Your were Running a Good Race

 Read Galatians 5

 

So where have we been so far? There is no other gospel.

Salvation is by grace through faith.

The law is no longer our guardian or governor.

I am crucified with Christ.  Christ lives in me.

You foolish Galatians, did you really think that the law could do what Christ Jesus himself has done for you? If the law could get you to salvation, Christ died for nothing.

Then comes one of my favorite expressions in the New Testament.  You were running a good race.  Who cut you off?  Who cut in on you? Who got your off course?

The Galatian believers had come to know Christ Jesus through faith alone.  Now someone had told them that wasn’t enough.  Their salvation was in jeopardy.  You had better get circumcised and follow at least some of the law.  You need Jesus Plus. You need Jesus 2.0. What you believe is too good to be true.

Realize that these are mostly God’s Chosen People enticing new believers to come under the governorship of the law. Why?  Because the salvation that they knew came from a love that is incomprehensible.  God’s people couldn’t believe how great God’s love was—how great his love is.

God’s Chosen people missed the boat on knowing God’s love.  Their mindset was God is rules.  We know that God is love. Understanding this, we know that God’s rules come out of love and are for our own God, but they are not our master.

This salvation that we know comes completely out of God’s heart. He loves us.  He will never stop loving us.  He made a way and paid the price for our right-standing with him.  Jesus paid it all.  All to Him I owe.

Paul told us the same thing that James did.  If you choose to live by the law, then you must abide by the entire law.  That’s something that nobody other than Jesus has even been able to do.

You can live by the law and continually fall short of God’s glory or you can live by love and by the Spirit of God that lives within you now.  It is just that simple.

The law or the Spirit?  Paul offered a provocation for those who insisted on living by the law.  The topic was circumcision.  Paul said why don’t you just cut off the whole business and show your commitment to the law. 

I have the same thoughts every time I see a man competing in women’s sports because he identifies as a woman.  Why don’t you show how dedicated you are to competing in women’s sports and cut off the whole business? 

Paul said why don’t you just emasculate yourselves?  Ouch!

If you think you must obey the law to complete your salvation, then you are alienating yourselves from Christ.  You are setting yourselves up for the words, I don’t know you. I never knew you. That’s a double ouch.

Should we practice the law as a guide to good living? Of course.  There is much of it that we should fulfill literally—word for word.  Don’t murder comes to mind right away.

Much of the law we fulfill by loving one another.  Love God and love one another are the commands on which all of the law rests.

We must always know that our salvation is the gift of God, no ifs, ands, or buts.  It’s a gift.

Now that we are saved, we are called to live by the Spirit of God that has taken up residence inside of us. 

Now that we are saved, we enjoy our freedom and we engage in war.  It’s a paradox. We are saved to fully live but not to give in to the desires of the flesh.  The flesh and the Spirit are at war.

We are free but we must fight to live in that freedom.  Most of those battles take place in the mind.  What is it that you desire the most? What do you seek?

To please yourself or to please God? Is it eat, drink, and be merry or seek God and his kingdom and his righteousness first?

We can enjoy this life and serve God but we must always put God first if we are truly living in the freedom that he gave us and not desiring to return to having sin as our master.

Listen to Paul’s words once again.

So I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh. For the flesh desires what is contrary to the Spirit, and the Spirit what is contrary to the flesh. They are in conflict with each other, so that you are not to do whatever you want. But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law.

Had we started this journey with Paul’s letters to the church in Corinth, we would have heard this explained this way.

All things are permitted for me, but not all things are of benefit. All things are permitted for me, but I will not be mastered by anything.

What does Paul mean by gratifying the flesh?

The acts of the flesh are obvious: sexual immorality, impurity and debauchery; idolatry and witchcraft; hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions and envy; drunkenness, orgies, and the like. I warn you, as I did before, that those who live like this will not inherit the kingdom of God.

Didn’t the law warn us against these things as well? It’s not that we must comply with a list of rules so we don’t go to hell.  It’s the Spirit of God that lives within us leads us to good living.  Like what? 

But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law. Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh 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.

Let us live by the Spirit of God that is within us.  If we will just trust God and quit fighting him when he directs our steps, we will produce good fruit:  love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.

We touched on each of these in the first service, for now we consider them collectively.

How do you know if you are winning the war between flesh and spirit?  Look at your fruit. Are you constantly in the middle of discord, jealousy, and rage?  Are you seeking to forget this world through debauchery or drunkenness?  Do hateful thoughts and emotions come back to you time and again? Is everything you do just for you and yours?

