From comment cards to online customer service surveys our culture encourages us to be critical of everything from food to services. I know, it comes in the package with freedom. It’s a first amendment thing. Recently Time Magazine featured an article entitled “When Everyone’s a Critic.” The article examines the growing popularity of websites that feature consumer reviews of products and services. These websites are based on an economic theory that states, “Perfect information leads to perfect competition.” The only problem is, “What happens when you live in an imperfect world?” When we become a critic we are expecting something or someone to be changed to match what we consider to be the ideal. We would much rather have something else change, instead of changing ourselves. Sound familiar? It should this is exactly the battle going on in the Galatian churches. Paul showed the danger of giving into the critics. Paul showed that if the Galatians would bow to the pressures of the Judaizers not only would they lose their freedom; they would be giving up their very salvation. In our text Paul presents very clearly the steps to prevent this tragedy. Let’s look at the lessons we can learn from this text.
I. You don’t always have to listen to your critics.
A. Having reminded his readers of the bondage imposed by the law, Paul urges them to resist all who would seek to put them back under the Law.
1. Paul here compared the Christian life to the running of a race, an athletic image found in many of his writings.
2. Paul was fond of using athletic imagery to describe the Christian life. To him life is a race, demanding adherence to rules and discipline if the race is to be completed successfully and a prize obtained.
3. Like runners in a marathon they had been running well when Paul had last seen them. They were headed in the right direction and making good progress. At that point Paul had every right to think they would finish in victory.
4. Paul asks, “Who cut in on you?” Someone had hindered them. The verb enkopto—a military term—refers primarily to setting up an obstacle or breaking up a road. In this context, it probably refers to the illegal interference of a runner who cuts in ahead of another and thereby disadvantages him.
B. They were doing so well until the Judaizers got a hold of them; why had they let themselves be talked into changing?
1. Paul doesn’t seem to be dealing with a large body of Judaizers, but a very few persuasive ones.
2. One cannot help but guess that the Galatians are going along with them more out of a desire for peace rather than real conviction.
3. The truth is it is always easier to follow the lead of traditional dictators of religious taste rather than to chart your own course.
4. The criticisms of the Judaizers were turning young Christians away from grace and freedom in Christ toward the binding structures of legalism.
5. To a person of a Judaizing mentality, clinging to the apparent certainties of their prescribed religion, claims of freedom in Christ seems ludicrous.
C. Criticism is inevitable.
1. Paul identifies with the pressure the Galatians are feeling from the Judaizers, because he is suffering the same.
2. Paul’s confidence was in the Lord, not in his own ability to reverse the situation. At the same time, he may have found some encouragement in the fact that the Galatians had not yet submitted to the demand for circumcision. The churches of Galatia were in turmoil and they were wavering.
3. Jesus’ substitution was unacceptable to law keeping Jews, for it left them nothing by which they could earn at least part of their own salvation. If there could have been a kind of Christianity that included circumcision and excluded the cross, there would have been no conflict. Neither would there have been salvation.
4. Paul shows that we do not have to give into the critics, because if we do we will strip the Gospel of its effectiveness.
II. Do not use your freedom to indulge yourself.
A. After dealing with the danger of submitting to their critics Paul shows the Galatians the danger of going to the opposite extreme.
1. There is a huge temptation to view Christian liberty as a license to do whatever they please.
2. The irony of true freedom is that it is found in servitude. When Paul says, “serve one another” he uses a word normally employed in the context of slavery (douleuete). The person who is set free from both slavery to law and slavery to self will find true freedom as the slave of Christ, an eager servant of the community of believers.
3. Just as real faith expresses itself through love (5:6), the joy of a Christian’s freedom is discovered to rest upon love. Just as the old law brought bondage and death, the new “law of Christ” (6:2) introduces the believer into an exciting new community where people are free to love each other and serve each other’s needs.
4. It is unfortunate that most people would sum up the spirit and intention of God’s laws as “Thou shalt not.” This fosters a spirit of legalism which sees life as a minefield, where we must always be careful not to step wrongly.
B. God would really rather see us rush from opportunity to opportunity, always eager to serve others. Law builds fences around what we must not do; love builds bridges to new places of service.
1. Paul does not set up a future hazard to be avoided; he warns of a present condition (“keep on biting”) which must be halted. The Galatian churches were racked by civil war, not least of all over the very issue of law vs. grace.
