Walk By the Spirit

Okay.

I need some water after all that.

Beginning in verse sixteen.

But I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh.

For the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh.

For these are opposed to each other to keep you from doing the things you want to.

But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under law.

Now the works of the flesh are evident.

Sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, orgies, and the like.

I warn you as I warned you before, that those who live like this will not inherit the kingdom of God.

But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.

Against such things there is no law.

And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with his passions and desires.

If we are alive by the Spirit, let us also keep in step with the Spirit.

Let us not become conceited, provoking one another and envying one another.

The word of the Lord.

Well, I think most pastors I know, including myself, actually for as long as I've been a pastor, which has been for many years, have had a recurring dream.

And this reoccurring dream is that we're sitting in the audience, and suddenly somebody invites us to come to the platform, and that we're supposed to give the sermon that we are completely unprepared for.

And it's a terrifying dream I'm here to tell you.

And uh there's all kinds of variations of that dream.

But this so this morning, uh, I actually a little bit of that dream is kind of coming true here that uh Pastor Walt is sick today, and uh this morning it got even worse for him, and so uh he asked me to stand in for him at the last minute, and so I'm happy to do that, and I have to say it's not as bad as the dream.

So, what I'm gonna bring to you today are just really some things that are have been growing stronger in my own heart, things that um are really core to the Christian life.

And I would venture to say that these are things that are very strong in your hearts as well, as many of you as are in Christ, because we're gonna be talking about uh sanctification today, the process of growth.

We all know that the Christian life is about becoming a disciple of Christ.

It's about some kind of transformation, right?

Uh some kind of doing.

Just think of the great commission that Jesus gave, his last command to his disciples, to go into all the nations, baptizing them and making disciples, and teaching them all that I've commanded you to do, and surely I'll be with you to the end of the age.

And then we have the New Testament itself, the compilation of words that God chose to communicate his will to his people, his complete will.

Nothing more is going to be added to this, to the end of time, until he returns.

And this book is full, it's just filled with commands for us to embrace.

And we know in this book as well that Jesus is utterly committed to seeing us transformed from the inside out.

He has prepared beforehand, we're told, good works for us to walk in.

But as we enter the Christian life, something happens or needs to happen that maybe we're not prepared for.

Before we know Christ, we're just living our lives as we see fit, right?

And maybe some of us had a religious bent and we were trying to earn our way with God.

But at some point, if we've really come to Christ, God has brought us to see our utter inability to ever meet his standard, to live up to what he's called us to, and he's shown us something, a small glimmer of our sin, enough to see that we need a Savior.

And we come empty-handed, we come with confession to the degree that we're able to see, and we lean on Christ.

We ask Jesus to take our sins and we find forgiveness in Him.

And so begins, so begins a new life with God, a restored life with Him.

We call that process salvation or justification, acquittal.

There's different names that are given for that.

And that's the beginning of life, of new life for the Christian.

But then we're told that this new life is not meant to just lie there on the ground.

I planted grass seed this weekend, and my hope is that that seed will materialize into some blades, thick blades.

It's gonna, I want it to cover the whole grass, the whole lawn.

I'm looking for growth.

And we know as God's people that that's what Scripture is calling us to, calling us to grow and to embrace what Jesus has given us in his words.

But we also know that we have some propensities, and if we don't know it, we discover it soon enough.

We begin to read the commands of God.

Some of them we heard just a few minutes ago.

Maybe try this one on for size.

Selfish ambition, one of the works of the flesh, enmity, strife, fits of anger.

We're told to put all those things off.

Or how about this one?

Let us not become conceited, provoking one another, envying one another.

We come face to face with these commands of God, and we know God's calling us in a different direction.

What are we to do about that?

And when we begin to bring in our own propensities on this, they look something like this.

The first thing that we attempt to do often is we begin to work in our own strength in an effort to manage our sins and to be good.

We attempt to go after these things that God said not to.

Selfish ambition?

Okay.

Okay.

I am not going to be selfish any longer.

I'm done with self-centeredness.

I'm finished with it.

Um we make these kinds of vows to ourselves that we're going to be finished with provoking.