Or, and this is a big or, do you know love and joy?  Do you have a sense of peace that the world cannot understand? Do you practice self-control? Are you patient like your Father in heaven?

Let’s put this in terms you have heard many times.  Have you crucified the passions of the flesh?  Does Christ live in you?

When we say, I am crucified with Christ.  Christ lives in me, that’s what we are saying.  Is that true for us?

It seems to be such a black-and-white dichotomy, but there is a struggle. It should just be the old self is gone and the new person lives in me.  Christ lives in me.

Paul says, I get it.  We are at war with the flesh while we try to live in the Spirit.  Paul has a recurring theme of having already attained something but not yet.

I live by the Spirit but I struggle with the flesh.  I have been given right-standing with God but I struggle to live up to what he gave me.

Welcome to life.  Welcome to real life.  Welcome to abundant life. The answers come with having the law as a mentor and friend and not as your master.  Jesus is your Master.  He is Lord.  We are known as his disciples by our love.

The law may guide you but once you start living by the law because you question the gift of God that we call grace, we invite sin back into our lives. The law can either be your friend or your governor, but not both.

Jesus paid it all. All to him I owe.  Our response to this great gift is to live by the Spirit that he placed with us. It is to live by the Spirit and manifest the fruit of love.  This is how we are to live.

Once you begin to run this race, don’t let anyone or anything cut you off.  Don’t let anyone entice you back into slavery because they cannot see the great love of God that we know.

Amen.

The Fruit of the Spirit is...

 Read Galatians 5

So where have we been so far? There is no other gospel.

Salvation is by grace through faith.

The law is no longer our guardian or governor. I like to say it’s our mentor or guide to good living.

I am crucified with Christ.  Christ lives in me.

You foolish Galatians, did you really think that the law could do what Christ Jesus himself has done for you? If the law could get you to salvation, Christ died for nothing.

I could talk more about circumcision and living by the law, but let’s just jump to the good part.  What’s that?  The fruit of the Spirit, of course.

But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law. Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh 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.

The fruit of the Spirit is in concert with what Paul will call a new creation or new creature in other writings.  We are new.  The old is gone.  The new is here.

We died to the flesh.  We were crucified with Christ.  Now the Spirit of Christ lives within me.

I am crucified with Christ.  Christ lives in me.

So the Spirit of God, of Christ lives within me—what then will I produce as good fruit?

Let’s start with love.  Back in the day, punctuation wasn’t a big thing.  In fact, it wasn’t much of a thing at all.  One way to read this scripture would be to place a colon after the word love.  It would go like this.

But the fruit of the Spirit is love: joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law.

The fruit of the Spirit is love.  Those other things listed are aspects of love—joy and peace, patience and kindness, goodness and faithfulness, and gentleness and self-control.

That’s one way to look at it, or we can consider all as stand-alone qualities—the fruit of the Spirit if you will.

When we think of love, think of the scripture that says greater love has no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friend.

Jesus told us to be known by our love and he told us to love like he did.  Jesus showed us love by washing feet, healing the sick, speaking the truth to a lost people, and giving his own life for us.

When we think love, think what good is it to gain the whole world and lose your soul? Love is to take the lowly position of a servant in this life and trust that God will reward you in the next.

When we think of the fruit we call love, it is a fruit of giving and sacrifice and service.

Love is manifest in joy, even when we are sacrificing.  Our joy is in the Lord and not in our circumstances.

Love is manifest in peace.  We have a peace that goes beyond our own understanding and surely baffles the world.  We can be a humble servant in this world and know more peace than the richest or most powerful person on the planet.

Love is manifest in patience.  Let’s skip that one. I don’t have time to be patient.  Patience has to be a real challenge in the age of immediate gratification.  Patience is taking the trials of life in the context of eternity while still living in the moment.

If you can exhibit patience in this modern century, the Spirit of God must be at work in you.  That patience also applies to trusting God for answers to our prayers.

Our love is manifest in our kindness and goodness when the world says look out for number one first and foremost.  Our love is manifest in kindness when the world is doing it’s best to make us transactional.

Our love is manifest in our goodness because we know that every human has a sinful nature and we can only be good by surrendering to God’s nature.

We see love manifest in our gentleness.  We may need to speak the truth in love and that truth may be uncomfortable, but we can deliver it with the fruit of gentleness. 

The last noted fruit that I would say is also a manifestation of love is self-control.  How good is your self-control?  Drive on the interstate for an hour.  Do you feel like killing someone or can you continue your journey without thinking about who deserves what or conveying digital signals?

