Living by the Spirit

Can he be any more specific? He is not speaking out against our physical appetites. What he is doing is noting what happens when we are wholesale driven by these fleshly appetites to the neglect of the Holy Spirit's activity in our lives.

The King James Version and the Revised Standard Version use the phrase, in verse 19, "the acts of the flesh . . ." instead of the phrase "the acts of the sinful nature . . . ."

The biblical distinction is made between that which is fleshly and that which is spiritual. It does not mean that our physical hungers are wrong. What it is he is speaking against is the worshipful attitude toward these physical hungers, the chief of which are food and sex. God gave us these appetites to be used to His glory. It is when we distort these and make them ends in themselves that life spirals downward and we live lives in which our appetites control our lives, instead of being used as a vehicle to bring glory to Jesus Christ and to serve others.

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A classic evidence of this downward spiral is the following. In William Golding's book, Lord of the Flies, a plane carrying a group of schoolboys crashes, killing the pilot, and the boys are left without supervision on a remote island in the Pacific. At first they try to maintain order and discipline, so they elect a leader named Ralph. But in the absence of moral restraints, many of the schoolboys eventually become savages and even murderers. At the conclusion of the book, Ralph is running for his life from the boys, who plan to kill him and put his head on a stake. At the last moment, he runs out of the jungle and is saved by a naval officer, who is astonished at the transformation in the schoolboys.

Imagine that all civil and criminal laws were abolished in your community. How and why might this affect the people who live there?

Spirit works, or living by the Spirit, looks like this, which Paul describes in Galatians in 5:22-26. He writes, "But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self control. Against such things there is no law. Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the sinful nature with its passions and desires. Since we live by the Spirit, let us keep in step with the Spirit. Let us not become conceited, provoking and envying each other."

I went back to my sermon files this week and discovered, much to my shock, that until this series I have never preached from the Book of Galatians except for a series I did several years ago on the fruit of the Spirit, the verses I just read. I will resist with all my energy going back and repreaching those nine messages, each one concentrating on one of these fruit.

Instead, let us emphasize the difference between what naturally emerges from our sinful nature, what we have called "flesh works," and what naturally emerges from our spiritual nature, what we have labeled " spiritual works." Paul uses the analogy of a fruit-bearing tree. Life given over to the sinful nature will bear negative fruit. Life given over to the Holy Spirit of God will produce spiritual fruit.