Gosh, I'm conscious of provoking.

I am going to stop being so provocative and so conflicting with people, and I'm going to try to be more of a peacemaker for people.

We really want to do what God tells us to do.

But then what we end up doing is we end up focusing on our outward behavior and avoiding our inner world and heart.

And this is where we get into trouble.

Because in the scriptures, the real action takes place in the heart.

That is where real virtue flows from.

It flows from the heart, not merely from the outside.

The problem is that we're ignorant of our heart.

We don't see very deeply into our hearts at all.

And in fact, one of the things that we have to learn at some point, and maybe we have this in knowledge early on, but we don't get it experientially until much later into the Christian life.

And that is that we need the Spirit of God.

We need the Spirit of God.

We need the light, his light to illuminate what's right, what's good, what's beautiful.

We need his light to illuminate inside our hearts what's the flesh.

And in Scripture, especially in these letters we're looking at, in Romans and the letters of Paul, the flesh refers to our sinful nature, the old part of us that we inherited from Adam.

It's where our desires that were desires and passions, found in Galatians that we read.

Desires and passions that move us morally, that move us behaviorally, that move us in our attitudes really to self-centered living.

But they're deep desires and deep passions within us in the flesh.

We need the Spirit of God to shed his light to illuminate those desires inside of us.

What we like to do, and what we're prone to do, is that if we can just on the outside get close to a virtue, we tend to give ourselves a pass.

It's good enough.

And so the other day I was very conscious of something in this Holy Spirit has been doing some things in my life lately as I've in the years recently have begun to reflect more deeply on what is really going on in my heart.

The Spirit of God begins to unearth things.

That's one of the main things He does.

He unearths the flesh, he unveils it.

We have these huge robin redbreasts.

You have those?

I mean, they are just like they land in the yard, and within a minute they just poke their head down and they pull this, you know, four-inch worm out of the ground.

Like, where did they get that?

How did they know where that was?

But they're eating these worms, and uh so he asked me, he goes and gets my fishing worms, and he wants to know if he can have one of my nightcrawlers to feed the birds.

I was like, no way, put those fishing worms back.

They can get their own worms, but uh, but if you want to give him one, I can tell you where you can find one.

Go out to the compost pile, and there's some dirt out there, and take that little hand shovel over there, and I guarantee you, just stick that shovel in and turn it over, and you will find worms and some big, fat, juicy ones are there.

Help yourself, feed all you want to the birds, and sure enough, he did, and he found them, and he did.

That is what the Spirit of God does, one of his works in our life.

He illuminates, he rises to the surface, he unearths the worms of the flesh that are below the surface.

But we're not aware they're there.

We can live our Christian life by just thinking about our outward behavior and giving ourselves passes and think we're progressing.

So I started to tell you, I went to the grocery store the other day, and it was well, it was more than the other day, but it was during the winter and it was cold, and uh I was had to take kids to school in the morning.

I didn't have time for a shower first, so I just threw on my snowsuit, right, and put on a stocking cap as low as I could, and uh got in a car and went.

Well, I had to stop off at the store on the way home, and I walked into my favorite grocery store and went to the service counter to make an exchange of something.

And this lady treated me like I probably looked, I looked like I probably slept out on the street last night.

And uh I just felt from her this kind of contempt.

And I thought to myself, really?

Like, does this lady know that I spend thousands of dollars in this store over the past years?

How dare she treat me like this?

Um, I'm just feeling inside these this kind of anger toward her and contempt back to her.

And not only that, um I wanted to get even with her.

I started thinking, you know what?

I uh I'm gonna call your manager today.

I'm gonna let her let him know or let her know the kind of treatment I got in this store in here today.

Um I didn't do all that.

But all that is churning.

It's churning below the surface.

So what did I do when I was standing in front of her?

Did I yell at her?

No.

I'm a good editor.

I just edited the outside.

I smiled at her, I thanked her, I got my stuff, I moved on.

And there's some part of me that might have felt really smug, like, wow, you know, you were provoked there, but you really succeeded.

Um, there was little virtue there, really.

Virtue comes from the heart.

