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OK, so we're going to look at
Galatians five, nineteen through twenty six this morning. As we try to put these within
the context of the larger part of the passage, but this week
I want to focus especially on the things that are in these
two lists and. And the differences between.
The works of the flesh and the fruit of the spirit didn't get
a lot of time to do that last week, and I I thought that it
would be important to look again at these things. So in these
seven verses or so, the word flesh and the word spirit are
actually very significant, but they're also significant throughout
the rest of the New Testament. And if you were to do an Old
Testament search, you would find especially fruit is found everywhere. The term flesh is used a little
bit differently in the Old Testament than it is in the New. But this
is a major theme of the entire Bible. The word flesh is the
word sarks, and it occurs in twenty two of the twenty seven
New Testament books. That was my count anyway. This
week, a total of around one hundred and fifty times. The word fruit
is the word car parts. And it occurs in 18 of the New
Testament books, a little over seventy five times. So that's
quite a bit of information that we could draw upon if we were
I'm going to look in a lot of detail and say class or something
at these two things. Now, in our passage, these two
words show two sources from which a person might commit an action. And we see, of course, that the
flesh is the source of no good actions, but only fragrant, flagrant
acts of disobedience and sin. And they are called works of
the flesh. But in the passage as well, fruit
comes from another source and it produces only good things,
God honoring actions. In this list, there is no hint
that the flesh ever produces a good action. And I want you
to keep that in your mind. It never produces a good action
or that fruit from the other source ever produces a bad one.
And I think that you would be hard pressed to find anything
different anywhere else in the Bible. And that would take a
long search, but best as I thought, I couldn't think that the flesh
is ever put in terms of look at the good things that it produces.
And I say this to you because it leads to a difficulty. The difficulty is that Christians
do display works of the flesh and non-Christians display some
form of the fruit of the spirit. And what I want to ask is, how
do we rightly understand this? The answer to the Christian's
dilemma is something that I talked about last week, actually, for
quite a while. And it's that we live between two ages, as
I told you about. We've been raised with Christ,
and yet our bodies have not been raised from the dead. So I won't
go into that anymore. The answer to the non-Christian's
dilemma might surprise you. I think it begins by thinking
about the fact that they are image bearers in Genesis. You have to remember also that
it is the Holy Spirit who gave life to the man and the woman
in Genesis, not just to Christians, but to all people. The spirit
works in a general way to convict the world of sin. We learn in
John 16. And he comes upon pagans like
Balaam and Cyrus in the Old Testament so that they can prophesy and
help God's people. And we don't have any indication
that either one of them was ever saved. Now, since the flesh cannot
produce anything good, and since the Holy Spirit comes in some
way upon all people, We have to conclude, therefore, that
when unbelievers display fruit like love and patience and kindness,
that it has to be the work of the Holy Spirit in some kind
of common grace. And so I want to ask, what is
the difference between the two people? That's really the key
question, because the Holy Spirit does not come upon all people
in the same way. For Christians, the fruit that
they bear demonstrates their repentance and acknowledgement
of utter dependence upon the Holy Spirit to regenerate them
and to give them life. But for nonbelievers, as John
Owen says in his great work on the Holy Spirit, he says, quote,
Some indeed receive him in a sort or in a way as to some ends and
purposes without any advantage, finally, to their own souls. So do they who prophesy and cast
out devils by the power of the name of Christ and yet continuing
workers of iniquity are rejected at the last day in the quote.
It is the source and acknowledgment of the Holy Spirit that makes
us differ and of Christ and of the father, and those differences
are going to continue not just until we die, but on through
all of eternity. Now, this morning we will look
at two conflicting sets of actions. and at the source of each of
them. And the first set of actions are vices familiar to the New
Testament in many different lists to ancient Jews, to the Greek
world and beyond. It's one of the reasons why I
wanted to tell you that, you know, it's not just Christians
who talk about doing these things. These things are specific applications
of the Ten Commandments, which are things forbidden by God that
all people know because they are written on their hearts.