2. It is characteristic of legalism to tear down rather than build up. When the crusade of the self-righteous reaches its ultimate end, the community of believers is decimated and finally annihilated.
3. Rather than the old bondage to law, and rather than the bondage to self that will ultimately cut off and destroy everybody else, the true path to freedom is to live (literally, “walk”) with the Spirit.
4. The Spirit is not natural to man in his fallen state. But this does not mean that by the gift of the Spirit the redeemed man escapes the need to struggle against sin. The Spirit simply makes victory possible and that only to the degree that the believer "lives by the Spirit" or "walks" in him.
5. Paul reminds the Galatians that, though he is now talking of the need to live a godly life, he is not thereby reverting to legalism. Life by the Spirit is neither legalism nor license—nor a middle way between them.
6. It is a life of faith and love that is above all of these false ways. Being led by the Spirit does not imply passivity but rather the need to allow oneself to be led.
III. Work to cultivate the fruit of the Spirit in your lives.
A. In this conflict the flesh and the Spirit are set in opposite positions like two armies entrenched for battle.
1. The flesh is not opposed to an occasional act of selfless love or service, but the total lifestyle demanded by the Spirit is out of the question!
2. The solution for the miserable predicament is not for people just to try harder to resist their own carnal desires. Freedom comes in ways previously unsuspected: Jesus delivers from guilt and the Spirit begins installing a new set of desires which we have limitless permission to pursue.
3. The law could condemn our misbehaviors, but was powerless to change them in any permanent way.
4. As Christians we are being led to walk the path that increasingly leads to the final and total escape from our lifelong plight.
B. Paul closes our text by presenting the contrast between the sinful nature and life according to the Spirit.
1. When Paul says that the acts of the flesh are obvious, he does not mean that they are all committed publicly where they may be seen. Some are, some are not. Instead, he means that it is obvious to all that such acts originate with the sinful nature, and not with the nature given believers by God.
2. Paul’s list of sins have four obvious divisions: first, three sins that are violations of sexual morality; second, two sins from the religious realm; third, eight sins pertaining to conduct in regard to other human beings—social sins; and finally, there are two typically pagan sins—drunkenness and the revellings accompanying it.
3. Those who “live like this” are those who “continue practicing” such things. While God readily forgives the sinner for all such sins in his past, the sinner must not glibly think God will automatically forgive the same ongoing sins in his future. The Christian may never find immunity to these sins while still on earth, but he must never give up in the struggle to subdue the flesh by the Spirit.
4. Fruit is what something naturally produces. When a tree is rotten it naturally produces rotten fruit. But when the indwelling Spirit of God himself begins to express his mighty power in the inner being of believers, good things begin to happen. The nature of God himself begins to manifest itself in our lives.
5. The Spirit expresses the qualities of God Himself through our personalities. We experience and express love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self control.
6. Paul reminds believers that if they have been made alive by the Spirit – they are also to walk by the Spirit. The Spirit leads; they are to follow. Indeed, they are to get in line with him or keep in step.
7. The person who lives in the spirit will be above conceit and will have no desire to provoke or envy anyone else. He will bear the whole fruit of the Spirit and the Spirit will bear him up.
8. The truth is this: where law is unnecessary, there is freedom.
During World War II, the allies drove the Italian forces out of Eritrea in North Africa. The departing Italians did their best to delay the enemy’s advance, though, by filling great barges with concrete and sinking them across the entrance to the harbor. They failed to take into account the ingenuity of the allied engineers. The barges were removed by a brilliant yet simple method. The allies requisitioned the huge empty tanks the oil refineries store their fuel in. They sealed them airtight, and then floated them in the sea above the barges. Then at low tide they chained the gigantic floats to the submerged barges and waited for high tide. When the tide was full, the buoyancy of the fuel tanks lifted the barges off the harbor floor and away from the entrance. The engineers could never have lifted such weights by themselves. Instead they harnessed the power of the tides. Paul insists that we cannot raise ourselves above the pull of the sinful nature by ourselves, but we can be filled with the Spirit that lifts us Godward, above both the sinful nature and the Law that sinful nature requires. There, in the purer air in which the fruit of the Spirit can flourish, this is true freedom.