Virtue is not about my smiling and editing my outward expression to her.

God is calling us to have a heart that wants to bless.

I mean, that really longs and desires to bless.

To bless and not curse.

And to be indifferent is to curse.

There is no indifferent.

You either bless or you love.

But all that gets hidden, right?

You know it does.

It gets hidden, and because we're not really inclined to be a people who think about and who asked God to begin unearthing and illuminating in our hearts our signature sins and to rise to the surface what's really going on down there.

Apart from the Spirit of God, we are powerless to love anyone well or to affect real spiritual growth in our lives.

The flesh counts for nothing, God says.

The flesh counts for nothing.

We not only need the illumination, we need the power.

We need the power to even be able to confess that, then we need the power to begin to move against it.

We need the power to put on anything different than that, to put on patience in that moment, to put on self-control, to put on love.

What would it look like instead of the description that I gave to have been able to have, maybe even after the failure, to have been able to ask God in the moment, after confessing it and putting a name on it?

Lord, vengeance.

That's what it was.

It was vengeance, Father.

Please forgive me for that.

Contempt.

I had contempt for her.

Lord, I don't know what her day is like.

Um she might be having a really hard day tonight today.

Would you bless her?

Would you bless this lady?

I failed in the moment, but there's something in me that really wants to bless her and to see her blessed.

Would you bless her?

We need that's the power of God, that's the spirit of God that moves for that to be real.

You either desire that or you don't.

If if you don't have those desires, then you don't have the spirit, and you don't have, you don't have Christ.

Anyone who has Christ has the Spirit of God, and in you you have these desires.

Sometimes they're very faint, sometimes they're strong.

But it's the deepest part of you.

But yes, you also have the flesh and its desires.

This clamoring and scheming and aligning itself with the devil and hearing all kinds of voices and moving in places we don't want to move.

That's why Paul says in here, there's a war going on in you.

We sang about this holy war, right?

That's not talking about some jihad experience out in the world.

It's talking about in our heart the desires of the spirit and the desires of the flesh are like a thunderstorm forming inside.

And they're clashing.

And what God is telling us to do is He's telling us that if you are alive by the Spirit of God and you have these desires in you, then keep in step with the Spirit.

Keep in step with the Spirit.

Listen to the cadence of the Spirit's desires that are deep within you.

And those desires begin by being open, being open to God, being open to hear his wooing, which might meet first begin with confession and naming and just sitting in a mess that we've have and that we are.

But it goes beyond that.

It goes beyond that to loving other people.

I was in the military not long after high school, and um the particular branch that I was in was really big on drill.

We spent most of boot camp drilling out in the hot sun on a big parade deck.

And there was this cadence of the drill instructor that we had to learn to hear.

We didn't go there with ears for that cadence, I assure you.

Come on.

I don't know if you understood that or not.

I understood it perfectly.

He was calling left and right and giving some commands in there.

But you have to be trained to hear that cadence and to keep in step with that cadence.

Paul's saying in this letter, what God's saying in this letter is you have two cadences that are breathing in your ears.

You have the cadence of the flesh that is all self-absorbed, and it's all about you.

It's all about me, and it's about lifting us up and protecting us and having us look big.

But then you have the cadence of the spirit that is calling you to a different place.

And dear ones, the cadence of the spirit is so much more than just do good and do right and be moral and quit all the evil.

It's so much more than that.

The cadence of the spirit is I love you.

I am good.

I am trustworthy.

I have spoken and it stands.

It's a rock.

You can count on it.

Yes, your life is unraveling, but my words are true, my promises are true.

Yes, you've come to me.

You know you've come to me.

You've come to the cross empty-handed, you're leaning on Christ, you're one of mine.

I love you.

I'm never gonna let you go.

I'm not gonna let you go.

Everything may be falling apart for you, but I'm not gonna let you go.

It's going to be okay.

That's a part of what the cadence of the spirit is saying.

If you can't hear that cadence of the spirit, we are very powerless to love anyone.

Christianity is not just about a list of morality for us to do.

Do you know there are many philosophers, there are many religious leaders who preach gospels of morality and have since the dawn of time.

