The Battle Rages | Galatians 5:13-17

Galatians chapter 5, 13 to 17.

Galatians 5 · chapter mention

You, my brothers and sisters, were called to be free.

But do not use your freedom to indulge the flesh.

Rather, serve one another humbly in love.

For the entire law is fulfilled in keeping this one command.

Love your neighbor as yourself.

If you bite and devour each other, watch out,

or you will be destroyed by each other.

So I say, walk by the spirit, and you

will not gratify the desires of the flesh.

For the flesh desires what is contrary to the spirit,

and the spirit what is contrary to the flesh.

They are in conflict with each other

so that you are not to do whatever you want.

Thanks, Sam.

Good morning, everyone.

Right, so before we get into the text that's

before us this morning, why don't

we pray together and ask the author for his help

this morning, which please pray with me.

Father God, we thank you that you have indeed gathered us here

this morning to be together.

And Lord, by your grace, you have sustained us for yet another week

that we might hear the words of eternal life.

This morning we ask that you would work by your Holy Spirit

in our midst, that you would hold Christ high,

that we would be drawn to Him.

And we ask this in His name, amen.

Imagine for a moment if you were given a car

and told that you had all the freedom in the world

and you could do whatever you wanted on the roads.

Imagine it, the results would be absolutely disastrous,

not only for yourself, but for all of those around you as well.

Well, that's why we have laws in place

so that we are kept from total carnage, like speed limits,

places we can park, and rules with how

to navigate the roads with other drivers.

And so we might say when it comes to the many freedoms

that we enjoy here in Australia, the law with its limits

and restrictions is actually designed to be a good thing.

Because in many cases, it's there

to optimize both our freedom and public harmony.

And I mentioned that to you this morning

because that's the big idea that our apostle is going

to address for us here.

How do Christians treat the Mosaic law now

that we've been set free from it?

Do we cast it aside completely?

Or is there something in it that is still important

to help navigate us through this life?

The law we have to remember doesn't save us.

But what do we do with it now that we're not under it?

Now with that said, as we've gone through the book of Galatians,

admittedly, working for your salvation

by keeping the law might not be the personal battle

that you feel has raged in you.

I mean, I don't personally meet a lot of Christians

who are wanting to sign up to a system

so that they can do even more work.

Now, it's usually the complete opposite.

Many are looking for ways to do less and less.

I think our Christian walk is actually a mixture of both,

of both legalism and lawlessness

that we're in continual danger of falling into.

I once heard put it like this, that the Christian life

is like watching a clumsy rider who falls off their horse,

then who tries to get back on only to fall off the other side.

And Paul is going to address that very thing for us here.

Christians must be aware of the danger of legalism

which absolutely kills the freedom that Christ has won for us.

But equally, Christians must be aware of the danger

of the abuse of freedom that Christ has won for us as well,

which leads to lawless living.

And I want to show you this under two headings this morning.

First, we're going to look at the way of freedom,

there in verses 13 through to 15,

and then second, the battle for freedom in verses 16 and 17.

And I want you to see that the freedom that Christ has won for us

isn't about being lawless people,

but about living in a way where the law actually has a part

in optimizing both our freedom and love for those around us.

So if you have your Bibles with you this morning,

have a look with me at verses 13 and 15, to 15, sorry.

We read, you, my brothers and sisters, were called to be free.

But don't use your freedom to indulge the flesh.

Rather, serve one another humbly in love,

for the entire law is fulfilled in keeping this one command.

Love your neighbor as yourself.

If you buy it and devour each other, watch out,

or you'll be destroyed by each other.

Right, so the first thing that I want you to notice here

this morning is right there in verse 13.

Paul's kind of repeating the theme of last week, right,

where he said it's for freedom that Christ has set us free.

Now he says a similar thing here.

You, my brothers and sisters, were called to be free.

And so we might ask, what is this freedom

that Paul is speaking about?

Well, to answer that, we have to think about what we've seen

in this book of Galatians so far.

