Amen. You can be seated. Turn once again in your copy of the scriptures to Galatians chapter five. Today will be the last time we say Galatians five. In a couple of weeks, we'll finish up Galatians 6. And then I think in June, we'll move to our next chronological book in Paul's writings, and that will be 1 and 2 Thessalonians. But for today, Galatians 5, 24 to 26. If you're using the Pew copy, it's on page 975. Let's hear the word. of the living God together. Paul, after speaking about the deeds of the flesh and the fruit of the spirit says, and those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and its desires. If we live by the spirit, let us also walk by the spirit. Let us not become conceited, provoking one another, envying one another. Pray with me. Lord, we thank you for the chance to hear from you. We pray that our ears would hear, our eyes would see, our hearts would perceive, and that our hands and feet would be ready, willing, and able to go and do all that you command for your glory, our good, and for the witness of Jesus Christ before the watching world. In his mighty name we pray, amen. The $64,000 question for every believer, every Christian is this, how do I live the Christian life? How do I live the Christian life? And we want to avoid Phariseeism, we want to avoid legalism, but we also want to avoid anti-Gnomianism or lawlessness or just an unthinking or uncritical living of the Christian life. How do I live the Christian life? Well, if you ask some in our culture, they may say this, say yes to Jesus, And they don't say it this way, but it's what implied say yes to Jesus and then wait for the chariot to swing low and take you to heaven and say, yes, I prayed the prayer. I've got the card. That's one way. It's not, it's not a biblical way, but it's one way people might answer. The other would be say yes to Jesus and go to church. Say yes to Jesus. And every time those doors are opened, you better be there. Every time a committee meets, you better be on it or edit that sort of thing. Another answer would be say yes to Jesus, go to church and don't do bad things. Or at least if you do bad things, make sure the good things you do outweigh the bad. That's bad too, that's wrong. Or how about this? How do I live the Christian life? You say with Paul in Galatians 2.20, I have been crucified with Christ. Meaning my sins were placed on him at the cross And when he paid for sins through his suffering and death and the wrath of God being poured out on him instead of me for my sins, my sin nature died also. I have been crucified with Christ, Paul says in Galatians 2.20. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And so we can answer the question, how do I live the Christian life? We put our faith in the crucified Jesus. knowing that our sins and our sin nature were put to death in Him on the cross. And then it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives through me. We continue to put to death our sins, and we continue to live a resurrected life. That's the whole mortification and vivification set of terminology, isn't it? We continue to put to death our sin, And we continue to live the resurrection life. I'm going to explain this a little bit more, but back to the question, how do I live the Christian life? Well, I live it in Christ. I live it by the power of the Holy Spirit and I must daily die to sin. Now here's the question that I know comes to your mind. I'm not gonna say if, I'm gonna say since. Since Jesus died on the cross for my sins, because my sins were placed on him on the cross, since Jesus died for my sins, my sins, past, present, future, atoned for, paid for, and since my sin nature that I inherited from Adam died with him on the cross, why is it that I, who have been born again from above, still sin? Why do I need to daily crucify or mortify sin in the flesh? And that's because of what Paul teaches us. The scriptures teach us. Yes, we are born again. Yes, our sins past, present and future are forgiven. But in our life and until our dying breath, we have what Paul calls the flesh. or what is explained as remnant sin or remaining corruption. And that remaining sin, that flesh or that remnant corruption that is in us, when it partners with the devil and it partners with the world, the world and the flesh and the devil wreak havoc in our lives unless we daily put it to death, unless we daily take it to the cross. And that's where Paul in Galatians five, particularly verse 24, after the whole book, remember he's, he's yelled at the Judaizers. Don't say Jesus plus these things. give salvation. It's Jesus only give salvation. So we don't need adherence to the law and adherence to all these, uh, uh, you know, added on doodads that we like to add on in the Christian faith. Those aren't needed. You just trust Jesus. Then he's fussed at them for not living by the spirit. Some of them have said, okay, if Jesus has saved me and he's forgiven me, it doesn't matter how I live. I can do what I want. I can send my brains out. Uh, how does the song go? Um, uh, Justification, how blessed a condition, I can send