My cruise control automatically puts a safe distance between the car that just cut into the space-and-a-half between cars so it could arrive three-tenths of a second ahead of me. Left to my own devices, I might be riding that car’s bumper for the next few miles.

Sometimes it’s hard not to gratify the flesh.  That’s why we must surrender completely to God’s Spirit that lives within us.

Paul notes there is a battle between flesh and spirit.  Jesus having experienced human flesh for over three decades noted that the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.

How do you know if you are winning the battle?  Look for the fruit of the Spirit.

But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law. Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. Since we live by the Spirit, let us keep in step with the Spirit.

Let us keep in step with the Spirit.

Amen.

You were running a good race...

Read Galatians 5

In Matthew’s gospel, we are introduced to a term called the yeast of the Pharisees.  The disciples were in amphibious mode once again and took a boat ride with Jesus surely to land on a shore to teach and preach and who knew what else the Master had in store for them.  They had forgotten to bring bread.

I know, you think out of 12 disciples somebody might have remembered to bring a lunch.  But in fairness to the disciples, when you were following Jesus, you didn’t know if you were headed to a feast or into the wilderness.  You didn’t know if the trip would take all day or if suddenly you might find yourself on the other shore.

In any case, they had forgotten to bring bread.

Jesus, not considering the trip across the water to be transportation only but a mobile classroom as well, warned his followers to be on the lookout for the yeast of the Pharisees.

I am speculating here but I’m confident that Jesus is thinking, “I nailed that metaphor.  That was a good one.”

The disciples think, “O great.  He’s going to make an issue of this whole bread thing.  Let’s draw straws to see who is going to remind him that man does not live by bread alone.”

Jesus doesn’t get to enjoy his magic metaphor moment because he knows what his not so literary followers are thinking, so he breaks it down into fishermanspeak.

Jesus tells them directly:  I am not talking about bread but about the junk food that the Pharisees are trying to feed you when I have fed you the truth.  Don’t eat the junk.

Now let’s get back to Paul’s letter to the churches in Galatia.  We are beginning the last third of this epistle and Paul has been trying  to fit everything he can into his letter to bring these new believers back to the truth.

He says, I have been talking about freedom.  In Christ we have freedom.  Don’t be slaves to the law.  We might be thinking, hasn’t he said enough already.

Now Paul is surely thinking, what else can I say, how can I phrase this, what can I say to help these fledgling believers understand the liberty that they already enjoy in Christ and the slavery that that these knucleheads, and there is likely a chief knucklehead in charge among them, are trying to sell.

The yeast of the Pharisees would have been a good metaphor but Paul had something else in mind to get their attention.

You were running a good race.  Who cut you off?

Paul loves the race metaphor.  Paul likes to encourage believers to press on towards the goal.  The race metaphor would be just fine.  You were running a good race.  Who cut you off?

Paul does make general reference to a little yeast working through the whole batch of dough.  It doesn’t take much falsehood to dilute and pollute the truth.  Don’t consider yeast to be something bad.  Jesus also used it to explain how the Kingdom of Heaven would grow.

Paul really wants to make sure he tackles his explanation on freedom and slavery from every angle and uses whatever examples, analogies, and literary tools he can muster.

Try these few verses that we touched on last week.  This time consider them in The Message.

  It is absolutely clear that God has called you to a free life. Just make sure that you don’t use this freedom as an excuse to do whatever you want to do and destroy your freedom. Rather, use your freedom to serve one another in love; that’s how freedom grows. For everything we know about God’s Word is summed up in a single sentence: Love others as you love yourself. That’s an act of true freedom. If you bite and ravage each other, watch out—in no time at all you will be annihilating each other, and where will your precious freedom be then?

Paul is not being callous and didactic;  he’s not just directing arbitrary rules of his own.  He understands the struggle.  The Spirit and the flesh are not friends.  They fight.  They are at war and we are the battlefield.

You want to live by your human nature, then you will be drawn to the law, and you will always fall short.  Our human nature tries to enslave us in this rule following business.

But our Spirit nature—our true nature in Christ—is not subject to the law.  We live in freedom, not wondering if God still loves us or if our salvation is intact.

Just about every preacher who ventures through this scripture thinks of the story of the two wolves.  I think I first heard it being credited to a Cherokee Chief.  It is hard to know for sure where it originated.  I’m sure if Paul had known it, there would have been 7 chapters in this letter.

An old Cherokee is teaching his grandson about life. “A fight is going on inside me,” he said to the boy.

“It is a terrible fight and it is between two wolves. One is evil – he is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego.” He continued, “The other is good – he is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith. The same fight is going on inside you – and inside every other person, too.”

The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather, “Which wolf will win?”

