L.D. 20, Galatians 5:16-26 "Free Indeed" Scott Hoezee

Mostly, we don't know about the excesses of the wider society. True, we all struggle with various sins and temptations and we fail often to live as morally as we'd like. As I said in another sermon recently, few of us draw a blank when we come to the confession of sin time in our morning services. We know what sin is and we know what our own specific sins are, too. I do not for a moment want to minimize the seriousness with which we ought to confess our sins. Certainly we don't want to fall into that relativistic trap of downplaying our sins just because they are not as bad as the sins that other people commit.

But this morning's passage forces us to contrast what Paul calls the life of the flesh with the life of the Spirit. Taking our cue from there, I think we may say that compared to a full-blown carnal lifestyle, the things that vex us as Christians, though still serious, are in a very different league. That thought occurred to me recently when I saw a portion of a TV special about pop singing sensation Justin Timberlake. At just 23 years of age, Timberlake has a wildly successful singing career. The television show that documented what Timberlake has done with the millions of dollars that have suddenly flowed his way was a secular celebration of carnal indulgences.

And so we were shown the small fleet of high-priced vehicles Timberlake has purchased: BMWs, a Mercedes Benz or two, a couple of those giant SUVs of the Cadillac Escalade variety. He now has something like a dozen vehicles that cashier in at anywhere from $50,000 to $100,000 each. We were shown also his multi-million dollar mansion where he throws wild parties that would almost certainly qualify for the designations of debauchery, orgies, and hours and hours of drinking, eating, swimming, and frolicking. Smaller details were also shown, like the $12,000 watch he wears (a gift from rap star P. Diddy) and shopping sprees in London where Timberlake's purchases can quickly tally up into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

But, of course, this was not some grim documentary on the bad things that can happen when a young man gets too rich too quickly. The glitzy exuberance by which this was all presented was calculated to make us envy such a life--if ever we ourselves were to make it big, this is exactly what life could, should, and would look like for us, too. Again, we don't want to go down the path that claims that compared to all that, we are in such good moral shape that we need not even talk about our peccadillos and ethical foibles. But it may be safe to say that this gives us a glimpse into what Paul is talking about when he says there is a vast difference between the life of the flesh and the life of the Spirit.

This morning let's let Galatians 5 help us to explore what it means to be oriented toward God through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. Along the way, we will have the chance to think also about the nature of true freedom. The first verse of Galatians 5 makes it clear that Jesus died and rose again to give us freedom. But the quirky fact of the matter is that what we Christians call "freedom" the world labels "oppression," but what the world labels "freedom" we Christians call "slavery." This is why the church and the rest of society so often talks past each other. This is why so often the letters that get printed in "The Public Pulse" of the Grand Rapids Press don't really end up getting anywhere because letter-writers often fail to recognize that the church and the world use different vocabularies.

So let's see if the apostle Paul can help us come to greater clarity. A first item to note has to do with the translation of this text in the NIV. In the verses we read, wherever you see the phrase "sinful nature," in the Greek original that is the word sarx, which means "flesh." The contrast here is between flesh and Spirit. But it is vital to remember that although Paul uses the word "flesh" as shorthand for a sinful lifestyle, he is not using this in the Gnostic, heretical sense of claiming that our bodies themselves are sinful. Christianity has always been tempted to go down certain ascetic paths that shun the physical, material world. And there are Christians, past and present, who tend to treat things like bodily pleasures, sexuality, eating, and drinking as inherently sinful and evil.

So we need to recall that Christianity is finally the religion of the incarnation. Jesus took on a real human body of flesh as a sign that he was not trying to save us out of this created world. Salvation is not a "Beam me up, Scotty" affair that transports us out of a world of sweetcorn and trout streams to go sit on a cloud somewhere far above it all. Jesus had a real body in order to save us within this creation. Jesus redeemed and salvaged all the goodness that God originally intended when he created bodies and all other earthly things. Christianity affirms the created goodness of our bodies, of sexuality, of food and drink.

