over backwards and kept her alive. They kept the blood from draining because she was drowning in her own blood. They kept her alive till the ambulance came.
On the interview you can see she’s got this big scar on her face, her jaw’s wired shut and she can only talk out of one half of her mouth. She said, “You would not believe how many wonderful people there are out there.” That was her take-away. Her take-away from being shot in the face was not “Some creep up in a window shot me.” Her take-away was “You would not believe how many wonderful people there are out there.”
Where does that come from? Where does all those people helping one another – putting their bodies over strangers they don’t know to shield them, where does that come from? That, my friends, is the Spirit at work in the world around us. That’s God at work. Name it however you want to name it, but that is a divine movement of God among us.
Hurricane Harvey comes and our folks all over our city jump in to help one another. That is a divine movement of the Spirit among us. Where does that come from? It’s because God works among us and we can tap into that Spirit. Paul said, “Live by the Spirit. Be led by the Spirit.” And listen, he says, “The fruit of the Spirit...” Notice it‘s not a work, now we’ve got an organic image, that you tap into the Spirit and then that produces fruit in your life.
You hear that phrase, “Tap in” periodically, don’t you? “That’s really tapping into something.” Well, there are a lot of things. Pornography taps into something. It taps into the flesh. But the “fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control…” Again, a list that’s suggestive and not exhaustive.
The goodness comes from us like a taproot. A fruit. You tap into that Spirit and you live out of that place.
Now three things, let me just say about the fruit of the Spirit, and we’re going to talk about how we live by the Spirit again in two weeks. A little bit next week and even more when we talk about sowing and reaping in the last sermon of the series. Three things about the fruit of the Spirit and how that fruit comes.
First, it is inevitable. The fruit of the Spirit is inevitable. If you’re living by the Spirit that fruit will show up in your life.
When we were growing up we had a garden and my mom planted zucchini. Have you ever tried to grow zucchini? You could feed the entire world on one acre of zucchini. It just takes over! It’s like you can’t stop it. You can’t mess it up. It just grows and grows. We learned to make fried zucchini, and sliced zucchini, and broiled zucchini. It’s kind of like Forest Gump and shrimp. All these different kinds of zucchini because it just kept growing all the time.
That’s the way the fruit of the Spirit is. It’s an inevitable result of the Spirit. It will always produce that. But here’s what’s interesting. You can’t fertilize the fruit; you have to fertilize the plant. You can’t set out for “...joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness...” all those things. You can’t set out for those. Those can’t be goal – it’s an inevitable byproduct. Those are an inevitable byproduct of pursuing the Spirit, of living by the Spirit, of wanting to be about the business of the Kingdom of God. They come but you don’t chase them, it is so counterintuitive. Whether you are trying to get joy or get rid of licentiousness, either way you’re pursuing the wrong thing.
Here’s the way Jesus said it, “Seek first the Kingdom of God and his righteousness and all these things will be added to you as well.” You pursue God’s kingdom, being about God’s business, doing what you can to accomplish with God’s strength and power God’s purposes. And what you get as a byproduct of that is “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.” And you get rid of those works of the flesh. So they are inevitable byproducts.
Second, it is gradual. The fruit of the Spirit is gradual. You can’t watch fruit grow – well, maybe you can watch zucchini –but any other fruit you can’t actually watch grow. You can sit and stare at it but it goes so slowly that you never really notice it. You might see it later and say, “Wow – look there; it’s got fruit all over it now.” But you can’t actually watch it.
But listen, when Paul is talking about fruit he’s not talking about peaches. He’s talking about olives, or grapes. It takes twelve years for an olive tree to produce fruit. If you go to the Garden of Gethsemane today, there are olive trees there that are over 1000 years old. It is a slow tree. So when Paul says, “fruit of the spirit” what he’s saying is “Yes, your life will be different but it’s not going to happen overnight.”
We have people come and share their testimonies and every once in a while somebody will say, “I was a terrible person. Then I went to a church service and I found Jesus and now I’m a good person.”
Well, I’m always a little skeptical. It’s not that God couldn’t do that. Sure, God can. But that’s not the usual pattern. The usual pattern is that over time the fruit becomes more evident in our lives.
One of the things I’ve seen much more in my life is peace. When I look fifteen or twenty years ago I was so much more anxious about things. So much more worried. Now it’s like … have you ever watched time-lapse photography? It’s always fun to see, they sent up the Go-Pro and every day it takes a picture of that place. I went online and saw one where how a forest that had been ravaged by fire came back to life again and began to grow. It’s so cool to watch that, so gratifying to see it. Unfortunately that’s not the way it works in the world. We don’t see things that way. It takes time and you can look back and see how the fruit has grown.
Finally, the fruit of the Spirit is reproductive. What I mean is that the purpose of fruit is to produce a seed and the purpose of the seed is to produce another tree. And the purpose of the tree is to grow more fruit, which produces more seeds which produces more trees. So it’s not about you and I as the tree, the purpose is the orchard. It’s the whole thing – the whole Kingdom of God.
We just read the names of 57 people who have gone on to be a part of the church triumphant. I will tell you from being a part of planning their worship services – their memorial services – that the fruit of the Spirit in their lives left seeds in the lives of families that are sitting here in this place. Seeds in my life. Every year I hear the names and recognize a much higher percentage of them. I remember when I first came I knew maybe three the first year, and now I know almost all of them. The joy and the love and the kindness and the generosity that they lived planted seeds of the Spirit in my life. It grows, and friends, one day, they’ll read your name and mine. And the work of the Spirit in our lives will have produced joy, and love and peace that will have impacted another sanctuary full of people.
See, it’s about the Kingdom of God growing. The fruit to grow the Kingdom.
So Paul’s message is not to focus on the problem, spend your time saying, “What am I going to do to get rid of these works of the flesh?” Don’t focus on trying harder and working at it more. Don’t focus just on how can I be more joyful. No, the focus is on thinking. “How can I be a part of what God is doing? God, use me as you see fit. I’m not going to think about me so much. I want to be a part of what God is doing.”
There’s a man I know whom I have such respect for. He’s one of those guys that when you have a conversation with him and it’s over, you realize that the whole time it was about you. That he’d managed to ask questions like, “So what’s going on? How are the kids? Wow – what’s going on at work?” All of that and you got sucked in. Because this is a person who authentically it’s really not about him. Once he told me that the mantra in his mind is “Less of me, more you.” The goal is to become self-effacing or to get thinner. To be less of me so it’s more about others and more about God. That’s the Spirit at work when that happens.
So we live by the Spirit, we’re led by the Spirit, we tap into the Spirit, we become a part of what God is doing in the world. We give up trying to do it on our own and we open ourselves to God’s Spirit. That’s Paul’s model for change. And I bet it’s at work in your life even now.
Gracious God, thank you so much for the way you are at work in our lives. Your Spirit at work within us. And sometimes we see that Spirit come out in us and we know it’s from you. Thank you, God, turn our focus so it’s completely on you and not on ourselves. We pray in Christ’s name. Amen.