The old Cherokee simply replied, “The one you feed.”

Paul knows as he writes these Galatian believers that they too have a war raging inside of them.  He so wants them to feed the Spirit that God placed there and let the sinful nature die.  He would like to see our sinful human nature nailed to the cross and left there.

We need to understand that we are unique creatures.  We are of the world—made of clay, of humus if you will.  Our every sense was designed to navigate this carnal world.

 

But we are also creatures that became a living soul when God breathed life into us.  We are not only creatures made out of the mud but ones that are full of God’s Spirit and made in his image.

We live in these jars of clay but we are full of God’s Spirit.

Paul did something that only the very best speakers and writers do consistently.  He anticipated the needs and questions of those to whom he was writing.  He thought through their possible responses and replies.

Paul understood that this was not going to be a rapid fire series of Facebook posts.  He was not able to Facetime with the leaders of the church.  He had to pack it all into this letter.

What did he anticipate?

His insight revealed the fact that the reaction of the Galatians to these new rules and requirements that others wanted to place on them was a natural thing, especially if you are left to your human nature.

It feels like I need to do “something” for my salvation.  Now, if Tom had been writing this letter, he would have brought in Proverbs 3:5-6.  Why?  Because the people were leaning on their own understanding.

And that is understandable even today.  We do it all the time today.  We want “God stuff” to fit into our own understanding.  It doesn’t always work that way.

Sometimes it is hard for us to understand the gift of grace and favor and the incredible love that we know in Christ Jesus.  We say we do but our nature thinks we should do something—just a little even—to earn our salvation.

Paul is doing all that he can to keep these believers from adding any conditions to their salvation—no law, no sign in the flesh, and no mandatory feasts and festivals; but he knows the people want to do something.  It’s natural.

So he says, here are some things that you can do that don’t bind you to the law.  You can do them in response to God’s great love and not in hopes of earning it.  These things will flow naturally out of you when the Spirit, not the flesh or the law, becomes your first nature.

These things will be your fruit:  Love, joy, peace, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self control.  We will leave for another day the discussion as to whether love is the umbrella over all of things or just the first among many outpourings of God’s Spirit that lives within us.

Paul goes on and reminds the Galatians and us that since we live by the Spirit, let’s get in step with the Spirit.  Let’s not fight among ourselves or envy what another believer has, but let’s be the encouragers that God wants us to be and which by his Spirit that lives within us, he has equipped us to be.

Let’s produce some fruit.

Let me deal with a couple odd comments in the mix of some wonderful guidance.  The first is Paul referring to those who continued to insist upon circumcision and his reply is just let them go all the way then and castrate themselves.

Here is your guidance on that one for the current century.  Don’t try this at home.  In the words of Forrest Gump, that’s all I’ve got to say about that.  Well, not quite.  Jesus was fan of using hyperbole.  Who can blame Paul for the same thing?  Granted Jesus limited his severing of body parts to eyes and hands, but remember that Paul is breaking out every literary tool he knows, and apparently it includes a little hyperbole.

The second talks about not inheriting the Kingdom of God and you might take this as losing your salvation.  Paul is not writing to pagans.  He is writing to believers so how do we reconcile this admonishment.

 

We do it in the context of Psalm 49 and in the context of what Jesus said about the Kingdom of God.  The psalm is a proverb made into a riddle and then into a song that has at its heart, you can’t take it with you.

The psalmist declares that we don’t need to despair when wicked people seem to be getting over on the rest of the world.  That temporary success is the only taste of heaven they will ever have.  All of their rewards will have been claimed in this life.

We who believe and live by the Spirit may know the Kingdom of God or the Kingdom of Heaven in the here and now as well as in all in fullness and surprise in the age to come.

Don’t let those sections keep you from the essence of this part of Paul’s letter to the Galatians and even to us.

We were reconciled to God by faith.  The Spirit worked in us then and it continues to work in us now.  Let the Spirit rule our lives.  We don’t have to give in to our every natural urge.  Let the Spirit rule.

How will I know that the Spirit and not my sinful nature has dominion over me?  By my fruit, the first of which happens to be love.

We don’t produce fruit to impress others or earn our salvation.  It is the natural outpouring of God’s Spirit living in us.

It is what we produce when our faith is lived out in love.

We may not be the best theologians in the country or even the county, but I think that we are running a good race of faith lived out in love.

We are running a good race of faith lived out in love.  If we stay the course, eyes fixed on Jesus, nobody will have a chance to cut us off and the inevitable result will be the fruit of the Spirit.

So let’s run our race and produce the fruit of the Spirit.

Amen!