There are 15 things that are mentioned in this list, and it's
not an exhaustive list by any means, because Paul concludes
the list by saying and other such things. Some have tried
to categorize the list, and the most popular categories are into
four, where the first three are sins of sensuality and the second
is two sins of worship, heathen worship. The third set are eight
sins having to do with conflict. And then the last is two sins
having to do with drunkenness. And that's if you want to categorize
them. It might just be that this is a general list like a grocery
list that might have some order to it, but it's mostly just jotted
down as things come to mind. And of course, in your mind,
things often come together. So let me go through these words
and give you the Greek word for each of them. It's kind of fun
to think about the roots of these words, because a lot of these
words you can recognize by some of the English words that we
have. The first word in the list is pornea. And it is sometimes
used narrowly of prostitution, especially temple prostitution.
And sometimes it's used broadly of immoral sexual relationships.
And so the ESV has sexual morality. In the Greek world as today,
this vice was so common that it was generally not viewed as
very bad at all, except when carried to excess. William Barclay
in his commentary writes, it is significant that it is with
this sin that Paul begins. The sexual life of the Greco-Roman
world in the New Testament times was lawless chaos. Paul lived
in a world in which such sin was rampant, and in that world
Christianity brought men an almost miraculous power to live in purity. The second word is a catharsia. And this word can mean dirtiness
in the physical sense or pass or impurities in the medical
sense or uncleanliness in a ritual sense or lack of purity and loose
looseness in a moral sense. And it is often used with ceremonial
uncleanness in the Old Testament. And as the first word, it seems
to have sexual connotations here, though it can also refer to just
general error. In some places in the New Testament,
the ESV renders this word as impurity. The next word is a
salvia, and the word denotes licentiousness or debauchery,
or as Barclay puts it, a love of sin so reckless and so audacious
that a man has ceased to care what God or man thinks of his
actions. It can refer to exhibiting oneself as in that idiot flasher
caught this week in Boulder who said that as soon as they release
him, he's going to do it again. But it can also refer to any
devising of lascivious behavior, and so the ESV translates it
as sensuality. Now, these three words speak
to our own sensual, sensually supercharged, sexually explicit
Western culture. that has uncanny parallels to
the ancient Greek and Roman cultures. Paul says that we are especially
to watch out for this because every other sin that's committed
outside is committed outside the body. But these sins are
committed against the body, which is the temple of the Holy Spirit.
It's evident that these things are wrong and we are not to do
them. So that's the first of the four categories. Now, starting with the second
category, The word is idolatria. And it obviously means idolatry,
although this word is never used in classical Greek or in the
Septuagint, Paul uses it with reference to an image of God.
Or to the worship of another god, and so the first and second
commandments are wrapped up in it. It also has is used with
regard to eating food that has idolatrous associations. Or it
can be used more generally in the New Testament of just covetousness
or being greedy. And the last use of the word
is interesting because it connects the first and last commandments
together, like a chain is linked with the fastener. If you break
any one commandment, you break them all. Now, there's a second
word in this list if you go by it, and I tend to think that
these categories are probably at least worthy to think about.
The word is pharmacia, and we get our word pharmacy from it. Now, it can be a neutral meaning,
but here it probably refers to the use of drugs for poison or
the use of sorcery or witchcraft. And so sorcery is the word that
the ESV chooses to give it. It clearly has otherworldly implications,
as the 60s proved with the world that had forgot to the world
that forgotten that certain drugs are doorways through to the realm
of forbidden things. They do things to our souls that
are unnatural and they allow contact with creatures that are
malevolent and powerful and do not have our best interests in
mind. We are to stick with the common ordinary communication
of God that he gave to us through the word and sacrament. Now, we're going to start the
third list, and it's a long one at three, I is the word, and
it begins. This list with the word that
means enmity, hostility or hatred, and the ESB gives it the definition
of enmity. Now, this is not the word for
hating that Jesus uses for hating your brother in your heart. It's
an even harsher word that depicts the relationship to God when
a person is a friend to the world. He says that if you're a friend
of the world, you are an enmity, hostility to God and James. The next word is Eris, and it
means strife or discord or quarreling or wrangling or contention. In
the ESV, it gives the definition strife and clearly this word
in the previous word and the several that follow have to do
with how people treat one another and think about one another in
the context of Galatians. This would have to be focused
primarily and especially on their relationships with others in
the church. And so I wonder and ask out loud,
have you ever been in a church where people acted With discord
and quarreling and contentions towards one another, churches
are not immune to those kinds of things. The next word is zealous,
and the word can refer to noble passion like a zealot or negatively
can refer to envy. It can mean intense devotion
to God or to some other person or thing. It can refer to anger
arising out of such devotion. It can refer to jealousy. That's
what the ESV has, which is an unfriendly feeling about somebody
else's well-being or envy or coveting, having what is not
yours, but which belongs to somebody else. And it's obviously closely
tied to the last few of the Ten Commandments. Fumoi is the next
word. The word has a good and a negative
sense, like so many of these words do. It can refer to courage.