They have all kinds of schemes and ways of you being moral, of doing good to people, and standards of conduct that we're supposed to keep.

We can't do any of that on our own, and for it to be real and come from the heart.

It takes the Spirit of God to do that.

That's why Christianity is different from every other faith, every other philosophy on the planet.

We are a people of the Spirit.

You take the Spirit out of Christianity and we are sunk.

But let me ask us, how does the Spirit play into your Christianity?

It doesn't have to play a small part.

It doesn't have to be a secondary thing out there somewhere that we know that truth, we know that doctrine, but when the rubber meets the road, we don't really depend on the spirit.

God is calling us to an active dependence upon the Spirit.

That is the work of the Christian life.

An active dependence on the Spirit of God.

It's not passivity, it's not, I'm gonna sit back and I'm gonna let God take over my life, and He is going to love people for me in my place.

And it's not the other extreme, it's not you going out and saying, okay, I read this book on love, and now I'm gonna work hard and I'm gonna love my spouse really well.

Starting today, it's Mother's Day, right?

From now on, mom, you're you're gonna be tops in my book.

I am gonna love you really well, mom.

If it's in your own strength.

If it's in your own strength, I'll tell you what that's gonna be like.

I I I watched a four-wheel drive competition this week, just a small one on TV.

And uh there was this hill that was really uh it was steep and loose dirt.

And one of the competitors came to the line, and their four-wheel drive went out.

It was working before they got there, but it went out, and so he started up this hill.

And how far do you think he made it?

He was going nowhere, he just sat there and spun and spun and made a big smoke and dust and clouds and went nowhere.

The guy in the four-wheel drive got up, pizza cake, and that's the way it's gonna go for us in this Christian life, in this sense.

Don't take that parallel too far.

But if we try, if we try to live out the commands of God in our own strength, we're just in two-wheel drive, and that hill is way too steep.

And you'll come here every Sunday or wherever you go, you'll hear sermons, and I know what's gonna go on in you.

I know it.

You might go in one of a couple different directions.

You might go in the direction of, oof, if I was honest, another another bunch of commands that I can't keep.

And you go home defeated, maybe, feeling defeated, whatever.

Um maybe you go in a different direction.

Maybe you go in, okay, I'm gonna try harder.

Um, I've been doing better on that other, that other virtue.

I've been working really hard at it, and um I'm I'm gonna be doing better at that.

And so you end up going in the kind of uh Pharisee kind of direction.

Neither of those directions will get you anywhere, and both of those directions will, in fact, repel people away from Christianity.

People are going to be allured by Christians to the degree that we love from the inside out.

That we manifest, that we see them with our eyes.

We're not doing checklists with them.

We see them, we experience them, we engage them, and we meet them where they are.

That's what allures people to Christianity.

That's where God has designed there to be power because his spirit is doing that work.

I want to add a layer onto this, this is crucial.

We live in the already but not yet state.

You've heard that before if you've been around very long.

We live in the already but not yet state.

Meaning, in one sense, already Jesus has won the full victory.

He's paid it all.

He has defeated sin.

The flesh has been crucified when Jesus was crucified.

Theoretically, it has been won at one level.

And so we have, Paul could say to the Corinthians, you have every spiritual blessing.

You have it all right now.

And yet we live in the not yet.

Because the fullness of what he bought for us will only come in the age to come.

You know, sometimes you just see things in marvel.

Uh, the songs that Webb and Amanda picked this morning, I don't know which of them picked those songs, but literally they could not have picked better songs.

If they had had the assignment and spent a month together, they could not have picked better songs that aligned with this message, which they didn't know was coming today, that that came today.

I love that part in one of the songs that talked about in the age to come, um, our bones are gonna sing.

We are gonna sing from our bones.

And already we feel it, don't we?

But we're in the already not yet.

You may come here just like I come here sometimes.

You may come here drained and depressed, and you may come here just really feeling far away from God.

You may be feeling like, wow, this God, where is God?

That's okay.

That's a part of the already not yet.

You may feel like most of your Christian lives is you're you're unhinged.