So when Paul uses "flesh," he means living a life that is oriented only toward the physical without any reference to God. The life of the flesh is cut off from God's will for creation and so ends up in a kind of insane abandon that inevitably leads to self-indulgence. And that is the life that Paul claims is true enslavement. Yes, from a certain vantage point, doing whatever feels good, engaging in whatever you want without any restrictions looks like freedom. And in fact many people define freedom as an absence of boundaries. So the moment a Christian suggests that there are some things that a person simply must not do, that prohibition gets lambasted as a puritanical desire to squash freedom, to clip people's wings, to spoil their fun, and to make them conform like some pre-programmed robot.

But Paul knows what many wise people know and that is the irony of what actually lies behind this idea that freedom means no limits. The irony is that living without limits usually results in a life that is driven ever farther outward in a relentless forward momentum that cannot stop precisely because there are no limits to serve as a braking mechanism.

If you throw a baseball up into the air, it will come back down eventually because there is the limit of gravity. But suppose a baseball were conscious and suppose it was determined to prove there was no limit to its trajectory. The ball would be forced to keep generating new energy to keep it hurtling upward because if it actually ever started to descend again, then its claims of limitlessness would be proven wrong. But you'd have to pity the baseball that could never rest. Its entire existence would be consumed by its inability to recognize and accept gravity's natural limitation.

In the human sphere, if we don't acknowledge limits, our appetites have a tendency to take over. The eye that is drawn toward pornography never grows weary of looking. Left unchecked, people never conclude they've seen enough or that they've seen it all. Does it ever stagger you to read in the newspaper about some school official whose home computer gets confiscated only to reveal that he had stored 50,000 pornographic images on disc? Fifty thousand! It's difficult to imagine having the time to collect 50,000 pictures of anything. Even birdwatching enthusiasts never get around to collecting that many snapshots of warblers and tanagers, and no matter how much you may love gardening, it's difficult to imagine compiling photos of tulips that would number in the tens of thousands.

But the eye not limited by moral boundary lines does not tire of elicit pictures--if anything, people demand ever-more graphic such images. And the mouth is never tired of eating french fries or chips--the Jays potato chip slogan is clearly right: you can't eat just one. One glass of wine is nice but two taste mighty fine and the next thing you know you uncork another bottle. Very few rich people ever conclude they've got enough money. Hang around the barber shop or the bowling alley and you will routinely hear people say things like, "Aw, the lottery jackpot is only at $2 million right now. I'm gonna wait til it hits $100 million before I'll bother going for it." I'm sorry, but did you say only $2 million?

But similarly for some other things Paul lists such as having a spirit of envy or having fits of rage. Outbursts of anger are almost never isolated occurrences. As C.S. Lewis once said, when someone flat out loses it in a raging temper tantrum, the tendency is always to say, "Well, that situation just made me angry." No, Lewis observed, the situation did not make you an angry person, it only revealed the angry person you are all the time.

So also with envy. If you hear someone making a snide, back-stabbing comment about another person ("Sure she got the promotion I was hoping to get, but I hear that she's just a rotten mother to her kids!"), if you hear something like that, you can be assured that such a comment is not an isolated event in that person's life. In fact, if you have the kind of competitive spirit that leads to envy, you will never run out of people with whom to compare yourself. If you are prone to envy, there will always be somebody else who is prettier than you, who makes more money than you, who bakes a better apple pie than you, who has as bigger boat than you.

If we do not know our place in God's created order, if we do not admit the presence of limits on what constitutes proper behavior, then we will sooner or later find that instead of being free, we are slaves to our appetites. By contrast, the life of the Spirit is real freedom because being free means having the ability to make sound choices. And true choice involves the possibility of saying "No" to something you might be tempted to do. But talk to anyone who has an addiction of some kind, be it to drugs, gambling, pornography, or alcohol, and the common denominator you will hear is that at some point, while supposedly living a life of limitless freedom, the addicted person lost his or her ability to say "No." And it is precisely when you no longer have a choice that you realize you are a slave after all.

To Paul's gospel-informed mind, freedom is the opportunity to take uncoerced, unforced action in life. Freedom involves critical thinking and decision-making and so freedom means having all the facts. It is the Holy Spirit of God that puts us into the right, ordered frame of mind in which we can make good decisions. The simple fact of the matter is that there are things that are not good for us because not only do they end up hurting us, they end up hurting other people. But the person who lives the life of the Spirit will not be a selfish human being precisely because the life of the Spirit predisposes us to serve others.