We're going to refer to fits of anger. It is used for God's
wrath, it is used for Satan's rage, and it's also used for
human rage. And here it clearly refers to
the last of those three. This is unbridled anger that
shoots up like Mount St. Helens erupting. Have you ever
had this kind of uncontrolled anger come out of you? Eretheia is the next word, and
it's used in Aristotle for canvassing for office or for seeking office. Pretty interesting word. More
generally, it's used for working for wages. And those are all
kind of just neutral meanings. But over time, this word took
on a negative meaning, which is something like self-seeking
or selfish devotion to one's own interests or selfish ambition.
I thought nothing has ever changed. You think about politics and
how the word, which just meant seeking office, all of a sudden
becomes seeking your own self worth. It seems to me exactly
what's happening in our political landscape today. The ESB has
the word rivalries. which can certainly be caused
by self-serving interests, especially when we think about some of these
other words in it at the same time. The next word is Vickostasiae
and this word means dissensions in the ESV or seditions. The only other occurrence of
it is in Romans 16, where Paul warns the church to watch out
for those who cause divisions. The word certainly applies to
the circumcision party that is attempting to split the churches
of Galatia. The next word is Arisace, it
can mean a choice or a plan or preference or purpose. That doesn't
seem to be a sense here because that's just neutral in meaning,
but it can also mean taking captive or capture. And so the ESV has
divisions. Different parties within Judaism
that you have all heard of the Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes
and Zealots are different divisions and they were at hostility with
one another. And the churches kind of have
the same thing, although not necessarily evil denominations
have certainly tended in the past to act. As divisions. And so it could refer to party
spirit within a church or causing divisions by grouping together
into different factions or political parties within the church that
is opposed to another group of people. Not only the church,
but individual churches have seen a lot of this throughout
the centuries, and in fact, it's frankly the reason why we have
almost all of our church splits today. Paul addresses it in this
word right here, and he says it's a work of the flesh. Most
people seem to think nothing of it, but it's listed in the
same category as sorcery and sexual morality. And that leads
me to a point. Big sins is what we would usually
think of the first group and the second group and small sins,
which is the way we kind of tend to treat these in the third list. They're all together. There's
no picking and choosing which sins you can enter into and which
are really offensive and which are acceptable. In God's eyes,
sin is sin. John Piper on his Facebook yesterday
posted a little blurb. He goes, so I can remember it.
Have you ever committed the sins of Eve or Lot's wife? Just a bite and a glance. Think about it. Sin is sin. Fully half of the sins in this
list have to do with how we treat one another in church. The next word is fathanoi, and
the last this word means ill will or malice or envy. Envy
seems to dominate the New Testament usage. It's closely related to
jealousy. Clearly, God cannot stand abuse
like this within the body of Christ. And so you're not to
treat each other in these ways. Now, the last of the four categories,
the first word is meth and it can mean strong drink or drunkenness,
a strong drink, while not forbidden in the scripture, certainly leads
to drunkenness, which is forbidden in the scripture. Why is drunkenness
so bad? It's because it makes a person
lose control. Think about what happened to
Noah as soon as he got off the ark. Drunkenness opens the tongue
to all manner of wicked speech. It causes people to make decisions
that they might not otherwise make. It makes foolish people
and stupid people. It causes chemical addictions
that ruin families and children and relationships, all while
making the person think that there's not really a problem.
