Walking in the Spirit

I don’t know if you have noticed this, but it seems to me that there are a lot of books and YouTube videos on the subject of rules and habits. For example, there is “12 Rules for Life” by Jordan Peterson, “Eight Rules of Love” by Jay Shetty, “Robert’s Rules of Order,” and “The Five-Second Rule” by Mel Robbins. If you were to expand the list to include books with “habit” in the title, we have “Atomic Habits” by James Clear, “Tiny Habits” by BJ, and a few others which I have forgotten. I think the reason for this is that we are living in increasingly complex and challenging times, and people are trying to find a way to navigate them.

Rules and habits can be very helpful to us. In his book “God In My Everything,” Ken Shigematsu, a pastor from Vancouver, talks about how having a set of basic rules for life can be like a trellis that supports a grapevine. Rules and habits can provide support our lives and help us to nourish and grow and be fruitful.

However, there is another side to habits and rules. They can become detrimental to our lives instead of being helpful when they somehow shift from supporting our life to becoming our life. Here’s why that can be a problem: Underneath our exterior, deep down inside of us, we all have a soul. In its natural state, the human soul is hurting, wounded, broken, and dying. It doesn’t need rules or habits; what it needs is life, forgiveness, peace, healing, and restoration. Until that happens within us, rules and habits won’t help us; they will have the effect of crushing us. So, we need to deal with what’s going on in our soul first.

So the question that I’m inviting you to reflect on with me is this: How can we live an effective and fruitful life in this challenging and complex world? To help us as we consider this question, we are going to be reflecting on a passage from the Bible: Galatians 5:13-26. If you have a Bible or a Bible app nearby, I invite you to open it up to that passage.

The Problem of Adding Rules to the Gospel

As you do that, here is a bit of background to the passage. This is a letter that Paul to a group of churches in a region called Galatia. There’s some debate among scholars about whether it’s the northern part of Asia Minor, present-day Turkey, or the southern part, because in the northern part there were people called Galatians, and in the southern part, there was a Roman province called Galatia. I think that it is more likely that the letter was addressed to churches in the southern part of Asia Minor because Paul had previously planted churches in that area in 46 or 47 AD.

Shortly after he left, some Jewish Christians came into the region and began teaching the new Christians there that it wasn’t enough to simply believe in Jesus; the males also needed to be circumcised, and they all had to follow at least some of the Jewish ceremonial laws.

Paul then writes this letter in about 48 AD to counter what these Jewish Christians were teaching. This was a very important issue that warranted a response because this false teaching implied that what Jesus did was not enough and that people had to add some of their own efforts in order to be saved. Not only did this teaching denigrate what Jesus did, but anytime you add a human component to our salvation, it throws it in doubt. How do we know if our part, whatever it is, has been done well enough to be saved? The truth is, we don’t. Moreover, because everything we do is tinged in some way with sin, there is no way that our part could be done well enough to save us. That’s a problem. An easy way for us to remember this truth is with this saying: “Jesus plus anything equals nothing. Jesus plus nothing equals everything.”

Now there are two things that we need to admit to ourselves. First, there is a part of us that wants to add our effort to our own salvation. This kind of thinking aligns with the law of our natural human logic, and we understand how it works. If we do A, B, and C, and then D, E, and F happen.

The second thing that we need to admit to ourselves is that, at some level, the Gospel offends us because it means that people receive something really good and they haven’t done anything to deserve it. Deep down inside, in our human nature, we do not like that. We don’t like it when it happens to others, and we’re somehow offended when it happens to us. And both of these ways of thinking and being need to be challenged within us. We need to be challenged and offended because we humans have a track record of continually trying to save ourselves, and that has to stop for us to receive the Gospel message.

If we look in the Bible, in Genesis chapter three, Adam and Eve had only one thing they had to do: not eat from a particular tree in the garden, and they failed at that. When they realized that they were naked and ashamed they tried to sew clothes for themselves out of fig leaves. Not only was that an obvious sign of their shame, but fig leaves are totally inadequate for clothing materials; they won’t last long. What did God do in response to these two human beings whom he loved trying to save themselves? He promised them a Messiah who will come and undo all the consequences of sin and save them and all of humanity as a free gift. And then he gave them proper clothes made from animal skins.

When we move ahead a few pages in the Bible to Genesis chapter 11, we find that human beings were gathered all in one place and they wanted to make a name for themselves by building a tower that reached the heavens. Again, humans were trying to save themselves, this time through technology. God realized this wasn’t good for humanity or for creation, so He gave them all different languages. They scattered and started to fill the world as He intended and knew was best for the world.

Moreover, in the very next chapter, in Genesis chapter 12, God gave a promise to Abram (later named Abraham) that all nations on the earth would be blessed through him because it was through his family that God was going to bring the Messiah into the world. This Messiah would eventually undo all the scattering that happened at the Tower of Babel, gathering and uniting all people into the family of God. We have a beautiful picture of that in Revelation chapter 7, where every tribe, nation, and tongue of people are gathered, worshiping God together in the new heaven and earth. So, having the right relationship with God means laying down all of our ideas, self-made rules, and personal resources before Him and then trusting in Him to meet us in our helplessness.

