A Way To Walk: Fundamentals
Gal 5:16-26, July 18, 2010
Intro:
I’m going to begin with a little story I wrote, sort of a parable. Like most parables, it isn’t about what it seems to be about, the message is something different. I offer this uncharacteristic preamble because we are concerned about some marriage issues in our community, and I don’t want to come across as insensitive about those in any way. So while the parable appears to be about marriage, it is not; it is about something more important. I think it will be obvious…
Once upon a time, a young man fell in love with the girl of his dreams. They dated, she returned his affections, and they married. Around the same time, his friend met the girl of his dreams, and they also married. As happens in life, the paths of these two friends took them to different places, their friendship changed but they still kept in touch and continued their fondness for one another.
About 20 years passed, and the second friend called the first with an urgent need to talk. “I don’t understand it,” he said as he poured out his heart to his friend, “my marriage is just not vibrant. I feel distant, like sometimes she doesn’t hear me, she isn’t there for me when I need her, like she just doesn’t understand me. I sometimes wonder if she even loves me anymore.”
His friend listened with compassion, and then asked, “Do you feel like this everyday, or just sometimes? What is it like when you two interact on a daily basis?”
“Well,” came the reply, “we don’t talk on a daily basis, but I make sure I set aside an hour and fifteen minutes for her every week. Sunday morning, 10am, is her time. I almost never miss it, unless I am really tired from the night before, or unless I go away for the weekend. Every week, faithfully, I give up that 75 minutes to nurture our relationship. But sometimes she seems quiet then, sometimes I don’t even feel like she appreciates me being there, and I don’t always leave feeling uplifted and encouraged like I should. I feel like she isn’t keeping up her side of the agreement…” He paused and looked at his friend, and asked: “is it like that for you also?”
“Well, no, not really. See, I make time for my wife every day. We both get up each day with a desire to share our lives and our love, we look for ways to help each other, we go out of our way to do things that we know will bring each other joy. Like just this week, she knows how much joy I get out of serving, and an elderly neighbour down the street needed her eaves troughs cleaned out with all the rain, and even though I said I was tired after work she grabbed our ladder, walked it down to her house, and made me climb up and get the job done. She shared some tea and cookies and visited, while I got the gutters clean and the water shedding away from the basement. And I felt a thousand times more refreshed and re-energized than if I’d plopped in front of the TV and watched some dumb summer re-run. I’m sorry, my friend, I just can’t imagine a relationship in 75 minutes a week…”
Review:
Last Sunday I introduced a new sermon series on the fundamentals of our Christian faith by looking at Luke 9:23-24, where Jesus says: “If any of you wants to be my follower, you must turn from your selfish ways, take up your cross daily, and follow me. 24 If you try to hang on to your life, you will lose it. But if you give up your life for my sake, you will save it.” It is obvious that Jesus doesn’t say “if anyone wants to be my follower, you must give me 75 minutes on Sunday morning”, being a Christian is a way of living each day.
I wonder if anyone has a story from your life this past week of how you lived this out, or even how you tried to live this out. Some way you “took up your cross and followed”.
Also from last week, we created a list on some flip chart paper together about some of the fundamentals of being a Christian. I want to tell you that as I studied these, I was deeply encouraged. We “get” that our Christianity is a way of life, not a “Sunday morning” thing – our list was full of things that are not Sunday-morning centric, most of it was things we can’t even really do in any kind of fullness on Sunday morning like “walk in the Spirit”, “witness for God”, “shine”, “submit my will to God”, and “obey”. It was deeply encouraging that the emphasis in our responses was on how we live out of this relationship with God day by day. With that in mind, this morning I want us to think together about the first thing we wrote on the first chart in response to my first question last week about what it really means to be a Christian: “walk in the Spirit”.
Gal 5:16-26 (NLT)
16 So I say, let the Holy Spirit guide your lives. Then you won’t be doing what your sinful nature craves. 17 The sinful nature wants to do evil, which is just the opposite of what the Spirit wants. And the Spirit gives us desires that are the opposite of what the sinful nature desires. These two forces are constantly fighting each other, so you are not free to carry out your good intentions. 18 But when you are directed by the Spirit, you are not under obligation to the law of Moses.
19 When you follow the desires of your sinful nature, the results are very clear: sexual immorality, impurity, lustful pleasures, 20 idolatry, sorcery, hostility, quarreling, jealousy, outbursts of anger, selfish ambition, dissension, division, 21 envy, drunkenness, wild parties, and other sins like these. Let me tell you again, as I have before, that anyone living that sort of life will not inherit the Kingdom of God.
22 But the Holy Spirit produces this kind of fruit in our lives: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, 23 gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against these things!