First, we are free from the penalty of sin.

That was pretty much how Paul started this letter,

was by saying that Christ gave himself for our sins

to rescue us, which means that because we're lawbreakers

and deserve God's wrath by the grace of God alone,

he did something about it by sending his son, Jesus,

who acted as a substitute and took the wrath

that we deserved in our place.

We owed God a fine, if you will, for breaking his law,

something we could never pay back in and of ourselves.

But Jesus, he stood in our place.

He swapped places with us.

That's what a substitute does.

And he paid the price in full to set us free from sin's curse.

So that's first, we're free from the penalty of sin.

Second, we're free from the power of sin.

Paul spoke about this in chapter 2,

that when he came to put his trust in Christ alone,

the Spirit of God came to dwell in him in such a way

that he could say that it was no longer he that lived,

but Christ living in him.

Which is to say that Jesus is now the Lord of our hearts,

ruling and reigning our lives.

We once lived under the complete mastery of sin,

totally unable to not follow its orders.

But now because of the work of God in our hearts,

we've been set free from the old slave driver

to serve our new master Jesus.

And thus we are now able to resist sin.

We're free from the penalty of sin.

We're free from the power of sin.

Third, we're being set free from the stain of sin.

What do I mean by that?

Well, it might be helpful to think about it like this.

Because sin has had an all-access pass in our lives.

It's been like a welcomed guest in the house, so to speak.

And wherever it's been, it's left stains.

Which is to say, every part of our heart, our mind,

our soul and body has been affected by sin and been corrupted.

It's corrupted us.

But now Christ has purchased the house

and His Spirit has moved in.

Sin's contamination is slowly being eradicated from all areas

as we're being transformed from the inside out.

That's what it is to be in Christ and for Him to be in us.

We're being set free from the stain of sin.

Fourth, and finally, we will know this real freedom in fullness

one day.

Going back to the very beginning of Galatians,

Jesus gave Himself up to rescue us from this present evil age.

Meaning that there's coming an age where the kingdom of God

will be manifested in full.

And we will see in full our freedom from sin's curse,

sin's power, and sin's stain.

That is what the Christian has, brothers and sisters.

That is what Christ has achieved for His people.

This is the freedom to which we have been called to live in.

That is true for every single person who

is called upon the name of the Lord.

We are free.

That is your status before God Almighty at this very moment.

That status, because of Christ, can never be taken away.

We are free.

But what does that mean for us in the way we should live now?

Just this week, I heard a pretty funny story

that happened in the state of Arkansas back in the 1940s.

State legislators wanted to get rid of some old laws that

weren't valid anymore, nothing out of the ordinary there.

But where things went a bit wonky was when they made the ruling,

it was found that they passed a motion that

stated all laws and parts of laws are hereby repealed.

Now, historians think the blunder was by the clerk

in that he left off the first part of the sentence

being the actual laws that they were wanting to get rid of.

But whatever happened in their eagerness

to rid themselves of some laws, they actually

passed a motion to rid themselves of all laws.

That was until someone picked up on the error and corrected it.

And I mention that because our apostle wants

to correct the thinking of some Christians here.

Indeed, as we've seen, the Christian

is free from the demands of the Mosaic covenant

with all its ceremonies and civil constraints, no doubt.

But we must be aware that in our eagerness

to see those laws gone and to walk in our newfound freedom,

that we don't then make the mistake of thinking

that we've been set free to now be a totally lawless people.

That's not what Paul wants us to get from the book of Galatians.

No, we must make the mistake of thinking

that we have been set free to just go and do whatever

we want in this world.

That's what Paul balances out for us here in the rest of verse 13.

He says, don't use your freedom to indulge the flesh.

Now, just so we're all on the same page here this morning,

the flesh isn't just talking about our bodies,

but what we were before we were born again.

You see, as I said before, sin has infiltrated every part of us.

Yet when we were born again, the old passed away

and the new came.

We are new creatures in that sense.