all I want and still get remission. And that's the antinomian song. That's wrong. We are not to sin so that grace may abound. Remember Paul's answer to that question? By no means. In fact, it was stronger than that. Now we are to live the Christian life daily in Jesus, by the spirit, daily putting to death what is earthly in us, the sin that is in us. And so 5.24 says those who belong to Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and with its desires. And then he's going to say a few words to the Galatian church as he adds verses 25 and 26. He says, if we live by the spirit, we're not going to be conceited. And if we're conceited, Then we'll provoke one another and we will envy one another. So he's saying, if you want to keep on living by the flesh in the church, being conceited and provoking and envying one another, that's not going to be the fruit of the spirit in the church. It's going to be the fruit of the flesh. So he's going to say, we need to walk by the spirit. We need to keep in step with the spirit. But I want to go back to verse 24. That's really, really important. How do I live the Christian life? What do I need to do? daily to live the Christian life. Well, you need to rest in Jesus and his finished work. You need to rely on the Holy Spirit and his promise provision, but you need to, as Paul says here in 24, if you belong to Christ, you have crucified the flesh. And I want to compare right quick what Paul says here in 524 and back what he says in 220. In 220, he says, I have been crucified with Christ. That's past action. passive past action. God did it. I have been crucified with Christ here. He's saying, uh, those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh. It's a past action that Jesus did for us at the cross, but in the new Testament, uh, understanding because of the way the new Testament was written in the Greek language, it's a past action. crucified the flesh with ongoing and habitual work to continue that. For example, you're born, you're a baby. Do you stay a baby or do you become a juvenile and a teenager and a young adult and then an adult and then an older person? There's a progression in that. You get married, you stay married, you progress in marriage, you become a Christian, you're a baby Christian, you're a juvenile Christian, you're a mature Christian, you're an aging Christian. That's the idea here. Those who belong to Jesus have crucified the flesh, but they keep on crucifying it. with its passions and its desires. So think of the Christian life this way. You have died in Jesus and you continue to die daily. You have been crucified with Christ, but you are continually, you will and you must crucify the remaining flesh or the remnant sin in your lives. Now I want to think through a handful of ways that we need to put this into practice in our lives. I wanna stop for a moment and say a couple of things. One is, this is the thing every Christian needs to know. This is the thing every Christian wish they knew sooner. And this is the thing that the sooner we get to it by God's grace in Jesus and by the power of the Holy Spirit, we will live a more holy and pleasing and quiet and content godly life. And this will be what witnesses to the watching world. This will give you peace. This will stop your restlessness. And this will put an end to so many things in your lives. And it will be imperfect in this life, but it's what we need to do. And here's the first thing that I think the scripture calls us to do if we belong to Christ and we have and are and will crucify the flesh. We must call sin by its name. There's a book on my shelf that has a very catchy title. And it's by a medical doctor some years ago, maybe a 50 year old book. And it's called Whatever Became of Sin. And it's a medical doctor's look at Christian culture in America sometime ago. And he began to see that not only in polite company, but even in the church, we don't use the word sin. In fact, a couple of weeks ago, there's a very popular We'll use church loosely, I suppose, because what I'm about to say, we'll call that into question. But over Easter weekend, they said, we will not mention blood. Okay. Stop there. What are you? Rock concert? Who knows? We're not going to mention blood. We're not going to mention the cross. We're not going to mention sin and death and darkness and all those sorts of things. Several years ago, a man came to me, he was an elder in one of the mainline Presbyterian churches, and he says, we've just been told by the pastor that when we serve communion in the front of the church, we are not to say the blood of our Lord Jesus shed for you. What are you supposed to say? Tough it out, bud? We have lost our minds, whatever became of sin. Now we say, well, we all have shortcomings. Who are you to judge? You know, mistakes were made. That's sort of the thing we say. I love how R.C. Sproul has put sin back on the map for believers. And I love how he has also put the holiness of God back on the map for believers. And he says so well, sin is cosmic treason. Every sin, big ones, little ones, and in between. It doesn't