24 Those who belong to Christ Jesus have nailed the passions and desires of their sinful nature to his cross and crucified them there. 25 Since we are living by the Spirit, let us follow the Spirit’s leading in every part of our lives. 26 Let us not become conceited, or provoke one another, or be jealous of one another.
The Guiding Principle:
This is a familiar passage of Scripture to us, one which we have often looked to with a focus on the middle section, especially the “fruit of the flesh” and the “fruit of the spirit” in vss. 19-23. This morning I want to focus on the verses before and after, 16-18 and 24-26.
The guiding principle is “let the Holy Spirit guide your lives” (vs. 16), which Paul returns to in vs. 25, “since we are living by the Spirit, let us follow the Spirit’s leading in every part of our lives.”
The obvious question for us as we let Scripture examine us is this: to what extent is that true of our lives? How much of our lives are lived “guided by the Holy Spirit” and how much is lived guided by ourselves? Let that question sort of hang around, because I want to look at these two verses a little more closely.
“Walk” and “March”
I wanted to know a little more about what Paul meant in vs. 16 when he wrote, “let the Holy Spirit guide your lives”, so I used some online reference tools to find out that he literally said, “walk by (in) the Spirit” (NASB, NKJV). Our translation is a good one, Paul certainly means that we are to live all our lives by the Spirit, but I like this metaphor of “walking”. It speaks to me about activity and not passivity, it speaks to me about the journey, it speaks to me about going somewhere, and doing it together. The idea is not that the Holy Spirit dictated some lifeless words onto a page, like a map that shows a way we should go on our own. Rather, the idea is that we walk together with God, and we let the Spirit of God guide and lead, each and every step.
As I dug a little deeper into vs. 16, I wondered if vs. 25, “since we are living by the Spirit, let us follow the Spirit’s leading in every part of our lives”, used the same metaphor of “walking”. I looked at a few other translations, which said, “If we live by the Spirit, let us also walk by (in) the Spirit.” (NASB, NKJV). And I thought, “aha, I bet Paul used that same word in both verses”, but I checked and was wrong – Paul uses a different, but very similar word, with a different connotation: “to proceed in a row as the march of a soldier” (from www.blueletterbible.org). When I read that I decided that the NIV translation is the best, “Since we live by the Spirit, let us keep in step with the Spirit.”
Marching Lessons
Have any of you ever had to learn to march? I haven’t, but I’m interested. Is it hard? What do you really have to do?? What is the most important thing to getting it right? Anyone?? What does that tell us about our Christian lives? How do we live like Paul commands us, “walking by (in) the Spirit”, “let us keep in step with the Spirit”?
I think it starts with us welcoming the filling of the Holy Spirit in our lives. This can be problematic for us – we sometimes have a false theology that says we “get” a “single dose” of the Holy Spirit when we accept Jesus by faith and this should be enough to last our lifetime. But we know from many places in Scripture that this is to be an ongoing filling, and we see that even in today’s passage which suggests “keeping in step with the Spirit”, obviously suggesting an ongoing, regular, consistent interaction. It is also problematic for us because we’ve associated various “demonstrative”, or even “weird”, experiences as the definition of (or evidence of) the presence of the Spirit. Again, the passage of Scripture we read this morning suggests the opposite – the presence (or “filling”) of the Holy Spirit in our lives gives us a different set of desires (vs. 17), sets us free from things that destroy (vs. 19-21), and produces within us some amazingly valuable characteristics (like joy, peace, gentleness, self-control, etc., vs. 22-23).
We can’t “walk in step with the Spirit” if we are resisting the presence of the Holy Spirit in our lives, and we certainly can’t “walk in step with the Spirit” if the extent of our relationship with God is 75 minutes on a Sunday morning.
Conclusion:
So I left a question hanging a moment ago – how much of your life is “guided by the Holy Spirit”, lived “in step with the Holy Spirit”, on a day-to-day, moment-by-moment basis, and how much is lived guided by yourself, or our culture, or other people around you? I can’t answer that question for you, but I can lead you and create space for you to answer it for yourself.
I want to close with a time of guided prayer. I’m going to create some spaces for each of us to seek God through prayer, and I’m just going to really simply guide that along and trust God and trust you, and together we will seek first the Kingdom of God.
• Thanks for God’s presence with us through the Holy Spirit (perhaps thanks for times we recall when we have felt “filled”
• Reflection on the state of our spirits today – how full are we?
• Repentance for places we have walked to our own rhythm instead of “in step”
• Decision – will we say “yes” to God?
• Invitation to the Spirit to fill us again
• Commitment to live each day
• Thanks.