But as we're all very aware in this room this morning,

we're not perfect just yet.

No, we're still waiting to see that righteousness fully realized.

And so when Paul talks about the flesh,

it's a way of speaking about the person

that we used to be, the remnant of the old sin nature kind of thing

that we still live with.

Think back to that picture of the house.

God has moved in. The stain of sin is really being cleaned up.

But we still live in the house, right?

It's not like when God purchased us

that we got a completely new body and mind.

And that's the idea behind Paul's use of the flesh here.

If you are in Christ, the old is gone and the new has come.

Though we still have the remnants of our old life lingering.

All that to say, Paul tells us that we mustn't use our newfound freedom

as an opportunity to indulge in whatever our old nature desires.

No, instead, we're to serve one another humbly

for the entire law is fulfilled in keeping this one command.

Love your neighbor as you love yourself.

Now, remember last week in verse 6,

when Paul said the only thing that counts is faith,

expressing itself through love.

Well, here, Paul tells us that this godly manifestation of love

actually has a role in fulfilling of all things the law.

Now, straight away, you might be like the whole law of God

is fulfilled by loving other people.

But wait, I thought Jesus said the law was summed up as loving God

with all that you are and to love our neighbor as we love ourselves.

So what on earth has happened to the first bit, Paul?

Well, think a bit of context will help us here.

You see, Jesus was summing up the moral law of God

as most clearly defined for us in the Ten Commandments.

The first five is what it looks like to love God,

and the second five is what it looks like to love others.

Maybe you divide them or have heard them divided a little differently.

But whatever the case may be,

Paul's not really saying anything different here

once you understand what he's doing with the second half of the Ten.

You see, Paul has been drumming this to the Galatians over and over and over

to really love God, is to trust him.

And trusting him will always result in doing what he says.

And so Paul is kind of summing things up for us here.

To love and trust God as he defines it,

well, it will always lead to loving one another

because that is our faith expressing itself through love.

And to do that is to fulfill the whole law.

Haley and I, we're already starting to see this sort of thing with our own children.

They know that mum and dad get hurt by their bickering and their fighting

and their learning more and more and more.

That's saying, I love you mum, I love you dad,

but then going and hitting their brother or tearing down their sister

isn't as powerful a display of their love for us

when they do what they can to not only play nice together,

but to help each other with the little things like bedtime and sharing

and helping with the different fears that they might have.

And so in Paul's mind, the law can be summed up by what he's saying here

because it's all connected for him.

If you love God, you will want to do what he says.

And the overflow of that love and trust will be love for others.

And that's it's abundantly clear that God's moral law

as found in the Ten Commandments as explained there still has a role

to play for the Christian.

I mean, once you see how Paul is using it in this context this morning,

it becomes obvious that God's revelation of how to please him

continues to guide the Christian in the way that we are to live our faith.

Brothers and sisters, I want to be abundantly clear with you here this morning.

At the cross of the Lord Jesus Christ,

he took our place and bore on himself all the damnation

that the law of God says you and I deserve for smashing it in every which way.

Jesus really and truly acted as a substitute in our place

and took all that we deserved on himself.

Therefore, God's law was like our enemy and that it was used as a scalpel

to expose our hearts and condemn us.

But now that we have come to know Jesus,

now that we have been filled with the Holy Spirit,

that very same law that God wrote on stone.

Well, it's been written on our hearts and thus he has commanded us.

Thus the way he has commanded us to live, we will do out of love for him.

But I want to say a little bit more on this.

I want us to be crystal clear here.

You see, we don't as Christians just look at the law.

You see, it's because of Jesus that we can now look at the law

and understand it through the gospel.

In that we know what it is to love our God perfectly

and our neighbor genuinely because Jesus showed us

what it was to do that without sin.

You might say that we can view the law with gospel goggles on.

And because of these gospel goggles, the law is completely flipped on its head.

Where it once judged us saying,

you shall not have any gods before me because of Jesus,

because of the Spirit in us,

we can now see that as something we're being transformed into.