matter if it's the little bitty, at least in our mind sin, it's an affront to God and his holiness. And it doesn't matter if it's a great big old grand sin. It's cosmic treason. And I love how the shorter catechism defines sin. Sin in two ways. Sin is falling short of the glory of God. So, you know, when you're young and you go to the roller coaster, right, you go to Carowinds or something, and it says you must be this tall, right, to ride the ride, 48 inches or whatever, so you won't fall out of their harnesses when the thing goes off the rails. And if you're not that tall, you don't measure up. And if you stand on your tippy toes, you're cheating, right? You gotta be old enough, tall enough, big enough to fit in the ride and ride it safely. So measuring up, we don't measure up to God's standard. We fall short of it. And then there's the, you know, when you're in grade school and you go out in the schoolyard and the bully, school bully draws a line in the dirt. Says, I dare you to step across that line. He's saying transgress. cross that line. And so sin is those two ideas. It's way more than that, but it's not measuring up to God's standard and it's stepping outside or across the boundaries that God has given us. And so it's not shortcomings. It's not mistakes were made. It's cosmic treason. It's transgression. It's not measuring up and do sin. because of God's holiness and his justice and his truth is his wrath and his curse. It's why when Adam and Eve went outside his boundaries, don't eat from the tree, they lost fellowship with God. They were under his wrath and curse, and they went from happy and holy to being sinful and miserable. And I love how Sinclair Ferguson in recent years has encouraged Christians to name the sin in their lives. Give it a name. Think about after 9-11, September 11, 2001, we went to war with terrorism. And do you remember when we first went to war in Iraq? The United States made a deck of playing cards and on the backs of these face cards weren't kings and queens and jokers and whatever. It was the most wanted. And so they had the aces and they had the Kings and they had the Queens and the nines and whatever else are on cards. And so as the soldiers who were overseas in tents and in camps would be playing cards, they would over and over see the faces of those who are the most wanted. And I think in a sense, we may need to make a deck of cards for our own lives. I'm discontent with what I've got, so I go after what other people have. That's coveting. Call it what it is. I covet, Lord. Or we lust after something, or we pine away for something, or we use language we shouldn't use, or we have an attitude that's not godly, or whatever that thing is. Make a most wanted list and kill it. Put a bullet in it, put an arrow in it, put a knife in it, put an ax to its root, whatever it is, but name the sin and seek to crucify it. But also, and importantly, ask God by his word and spirit to help you cultivate the opposite, the spiritual fruit in your lives. I have a wonderful little book It's called putting off and putting on. And it goes through about 150 or so named sins in the scripture. And it lets you, if you find that thing and it's you, you circle it and it says fruit to be cultivated, thing to be repented of and all the rest. And so if you have an issue with anger, work on kindness and self-control. If you have a struggle with bitterness, work on the fruit of mercy. If you're a cheater, Ask God to make you honest. If you're a covetor, ask God to help you be content and thankful. If you're a divisive person, may God make you a peacemaker. If you're lazy, be diligent. If you have uncontrolled thoughts, live a self-controlled and upright life. If you are seeking to please yourself, stop and turn and begin to please God. If you are sinning sins in the body, you remember that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit. And on and on, you can read through this list of biblical sins and biblical fruit. But we need to call sin by its name. We do not need to water it down. We don't need to downplay it. We need to crucify it. So we call it by name. And then secondly, we crucify it. You think about the cross. We just got through Easter and we thought about the life and the ministry and the suffering and the passion and the atoning death of Jesus at the hands of first Almighty God. It was the will of God that he be bruised for our iniquities and chastised for our sins. It was the will of God to lay on him the punishment that was due us. Because he is the eternal lamb of God who could take away our sins. But it was the Romans who crucified him. It was the Romans who beat him. It was the Romans who made him carry that cross. It was the Romans who nailed him to the cross. And as he was stretched out on the cross. It was a slow and painful death. You could not, because of the position of your body and the condition of your body, you could not breathe. And for a while you could push yourselves up and down until they broke the bones in your legs. And because your arms were stretched out, you slowly died because you could