Basically, of all the other sins that are listed here, they're
all enhanced by drunkenness. Maybe that's why he puts it at
the end. And then the very last word is come away. This word
means reveling or carousing or orgies is the way the ESV has
it. And these were often related
to pagan worship, such as the cult of Dionysus, and it does
have a certain fit with drunkenness that also kind of brings us full
circle back to the first part of the list. So those are the
words in the list. What do we notice about it, about
these things? Let me give you some thoughts.
The first one is that, as I said, it covers a broad range of sins. Second, it puts big sins in the
same categories, little sins, because in reality, there's no
such thing. Third, some of these words have
positive meaning, but each of them is being used for a destructive
end. The fourth half of these things
deal with violent, hateful, divisive actions in the church. And fifth,
these are all works of the flesh. Now, what each of these sins
has at its absolute base is a love for self and disdain for others,
sexual sins, treat the other sex as an object to be conquered
rather than divine image bearers. Sins of worship seek guidance
explicitly forbidden by God, often for the power and puffing
up with a person that's participating in it. Sins of anger and jealousy,
divisions and the like are ways that we treat each other as subhuman.
There are ways to usurp the power structure that God has ordained
in the fellowship God wants in his church. Sins of drunkenness
are a sign that a person no longer cares about themselves, but rather
abandon self to other things, which is ironic because it ends
up being just as selfish as the other things as the self-pity
of the drunk is still selfish. After he completes the list,
Paul gives an ominous warning. And I didn't feel like it dealt
with this long enough last week, and I think it's pretty important
that we think about it. This is in verse twenty one.
I warn you, as I warned you before, that those who do such things
will not inherit the kingdom of God. With things. The works of the flesh. And you remember what Paul says,
flesh and blood shall not inherit the kingdom of God. It's similar
to this. In that same passage, that's
first Corinthians 15, he tells us that even heavenly beings
have a kind of flesh, just as Jesus has a kind of flesh in
his resurrected body. So some kind of flesh inherits
the kingdom of God. So if some flesh can inherit
another flesh can't, what is going on in this passage? Paul tells us that the problem
is that Our flesh is perishable, sown in dishonor, in weakness. It is natural. He says Adam was
created a living being. But Jesus, who has a new flesh
that inherits the kingdom, is a life giving spirit with a spiritual
body that's raised in glory and power and imperishable. Adam came from the dust. And
what does God say to the dust? You will return. Jesus has been
raised forever and has ascended into heaven. This is, in a nutshell,
what all things in the flesh do, they cannot inherit that
which is eternal because they are temporary. They must be raised
from the dead and sown as imperishable seed. This warning is not talking
about Christians who do deeds of the flesh. I want you to think
about some of the Christians that do some of these deeds of
the flesh already gave you one Noah. If drunkenness can't get
you into heaven, no, it's not going to be in heaven. How about
sexual sins, David and Solomon? They're not going to be in heaven.