And like, are you kidding me?

I hear these commands.

Am I supposed to like have all these permanent?

No.

We're supposed to be leaning into these things, depending on the Spirit of God.

It's a slow, slow progress.

Think of the command that Walt covered last Sunday.

Let this mind be in you that's in Christ Jesus, who, in very being in very nature God, didn't consider equality God something to be grasped, but emptied himself and gave up and went to the cross.

Have that attitude in you.

That's a tall order.

That's talking about a heart attitude.

How does that progress play out in the Christian life?

We don't just suddenly figure out a way to accomplish that and we're done, and it's there, and then that that attitude is in us.

We chip away at that all our Christian life.

The Spirit of God, as we lean on Him, unearths the things that are opposite of that, the things that lead us away from that.

God gives us glimpses and tastes of that, of actually sometimes having something of the Spirit of God moving in us in a way that we're like, wow, thank you for that, Lord.

Those desires are strong.

And then He gives us hope.

He builds in us a hope that someday we are gonna be complete.

We're not gonna have this battle any longer.

I tell you, when we sing about that, then you can sing from your bones.

If you've been gripped by that, when you when we sing about what it's gonna be like in the age to come, we will sing from our bones.

Because we're bone-tired, aren't we?

We are bone tired of this fight.

And it's meant to be that way.

So hang on.

Hang on.

Don't leave despondent on Sundays when the commands of God are strong.

Just come before God as you are.

Come with your brokenness.

Come speaking to God the way you really are, and just sit with him.

Just sit with him and confess what you can confess and ask what you can what you can bring up to ask.

Ask him to move and to initiate and illuminate and empower you.

Ask him to help you hear his cadence and to give you the power to lean into it.

To lean into it, hear his wooing and just move toward it.

It might mean when we're singing here that when you started singing, you were really thinking about lunch today.

That's okay.

That happens to me commonly.

It might mean that while you're singing, the fact the whole song, you might have missed the entire song.

Because your mind, you just couldn't, it was just, it's just everywhere.

Who knows?

It's okay.

But leaning in means hearing the cadence of the Spirit.

It says, Can I just sit with God for a moment and ask Him to begin to just bless my hearing of this and to move me toward the truths that we're singing?

And can I, as one another, can we just sing to one another these truths and remind each other that this is our rock, these truths?

And that in this life, it's the already and not yet.

Well, one final point, and we'll be done is.

You know, it's it's been said, I didn't coin this, but I think it's absolutely spot on.

We cannot lead others any further than we ourselves have gone in the journey of sanctification.

This is so critical to us as a church.

If all the further we've gone in sanctification is mostly exterior, if we are a people who mostly focus on the outside, edit ourselves, we're perfectly complacent to be nice people, then the mentoring that we will do, the discipling we will do will be no farther than that.

To the degree that we become people who learn to listen and reflect on what's going on in our heart and to see it and to ask God to begin bringing it up, to bring those worms out and to begin to name and put names to them and speak them.

Speak them to our children.

Oh, son, you know what I just did in that grocery store today?

I'm ashamed to say this.

This is what happened.

I just want you to know what goes on in your dad's heart, just by the way.

This is what look at does this go on in your heart too?

Um, we can begin to disciple people in that kind of direction to where the rubber really meets the road.

And that's when we can learn to love people where they really are.

That's when we can learn the flesh counts for nothing, and the spirit is everything.

Let's close as the worship team comes forward.

I'll lead us in a prayer.

How we thank you for the new life that you've offered and have come through with, with conversion.

Lord, we know your spirit did it.

He initiated it, he awakened us.

And Father, thank you for the process of growth.

And we long to grow more.

We long for the desires of the Spirit to be more strongly felt and seen.

We ask that you would encourage us in this way and that you would bless us and lead us.

And Lord, help us be good followers.

Give us eyes, new, fresh eyes.

This summer we ask for fresh initiatives in the lives of each of us here today.

That you would unearth some new things, that you would give us a new willingness to hear your cadence, and that you would bless us with some fruit and progress and a greater hope and the ability to love deeper.

And we ask it all in Christ's name.

Amen.