not breathe. You were asphyxiated. Now remember Christ, because of the Psalms, promised not a bone in his body would be broken. But you do remember they pierced him with a spear. And so we'll see in heaven, the five bleeding wounds, the hands, the feet, and the side. We will see the lamb as though he had been slain, who is worthy to open up the scroll and to take up its seals and to bring us safely home into the glorious eternal presence of almighty God. It wasn't the beating and the nails that killed Jesus. Yes, they played a role in his true body. but it was the weight of the wrath and the curse of God for every named sin that was ours that was placed on him at the cross. And you remember the charges placed over his head by Pontius Pilate, Jesus Christ in three languages, King of the Jews, and remember one group says, no, no, no, don't put that. Put the man who said he was the King of the Jews. And Pilate says, I have written, what I have written. And so when we name our sins and seek to crucify it, and I don't mean this in a funny way at all, but you need to think judicially in your mind. You need to put in your Bible reading and your thoughts and your prayers and your ponderings, you need to put your sin on trial and you need to say God's righteous law says this. My life and my spirit and my desires and my flesh are showing that and it doesn't measure up and it transgresses God's law. And I hereby sentence this sin in my life to death. Yes, I've been crucified with Christ. Yes, my sins were nailed to the cross and paid for. Yes, I have a new life in Jesus, my old nature. has been changed by the spirit and through the merits and the work of Jesus. And yes, the old man is gone and the new man has come, but that remaining sin in us needs to daily be put on trial and condemned and crucified and given a slow lifelong death. We'll deal with the flesh till our dying day. You will breathe your last breath, living with remaining sin and corruption. But as ugly as the cross is in our minds with Jesus on it, it needs to be that ugly in our lives because sin is so. And we need to starve it, we need to crucify it, and we need to let it die. The famous Puritan theologian John Owen said this, be killing sin or it will be killing you. So we call sin by name, we crucify it. Now I want to speak positively here. We need to third, cultivate fruit. If we name sin, we also need to name the fruit. Now in Galatians 5, and the list in scripture can be more exhaustive, it says the fruit of the flesh is sexual immorality. It's impurity, it's sensuality, it's idolatry, it's sorcery. It's enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness. orgies, and then it gives a catch all and things like these. And it goes on to say, if you do these things, you will not inherit the kingdom. Not because your sins aren't forgiven in Jesus. It's because people who do these things aren't saved. It's the fruit of the flesh. It's the fruit of life in Adam and not the fruit of being in Jesus Christ. But he gives an important, but the fruit of the spirit is, and we went through these week by week, love, joy, peace, patience. kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. And I know we probably got lost in the weeds or lost in the forest for the trees, going through each of these aspects of the fruit of the spirit. But these are the character of Jesus given to us. These are the life of Jesus given to us. You don't wake up and put a sticky note on the bathroom mirror saying, today be more loving. You want to think about it, you want to pray for it, but it's God himself who gives you the spirit of Christ to make you more loving or joyful or peaceful or patient and all the rest. Now we've talked about this crucify metaphor. I want to leave it for a moment and give you two other metaphors that come in the scripture. One is we need to put off our old man. We need to put off the old nature, the things that we once were and still have remnants of in us. We need to put that off and put on Jesus Christ. We need to put on compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, patience, and love. That's what Paul writes to the Colossians. So there's a crucify metaphor. We need to put to death daily in our lives, those remnants of sin and corruption that pop up. We also need to put off the old man and put on the new man. But there's also this idea of weed out sin, root out sin and cultivate fruit. So there's a garden metaphor. There's a vineyard metaphor. Several weeks back on Sunday night when we did Isaiah chapter five, we looked at the parable of the vineyard where God said, uh, I took Israel out of the nations and I planted them as a choice vineyard. I got the most perfect hillside with the most perfect soil and it had the best sunshine and the best year round weather. And I, I went to, um, the garden center. And I bought the choicest grape plants. I didn't get the chintzy ones. I didn't go to the discount garden center and get the dead ones. I gave it all I could. And I cultivated it. I tended it. I built a wall. I had a gardener. I built a tower to watch over it and