How about all sorts of factions and trouble within a body so
much for the twelve brothers of. Joseph, the sons of Jacob,
you see, if you want to just pick on the list and say the
things here is what the problem, it goes much deeper than that,
friends. Paul acknowledges in other places,
as I began with this morning, that Christians do deeds of the
flesh. But something has changed with
us. This is the one I gave you last week to think about in 1
Corinthians 6. We were washed, we were sanctified,
we were justified. And the key is the tense of the
verb. The verb is were. Past tense. How does this occur? It occurs
through faith and repentance. And so Calvin says Paul does
not threaten that all who have sinned, but that all who remain
in penitent shall be excluded from the kingdom of God. The
saints themselves often fall into grievous sins, but they
return to the path of righteousness and therefore they are not included
in this catalog. In a different passage, Paul
says, while we now listen, while we were living in the flesh,
our sinful passions aroused by the law were at work in the members
to bear fruit for death. But now that we are released
from the law, having died to that which held us captive so
that we serve in the new way of the spirit and not in the
old way of the written code. That's in Romans seven, and it
offers a nice transition from the first part of our text this
morning to the second part of our passage. The first thing
it does is it shows us what we were. We were living in the flesh,
but no more. That's what he says in Romans
seven. You were living in the flesh, but no more. And yet that's
the very contradiction that I spoke about last week for almost the
whole sermon. We are still in the flesh, and yet we are not
living in the flesh. And the explanation for that
is legal and mystical. Legally, we died to the law. How? Through mystical dying with
Christ. We have been united to him through
faith in a legal declaration that we are not guilty and that
his righteousness is now our righteousness. And mystically,
we've been raised with him in his resurrection. So Paul can
say, it is no longer I who live, but Christ who live in me. which
he says earlier in our very letter in Galatians chapter two, so
that the life I live, I now live in the flesh by faith in the
Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me. See, Paul's not
crazy. He's not contradicting himself.
He understands the tension between the two ages, and he deals with
it when you start looking at these broader ideas throughout
the rest of his writings and even earlier on in our very letter.
So we both live in the flesh and yet we don't live in the
flesh because it is both I who live and yet Christ lives in
me, though I have not died, I have died. And though I have not yet
been raised, I have been raised because Christ went before me
and did those things. And God has united me to him
in mystical union. Pretty remarkable, isn't it?
You could spend the rest of your life thinking about these things.
In verse twenty six of our passage here, he says, those who belong
to Christ have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. If something's crucified, what's
its state? It is dead. In Corinthians, he
says, we walk in the flesh, but we are not waging war according
to the flesh. So you see, you can keep going
back and forth like this. We have divine power to destroy
strongholds and arguments and lofty opinions and everything
that wages war against our flesh, he says. So that's one transition
moving from the works of the flesh to the fruit of the spirit.
Second, in the Roman seven passage, it says that the works of the
flesh bear fruit for death. I thought that was an interesting
phrase fruit for death. This is what Paul talks about
next in Galatians, only this time it's the fruit of life and
the fruit of the Holy Spirit. He's the source of the fruit,
not the flesh. It is the source of the works
of the flesh that is the world, the flesh and the devil versus
the source of the fruit, which is the Holy Spirit. That's the
real contrast that's going on here. The second set of actions,
then, are virtues. Also familiar to the New Testament,
to ancient Jews, to the Greek world and beyond. There are things
against which there is no law, and they are as follows. I'm
going to do the same thing I did before. The first word is agape
and it means love. And it is a word, believe it
or not, that you cannot find in classical Greek. They divided
love into three categories, as I'm sure you've heard many sermons
on this. If you're like me, I've heard a lot of sermons on this.
The three categories were brotherly love, physical love and familial
love. They are Philea. What is Philadelphia? The city of brotherly love. They
are Eros, which is a physical love, erotic. And then they are
Storge, which is a kind of a familial love that you have as a bond
between brothers and sisters and things like that. The kind
of love in mind with Agape has encyclopedias worth of information
written about it. You've heard a lot about it,
it's a favorite topic of evangelicals, and it's a very good thing. Agape
is the kind of love that God himself has, which is expressed
in John 3, 16, that God so loved the world. In our passage in
Galatians 5, it's defined these ways, faith expressing itself
through love, so it has to have faith. Through love, serve one
another, so it's a serving of other people, it's not just selfish.
It has other people in mind. Love your neighbor as yourself.
It is a selfless, unconditional, serving love that always does
not just once, not just feels, but does the best for other people. It is the highest moral end that
you can achieve. All other virtues have it at
their heart. And so I think there's a reason why he begins with love,
because love is part of all the rest of the things in this list.