There really will come a time when we will have no other gods

vying for our affection before our Heavenly Father.

Where the law judged us saying, you shall not murder

because of the gospel, we are really able now to put to death

our hatred towards others and learn to love each other.

Even our enemies like Jesus loved his.

Church where the law really was our judge,

handing down a death sentence time and time and time and time again.

Because of the gospel, the law can never be the voice

of condemnation in our lives ever again.

But only ever the staff in the hand of the great shepherd

guiding us in the way that we are to live.

And we obey as we obey its direction,

we will look more and more like the one who kept it perfectly.

And so again, we are free from the condemnation of the law.

But in saying that, we're not free to now go and do whatever we want.

No, we've been set free as Paul says, to serve and love and obey God

from a position of total acceptance.

Free to serve as an adopted son and daughter.

And the law brothers and sisters, it's no longer there to crush us.

It's there to help lead us in our freedom and love for those around us.

And that was certainly what the church in Galatia had to hear at this time.

Read with me verse 15.

Paul says, if you buy it and devour each other, watch out

or you'll be destroyed by each other.

You see, the fruit of legalism becomes suspicion

and condemnation of one another because in people's self-righteousness,

it leads people to look down on others who aren't working as hard as them.

But if you were to fall off the other side of the so-called horse,

lawlessness, well, things are much better there either.

Because when people don't love their neighbour and want to serve them like Christ

has demonstrated for us, then that will only ever lead people

to being selfish and jealous of others.

That is the fruit of legalism and lawlessness.

And our apostle is saying, if you don't begin to understand the limits

and restrictions of our Christian freedom as defined for us by God,

then you will tear each other apart.

Church, we have been set free not to indulge in the flesh.

No, as we've seen this morning, we have been set free to love,

to love others as defined by God and shown to us by our Lord Jesus Christ.

And it's as we trust and obey that we will actually find that our obedience

will bring an incredible amount of freedom and joy with those around us.

We're free.

We are free, but this freedom that we have is a freedom to serve and love one another

as God has defined it and demonstrated for us in the Lord Jesus Christ

by living out the intention of the law.

So that's first, that's the way of freedom.

It's not lawlessness, it's obedience.

Second, maintaining this freedom will come with its challenges.

There will be battles to keep it.

Ribbon me verses 16 and 17. So I say, walk by the Spirit

and you won't gratify the desires of the flesh.

For the flesh desires what's contrary to the Spirit

and the Spirit what's contrary to the flesh.

They're in conflict with each other so that you are not to do whatever you want.

I was reading just the other day about a guy called Hiro Onoda.

Now if you haven't heard about this guy, he's pretty famous for fighting for the Japanese

and being captured in 1974 somewhere in the jungles of the Philippines.

Now why might he be famous for being captured in 1974

somewhere in the jungles of the Philippines?

Well it's because he was first deployed in 1944 during World War II to fight the Allies.

But reports say that when he was told that the Emperor of Japan had surrendered

and that the war was over, he didn't believe it

and ran off into the jungle to keep fighting for the next 30 years until he was captured.

Talk about being stubborn.

And I think that story serves as a great illustration of the stubbornness of our flesh.

It's as we've seen this morning, the flesh has been infiltrated by God.

The old regime has been defeated in that sense.

Yet we still live with this flesh that somewhat refuses to fully submit to the good news

and which will still desire things that are contrary to the leading of God.

And so it's since that the war has been won for the Christian because of the perfect work of Jesus.

But the battle still rages because the flesh is a stubborn piece of work.

The spirit and the flesh says Paul.

They're in conflict with one another.

And so in one sense that is so incredibly frustrating because until kingdom come

we'll be in a battle and we will struggle with our sinful desires.

But in another sense, I hope you take comfort in what Paul is saying here

because with the sin that you struggle with, with the fleshly desires

that still linger and threaten with the wickedness that still tempts you to partake even daily.

Well, Paul is saying that is all part of the normal Christian life.