keep enemies out. I even built a wine press, because after the grapes came, I was going to press them out, and I was going to have the best wine in the world. but I got sour grapes, God says. Then he says, what should I do with my vineyard? I'll tear it down. I'll break down its walls. Enemies will come in to destroy it. And he's talking about Babylon coming in and destroying the land and taking the people out. And what God is saying, and now we can see through our life in Jesus Christ, God gives us everything. He plants us on a fertile hill. He gives us sunshine. We're the choicest of plants. There's nothing that we need for the Christian life that he's not given us or told us we could ask for. And what do we return to him? Sour grapes. We don't read our Bibles. We don't come to church. We don't sit under the word. We quench the Holy Spirit. We cultivate deeds of the flesh and not deeds of the spirit. It's our sin nature in us. It's our spiritual laziness in us. It's the influence of the world. It's the influence of the devil. And I'm saying to you all, it's really hard to live the Christian life. There is no magic bean. There is no pill to pop. There is no formula except the dying daily. Remember, Jesus, when he spoke to those who would listen, He says, if anyone would follow after me, they must daily deny themselves the flesh and take up their cross, putting to death their deeds and their desires and following me. Remember when he says, if your right hand is causing you to sin, you should cut it off. If your right eye is causing you to sin, you should gouge it out. He's saying you need to starve it. You need to cut it off. You need to get rid of it. You need to get rid of the thing that is killing you because God doesn't want sour grapes followers. He wants fruit bearing, fragrant, life-giving people. Now, why is this so hard? Well, we said we need to name our sin. We need to call it by name. We need to crucify it. We need to cultivate the fruit. But now we want to answer the question, why is this so hard? Why is gardening cursed? That's the question. Why is gardening cursed? Remember Adam and Eve lived in Eden. They lived in paradise. They had beauty. They had goodness. They had perfection. They had God. They had one another. They had family. They had worship. They had God's law and his boundaries. But then Satan came slithering into paradise and they were happy and holy and living for God. They had fellowship with him. They worshiped him. They had work and they had family. They didn't have yet thorns and thistles and pain and struggles and strife. And Satan came in the garden and said to Eve, God is not enough. He's holding back from you. You can be a God. You could know good and evil. You could have your best life now. God is not enough, and so Eve saw the fruit, she took the fruit, she ate the fruit, and she gave some also to Adam, who was with him. Their eyes were open, they realized their shame spiritually, but also physically, because they went to the fig tree and took leaves, and in a self-righteous, self-covering way, they said, this will cover our shame for sure. Yet they still had to hide from the eye. the presence of the almighty and all knowing God. They were hiding among the trees. He came down for daily fellowship, couldn't find them. He knew where they were. But what did he say? Where are you? We're hiding among the trees. Why are you hiding among the trees? Did you eat the fruit? Yes, we thought we could be gods unto ourselves and get away with it. We thought we could transgress your law and it'd be okay because sin isn't that big a deal. We thought we could not measure up because you'd be okay with that. and God killed an animal and covered them and their sins with skins of a garment of an animal whose life had be taken. Now, remember in the garden, it was possible for Adam and Eve to not sin. They could have never eaten from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and they would have lived forever in righteousness and holiness and in beauty and splendor, no stubbing the toes, no hitting your fingers with a hammer. Every time you planted a seed, it would grow perfectly and produce well. I mean, they had wonderful opportunity. And what Adam should have done in the garden, because it was also possible for them to not sin, it was possible for them to say no to Satan. What Adam should have done is what we've just been talking about, crucifying the flesh. He should have said, okay, look, Satan, I hear what you're saying, but you're wrong. God has a law and we will live within its boundaries. God has a standard and we want to meet it. And therefore you are sinning against God and I hereby condemn you to death. And a good old garden hoe would have ended all our sin and misery that we now experience because what he did has now come to us. That would have been mortification of sin. That would have been killing the serpent, slaying the dragon, stopping the madness before it took over. And Adam and Eve would have lived forever in righteousness and the glory of God would have spread across the whole face of the earth. But