Kara comes next, and it's the word joy. Joy is something highly
esteemed in the Greek pagan world. And it's even used in the old
world as a proper name, just like we use it in our day to
day. You've met somebody named Joy,
probably. It's connected with happiness
that resulted in finding your way between extremes in the midst
of pleasant circumstances. But Christians came along and
used the word in a new way that incorporated not only pleasant
things, but unpleasant circumstances, trials and sufferings. You can
have joy in the midst of this. So what does Paul say? Rejoice
in the Lord always. Again, I say rejoice. It's the
same word. And you think of something like
Buddhism that will tell you that you can have joy in the midst
of suffering, but they do something very different with that. They
deny that suffering is real. A big problem. Christians embrace
suffering as real. and find its meaning in the suffering
and death of Christ. And therefore, we can have joy
like nobody else can have joy. The third word is arena, and
it means peace. Now, peace is the universal quest
of humanity. Something that they're always
seeking, but never quite able to find, not quite able to grasp. The Middle East cannot get peace.
The United Nations will never bring peace. Treaties are worthless
in a world full of treachery and distrust. But God gives peace. And this is not merely the absence
of war or pain or trouble of mind. It is a word that epitomizes
the perfection of relationships. To have peace here is to know
that God not only doesn't hate you, but that he has positively
been reconciled to you as your friend and your father. So it's
not just the absence of war, it's the presence of a positive
relationship. Macro thumia is the next word.
It means patience. It means steadfastness, patience,
long suffering in the face of persecution or provocation. Now,
when someone is out to get you, when trials come your way, when
things are not going the way that you'd like, when the enemy
is at the door, when the government is dissolving around your feet,
when the teacher is being unreasonable in school, when you're being
egged on to commit some sin with others on the playground or in
church. Patience is a fruit of the spirit. It is exhibited toward
other people in the way that you treat them. whether they
are in front of you or not. So it's not just kind of a I'm
going to bear with it and not say anything. Patience is actually
something flows out of being patient. And I think that's where
some of these next words come in. Christosis is kindness. The word means excellence, refers
to things like goodness, honesty, kindness when referring to people.
It is found throughout classical Greek. I got the Sunni is goodness. It is like a copy, it's found
only in the Bible, it's a synonym for kindness when you act kindly
or goodly or acting for the benefit or betterment of somebody else
in a way that is not obligatory, like you have to do it or begrudgingly
kicking your feet in the ground while you do it. It is acting
goodness freely and willingly. That comes out of being patient.
Pistis is the word that's usually translated as faith. We are saved
by faith, but it's also translated faithful. It has its roots in God, who
is faithful. And because of its placements
in a list like this, it doesn't refer to faith in God, but to
faithfulness towards other people. It's the opposite of being treacherous
or untrue or an apostate or cheating or adulterous or disloyal. Faithful
are the wounds of a friend. Those who are faithful will have
friendships wherever they go. Proutis, this word means gentleness,
it signifies mildness or consideration or modesty in dealing with people. It is teachable and submissive
and humble. It is the opposite of being harsh
and ruthless and cruel and merciless. And yet it is not the inability
to get angry or have emotions. Like some kind of a stoic. Or
a Vulcan. Aristotle defined it as somewhere
in the middle, a gentle and quiet spirit is beautiful in God's
eye. Edkratia is a word that means
self-control. It was talked about all the time
by the ancient Greeks. It's the opposite of overindulgence,
whether it's in food or sex or anything else. It's the ability
to keep yourself under control of your passions, be they lust
or anger or covetousness or pride or any of the vices or any good
passion that you can use to access. And so it's fitting to complete
the list with a word that means self-control. Now, one of the
things I noticed about this list is how it is singular fruit,
not plural fruits. Like Mason's, the first person
that ever pointed this out to me, I never thought about it
before you said that. I don't know if I'm making too
much of this or not, but what I think this may mean is that
the fruit displays itself together at the same time. What does it
mean to love? It means all these other things.
What does it mean to be patient? It means to act kindly and goodly
and faithfully towards other people. These are not gifts of
the spirit. Where one person has one gift
and another has another gift, these are fruits of the spirit.