And so if you hear this morning and you're struggling with sin, battling sin,

then be encouraged because there is a battle.

I mean, if there was no battle, if there was no resistance,

if there was no desire to do the right thing and live in accordance to the leading and guiding of God,

then that calls into question if you were following Jesus at all.

Now the normal Christian life says, Paul, it means to battle.

And day after day it's a fight to put sin to death.

We have a stubborn enemy, it's so stubborn and it continues to threaten us to surrender to the flesh.

And so if you're struggling and striving with your flesh,

then that battle that you're feeling, even maybe at this very moment,

going on for your freedom, it's totally normal.

And so how do Christians treat the law?

Now that we have been set free from it.

I think Paul has shown us the answer to that this morning.

Well, Christ is one for us, isn't about being lawless people,

but about living in a way where the law actually has a part

in optimizing both our freedom and love for those around us.

We aren't under the law, but we're guided by it.

And so as we trust and obey, we will look more and more like the one who kept it perfectly.

And because of the Holy Spirit with us, the Holy Spirit in us,

when the law shows us where we're going off track,

we're able more and more to put sin to death and live unto God.

Growing and holiness, which isn't just possible,

but even inevitable because we are in Christ and He is in us.

Now, just before we finish and stand together,

I just want to end on this this morning.

Paul commands us.

He commands all Christians there in verse 16,

that as we do battle, that we are to not walk by the Spirit

so as to gratify the desires of the flesh.

Now, the Holy Spirit isn't some weird or strange feeling

that we're meant to get vibes off and just guess what He's up to.

Now, God has given us ways in which to support us in the battle

on this side of kingdom come.

He has given us what the Reformers call means of grace,

in which He said He will help us, that He'll use to help us

in the battle where we can walk with Him, so to speak.

His word is certainly one of those things.

The word is alive and active.

It is God speaking to us and He hears us

when we speak back to Him in prayer.

So the word and prayer.

The church is another where we can bear one another's burdens

and hold each other up.

And so, dear ones, if you're finding things hard,

these are sure ways to be encouraged and strengthened.

Another way God has chosen to meet us

is through the Lord's table.

This is something that He is given to His church

so that we might really meet with Him in a profound way

and be strengthened in our faith.

And so this morning, if you're here and you're battling

and you're feeling the emotion of one step forward

and two steps back, feeling the weight of running well,

but then tripping and falling flat on your face once again

and you're getting tired, then there is a place for you.

A place in and amongst your spiritual family

to cry out to Him for help to sustain you

and give you the victory.

His table is a wonderful place for the children of God

that need help.

And so in the next few moments, as we stand and sing

in response to the words that we've heard this morning

in preparation of coming to the Lord's table,

let me encourage you to speak to Him

and to ask you to help you in the battle,

to strengthen you, to sustain you.

And as you do this, I want you to remember the gospel.

Remember the gospel, though we might lose some skirmishes,

though we might get bashed and beaten here and there,

there will come a day when all things will be made new,

where our Lord will wipe away every tear,

where the very presence of sin will be eradicated

by the very presence of God.

We battle church, we do, but we battle knowing

that the victory has already been won

by the gracious work of our substitute

who stood in our place.

His name is Jesus Christ.

Let's pray.

Father, we thank you for your word.

We thank you for the gospel, and we thank you

for the Lord Jesus Christ.

We thank you that your spirit is the one

who circumcises our hearts.

That Lord, we are new creatures, we are a new creation.

The old really has passed away, and the new is here.

Father, we thank you that we have,

what we have to look forward to is eternity with you.

But on this side of Kingdom come,

we would ask that you help us in our battle.

We thank you that you do help us in our battles.

And Lord, we ask that we would know the gospel more and more,

that we know that we can come to you

and find grace and mercy in our time of trouble.

Lord, we thank you that these aren't things we're making up,

but truths that you have told us through your word.

Lord, we thank you for all of these things in Jesus' name.

Amen.