now because of Satan and Adam, it is possible only for people to sin before Jesus Christ. Satan lied, they said yes, and here entered worship me and serve me in curses and sin nature. And as the writer of Genesis tells us before Noah, there was only evil continually, only evil all the time. Now, thanks be to God for Christ, that in Christ our sins are pardoned. And in the Holy Spirit, our sin, our remnant sin, our sin nature is subdued. And the Christian life is one of gardening. It's weeding it out and letting the fruit grow, but it's under the curse. We still have passions. We still have appetites. We still have lust of the eyes, lust of the flesh. We still have the pride of life. And often we can find ourselves living ungoverned, following unbridled those passions, which the world, the devil and the flesh offer us. But Romans chapter eight, Paul says, we are to put that to death. It is to die daily. It is to die every time it pops up. But our desires, need to follow in the commandments of God. And we need to do things lawfully and in moderation and for God's glory so that sin will not give birth in our lives. We and our neighbors share a wisteria problem. And I think I know where it comes from. It comes from the woods up the hill from us, but it spreads through a couple of our yards. And it in fact grows under concrete through our yard and it comes out towards the front. And every time it pops up, you've got to chop it. But the best way to get rid of it would be to go find its root and cut it at the root. And it can pop up sometimes as beautiful green vine with wonderful and fragrant purple flowers, but it is a pest. And sometimes sin looks good, doesn't it? Sometimes it looks enticing. In fact, that's why C.S. Lewis gave sin for Edmund and the White Witch. It was all the Turkish delight that you could want, but it killed him. It froze him. It took away his spiritual vitality. And so brothers and sisters, we are called living under the curse of gardening under sin. We are given the curse and the difficulty of battling daily, our own remnant sin, the flesh, the desires of the world, the temptations of Satan. And this is how we need to live the Christian life. In Jesus Christ, by the power of the Holy Spirit, with the ingredients for success God promises. We are people of the word. We are people of the sacrament. We are people of prayer. We are people of fellowship. And we are people who fight and we garden and we battle daily through our daily disciplines, the Christian life. Now, I want to say this very clearly. Just because you come to church, just because you pray. Just because you hear the word or take the sacraments or read your Bible or get on your knees or whatever does not mean you will succeed. It's not Catholic, right? Ex opere operato. In the doing of the thing, the thing happens. It needs to be spirit blessed. It needs to be under the hard work of your daily discipline, but God blessing it by his spirit. Now there's a reality. in addition to our daily dying to sin that we need to understand. And it's this, our remnant sin is left in us for a reason. Our remaining corruption is left in us that we might be chastised for our former sins, not in an eternal way, but a temporal way. God is saying, look at what you are apart from Jesus. It's ugly, isn't it? It's also left in us to humble us. You think of King David, all that he was, and he lost it all through his sin with Bathsheba, but in his older days, he was more humble and grateful and godly. Or you think about Peter after he denied Jesus three times, what a better servant he was. And so God in his mercy, God in his providence, God in his purposes, he uses these things to humble us, to make us more like Christ, to be more watchful, To be more aware, to be sure not to neglect the means of grace and to remember that, say like in King David's life, if you quench the spirit and neglect the means of grace and you fool around, sin can break out in your life and it can wreak havoc in your life. And if you don't kill sin, it will fill in the blank. It will kill you. And so whatever you got to do, you got to shoot it. You got to chop it off with a hoe. You've got to poison it. You've got to uproot it. You've got to do whatever it takes, but it is all by the merits of Jesus. It is all by the power of the spirit. And yes, it is through the discipline of the Christian using the means that God gives word, sacrament, prayer, fellowship, and suffering. So what's the secret? to the Christian life. It's the cross. Way back then, 2000 years ago, but every day in the Christian's life, pray with me. Lord, we pray that you would help us to be watchful, to be diligent, to be merciless, naming sin, crucifying and condemning sin and cultivating fruit in our lives and let us not lose heart when there's rocks in the garden and weeds among the plants, and help us not to lose heart when Satan bombards us and the world entices us, but help us to keep our eyes on heaven, our eyes on the cross, and to die daily as we seek to live for you. Help us and bless us, we pray. In Christ's mighty and holy name, amen.