You are not to seek one of them and to the exclusion of all the
rest of them. They should all be exhibited
in your life on an increasing basis. And this is because this
list of nine fruits of the spirit. Are attributes of God, things
that show his character to and through the world, inasmuch as
he gives them even the pagans, he shows the world what kind
of a god he is. And how true that is, since he
gives them virtues, even though they hate him. But there's more
to all this than just doing good things, as if these two lists
were Do these good things and don't do these bad things. That's
the way too many people approach this passage. And I refuse to
do that. That isn't what's going on here
at all. To understand this, you need to understand the metaphors
or at least this metaphor, because it's different than the previous
one. That which comes from the flesh is a work. That which comes
from the spirit is fruit. And though Paul can speak about
fruit for death and therefore he makes the metaphor the same
here, the idea is that the flesh. In the flesh, you are not in
anything lasting or eternal, but in the spirit, you've been
transferred from one kingdom to another kingdom. So there's
several things to consider here. First, how does a person get
into the spirit or how does the spirit get into them might be
a different way of putting it. Well, not through flesh, but
through the Holy Spirit. Now, that should sound obvious.
That you get into the spirit through the spirit. But to so
many people, it isn't because they glorify something that is
impotent and they should know better. John says that we are
born not of the will of the flesh. Or the will of man. but born
of God. Paul says the natural person
does not accept the things of the spirit of God because they
are folly to him. He's not able to understand them
because they're spiritually discerned. So we don't get into the spirit
through the works or the will of the flesh, but only through
God's mercy. We've become spiritual by the
Holy Spirit in order to be spiritual. It's not the other way around.
This change does not begin with the flesh. Nor does it continue
with the flesh. Because what does the flesh produce? Only bad things. So that leads
to a second thought. Becoming spiritual comes through
the gift of faith and repentance. Now, these are gifts of God.
There's all sorts of verses that say these are gifts of God. A
person receives these gifts Through the word of God coming to them,
changing their hearts through the conviction of their sin and
the new desire to love and to serve him. And when they come,
what does a person do? They act upon them. Have you
exercised faith in Christ? Have you repented of your sins?
I tell you that you have to. Because without that, you will
not inherit the kingdom of God, even if you're eight or nine
years old. If you're still wondering about
all this, I want you to think about this, consider it's incredible
that John the Baptist could say to the Pharisees as he's baptizing
in the Jordan River, bear fruit in keeping with repentance. And
this shows that even the Pharisees could bear fruit. But John's
focus is on what matters. Repentance, their fruit is cannot
just be outward fruit. It has to come from repentance. When John said when Jesus says
a little bit later in Matthew's gospel, you will know them by
their fruit. At least part of what that has
to mean is their repentance, because it's repentance that
God uses as a means to generate the fruit. You know them by their
repentance. And of course, the other side
of repentance is faith. I want to point out that both
John and Jesus say that every tree that does not bear good
fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. And that's similar
to what I said a minute ago. It's similar also to the idea
of Paul, who says that those who commit these vices will not
inherit the kingdom of God. What's the problem here? The problem is that the tree
is bad. The tree is bad. Imagine a scenario. You're going to go, this is why
I don't give examples too often, because I'm terrible at it. But
imagine this scenario, OK? You have this job. Some guy hires
you to take care of his peach orchard over in Grand Junction. But you neglect your duty. And
all of his trees die. But you hear that he's coming
back to check on the harvest. And so you go to the store and
you purchase all the peaches that they have at the store.
And you hire a bunch of needy, unemployed, unscrupulous people.
And you go to Home Depot and you get glue and you get nails
and you get screws and you start to put the fruit on the trees. Now, you think that that would
be ridiculous. Because it wouldn't fool anybody. It's absurd, but
this is exactly what people are trying to do when they try to
manufacture fruit apart from faith and repentance. Anybody
who thinks they can fool God by doing these things are simply
trying to glue good fruit to a bad tree. And you aren't fooling
God. Jesus says our grapes gathered
from thorn bushes or figs from thistles. So every healthy tree
bears good fruit, but the disease tree bears bad fruit. A healthy
tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can the disease tree bear good
fruit. It's interesting, there's another
story I just thought of where he says a guy plants a tree in
the first year, nothing grows up or the tree grows, but there's
no fruit. So let's grow the next year.