That is why the fruit of the Spirit are almost all outwardly directed. Gentleness, love, kindness, goodness, patience and faithfulness all require the presence of another person in order to be manifested. But you cannot say "Yes" to other people unless you are able to say "No" to yourself. You cannot give money away without denying yourself the opportunity to spend it on yourself. You cannot be faithful to your spouse without saying "No" to the feelings of attraction toward and the temptation to be flirtatious with another person. You cannot be patient with the people who drive you up a wall without squelching the desire to indulge yourself by "really giving old so-and-so a piece of my mind!"

If other people matter to you, then you know you have to adhere to certain limits as laid down by the God who created us precisely to serve one another. Again, however, so much of society pushes the other way. This may especially be true for men in this country. As we have noted together in past sermons, the characteristics listed as "the fruit of the Spirit" tend in the direction of what many would regard as more feminine traits, as the opposite of all things macho.

California's governor recently got into trouble for labeling some of his legislative opponents as "girlie men," and just about everyone knew what he was getting at. Men are supposed to be tough, not tender; forceful, not kind; brawny, not gentle; cut-throat competitors, not people who exude deferential goodness. And under the rubric of "boys will be boys," if now and again men get a little rowdy and a little randy with the girls at the bar, well we understand. Curiously, I was working on this very part of the sermon when the new issue of Christianity Today arrived in the mail. On the cover was someone named John Eldredge, who thinks that Christian men have become too timid and docile. We've got too many Christian men like Mister Rogers, he said, but he thinks God wants men to be more like some blood-spattered Braveheart action hero, wild at heart and fierce. On the back cover of that same issue was an advertisement for the next round of PromiseKeepers conferences. The ad says, "Uprising: A Revolution is Coming" and it shows what looks like a small army of men in silhouette, some with fists raised into the air. Well, boys'll be boys.

But I say to you, live the life of the Spirit. Interestingly, when Paul lists the traits of the flesh in verse19, he says that these things are "obvious." The Greek word there is phanera, which means manifest, visible, readily on display and so easy to spy. And indeed, lots of sinful activities make quite a splash--that's why whole TV shows can be dedicated to the glitzy and indulgent excesses of a Justin Timberlake. But although Paul doesn't say it directly, it seems as though he is saying that having the fruit of the Spirit will not make such a splash, will not be as eye-catching as those who live life without limits. Yet that inward orientation toward love and peace, though ignored by the media, is still the life that God sees. The life of the Spirit makes a huge splash in God's eyes.

After compiling his now-famous list of Spirit-filled fruit, Paul makes the commonsense observation, "Against such things there is no law." This may have multiple meanings, and maybe the truth is a combination of all of them. In one sense Paul is saying that this lifestyle takes place beyond the reach of the law. As someone once said, a vine does not produce grapes because of an act of Congress--producing fruit is the natural function of a vine being itself. So also here: no one can force another person to be loving or kind or gentle. These traits have to emerge as the natural outgrowth of having the Holy Spirit graft us right onto Christ, the true vine of which we are the branches.

But the reverse is also true: although no law can force you to bear such fruit, no law could ever forbid it. How could anyone be against kindness? Of course there are no laws against these spiritual traits because even the most selfish person knows that his life will be better if the people around him are gentle, self-controlled folks. Who wouldn't want a nextdoor neighbor who was filled with the fruit of the Spirit? People like that always build up the others around them, and so of course there is never a law against such a life.

But maybe there is yet a third meaning behind this reference to law. As you may know, usually when Paul mentions the law, he contrasts it with grace. Those who live under the law try to get to heaven on the installment plan, earning their own way by keeping their merit-point tally higher than their demerits. People like that might be highly moral but the fact of the matter is that it's still all about them. If I think God grades on the curve, I focus a lot on myself because, after all, my main goal is to get myself into heaven.

Grace liberates us from worrying about ourselves. In Christ, we are all set. There's no law against the Spirit's fruit because it always helps others, and who could be against that. These spiritual fruit are a result of grace in the sense that grace frees us up to do the Christ-like thing of extending ourselves into the lives of others the same way Jesus extended himself so far into our lives as to become one of us. Some people think that freedom means traipsing down any path you want in life. Paul instead encourages us to "keep in step with the Spirit" because when we do, although there may be many paths we won't go down, the paths we do take will always lead us to serve others to the glory of our great God in Christ, who gives us the Spirit. Amen.