Still, there's no fruit. So he says, wait one more year,
and if there's no fruit, then chop it down. The third year,
the tree comes up and the fruit comes. So the fruit isn't something
that automatically like this is growing kind of a thing, but
every good tree will eventually bear good fruit, good fruit. So what is Jesus's solution?
He says either make the tree good and it's fruit good or make
the tree bad and it's root bad because the tree is known by
its fruit. So how does this happen? Happens by being found in Christ. And so Jesus famously said in
John 15, I am the true vine and my father is the vine dresser.
Note that we're not the vine dresser. The father's the vine
dresser. Every branch in me that does
not bear fruit, he takes away and every branch that does bear
fruit, he prunes so that it might bear even more fruit. He has
this hope for the disciples saying already you are clean because
the word I've spoken to you abide in me and I in you and the branch
cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine. Neither
can you unless you abide in me. I am the vine. You are the branches.
Apart from me, you can do nothing. This is by my by this, my father
is glorified that you bear much fruit and so prove to be my disciples. And a little later, he adds the
nail to the coffin of anybody who's still thinking all of this
is done by the will of the flesh. John 15, 16, you did not choose
me, but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear
fruit. And that your fruit should abide. And so therefore, we come
back to the very heart of Galatians. All of this discussion about
works, the flesh and fruit of the spirit comes after saying
in every conceivable way you can think of that you only have
life through Christ and you only have Christ through faith in
him. And this is why it's so important to keep going back
to the gospel. But then the gospel always has
implications for the way that we live. If we're in the vine,
we're alive. And if we're alive, we produce
that which comes naturally to living healthy branches. This
is not a matter of try really hard to produce more fruit in
your life. I mean, I could I could speak all day long to the fruit
tree in my backyard and tell it to come on, try and produce
more fruit. It's not going to do you any
good. All of this has its lifeblood.
The sap through the Holy Spirit. He makes these things grow in
us. He causes them to sprout. He infuses all of our works with
fruit that's pleasing to God. He is the he and not the it.
The call here at the end of the chapter in Galatians five is
a call to responsibility. These things come naturally,
but they also have to be cultivated. You cultivate them by being faithful
to the means of grace. By diligently putting to death
the misdeeds of the flesh, by praying to God, repentance for
your evil works and by trusting in his promise to justify, sanctify
and glorify you. He says, if we live by the spirit,
let us also walk by the spirit and to walk by the spirit is
to serve one another in love. In Romans, he says, now that
you've been set free from sin and become slaves to God, the
fruit You get leads to sanctification and it's in eternal life in Ephesians,
the fruit of life is found in all that is good and right and
true in Philippians, be filled with the fruit of righteousness
that comes through Jesus Christ to the glory and praise of God.
There is a great city that is coming down out of heaven in
the middle of the city. There is a throne. And flowing
from that throne, there is a river of life that makes its way through
the central street on either side of that street. Beside the
quiet, still waters of the river, there is a tree of life. And
this tree has 12 kinds of fruit yielding its fruit every month,
never going dormant, always bringing healing to the nations. Make
every effort, therefore, to be found in that city. For it is
the city of the living God, the city of Christ Jesus and his
church, the city that will last forever. Let's pray together. Father, this well-known passage
of. Works of the flesh and the fruit
of the spirit, we've heard it a lot of times, we've read these
lists many times. I pray that you would, through
the proclamation of your word cause fruit to develop in the
life of your people. Help us to weed out the works
of the flesh by attending to the means of grace, by trusting
in the promises, by believing you, taking you at your word.
By being filled with the Holy Spirit. Thank you that you give
him to us, and I would ask that he would do the work that's promised
here in our lives today so that you can be glorified in the church.
It's in Jesus' name I pray. Amen.
Works from the Flesh; Fruit from the Vine
Series Galatians
| Sermon ID | 115111919810 |
| Duration | 50:25 |
| Date | |
| Category | Sunday Service |
| Bible Text | Galatians 5:19-26 |
| Language | English |
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