The Good Life We Desire Comes to Us Solely Through the Efforts of Jesus

You see, the good life that we desire comes to us solely through the efforts of Jesus Christ, because Jesus is the Messiah that God promised. He’s God the Son who became human in the womb of Mary and lived a human life just like you and I do in this world, except that he did not sin. Jesus had his own rules and habits, which we read about in the Bible. For example, it was his custom to attend worship every Saturday in the synagogue wherever he was. He also followed God’s Ten Rules for Life, the Ten Commandments, which are actually God’s boundaries for how we live the life that He has given us.

Jesus summarizes those Ten Commandments in a beautiful way and helps us realize that the point of all those things is love. He said in response to a question about the greatest commandment, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind; this is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself. All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.” (Matthew 22:37-40) Jesus had rules and habits, but his rules and habits were not the source of his life; his Father was the source of his life. He tells us this in John chapter 14 when he’s gathered with his followers in that intimate setting on the night when he was betrayed. He says, “Don’t you believe that I am in the Father and that the Father is in me? The words I say to you, I do not speak on my own authority. Rather, it is the Father living in me who is doing His work.” (John 14:10) So Jesus’ rules and habits were not the source of his life; they were how he lived out the life that he had already been given by his Father.

And then, when the time was just right, Jesus did what no rule, law, or habit required of him. He willingly and lovingly went to the cross and suffered for crimes that were not his. You see, the sins that Jesus suffered for were ours. Jesus willingly went there so that he could pay the full cost of forgiveness for all the sins of all humanity and set us free. He set us free from the burden of our guilt and shame, he set us free from the pointless striving of trying to save ourselves, and he set us free from the threat of eternal death and separation from God. But Jesus did more than take away the negatives of our life apart from God; there are also many great positive aspects to the Gospel. Jesus made us beloved, forgiven children of God, he brought us into the family of God, he gave us eternal life with him, and he has begun the process of healing and restoring us, which begins the moment we believe in him and will be brought to completion when he returns to this world at the end of time.

How Do We Use Our Freedom?

So, the question for us is, how do we use our freedom? Paul sets before us two options. The first option is to use our freedom to indulge our sinful thoughts, appetites, and desires, which Paul calls indulging the flesh, in other words, indulging our own sinful self, our sinful nature . We could do that, but Paul warns us not to. As long as we live life in this world, you and I, along with everyone else who follows Jesus, will have two natures within us: our old nature and our new nature. If we keep feeding our old sinful nature, it will get stronger and stronger, and eventually it could overwhelm our new nature and take over our life. So, we don’t want to work to feed our old nature; we want to starve and weaken it. Some God-guided rules and habits can actually help us do that.

The second option is to use our freedom to serve one another humbly in love. Serving others with humbleness and love forces us to turn away from feeding our own sinful flesh because you can’t do both of those things at the same time. It also means that as we turn to serve the person next to us in love, we’re not feeding ourselves, and therefore we need to trust that God will feed our new nature as we serve others.

We know that God will do that because Jesus has made us part of the divine community of love that the Father, the Son, and the Spirit have lived in from eternity and will continue to do so into eternity in the future. Again, in John 14, Jesus says to his followers and to us, “Before long, the world will not see me anymore, but you will see me because I live; you also will live. On that day, you will realize that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you.” (John 14:19-20) Then, because we are part of the family of God, Jesus has also given us the Holy Spirit, as Paul tells us in his letter to the Galatians, “But when the set time had fully come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those under the law, that we might receive adoption to sonship.” (Galatians 4:4-6) The term “sonship” here includes men and women, boys and girls, and refers to the fact that we are all now children of God with full rights of inheritance. Because we are all “sons” of God, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts—the Spirit who calls out “Abba, Father,” or in English, we might say “Daddy, Father”. God loves us like a father loves his dear child and he has brought us into life with him, so we know that God will feed our new nature as we serve others in love. We can forget about ourselves. God has got us.

Then there’s this phrase that Paul uses of “keeping in step with the Spirit” or “walking in the Spirit” or “walking with the Spirit.” So, what exactly does he mean by that? Well, in the Bible, a person’s walk is their pattern of life. It’s how they live. First, to walk in the Spirit means having a pattern of life where our life is nourished by the Spirit. This happens as we engage with God’s Word and his Sacraments, and he nourishes our soul with gifts he has given us. In God’s Word, the Bible, we hear, read, and know how much He loves us, that He forgives us, that He accepts us, and that He gives us new life. We need to hear those words, read those words, and even speak those words into our spirit. One of the books I’m reading right now is called “The Kindness Method” by Shahroo Izadi. Shahroo is a specialist in the area of life change and she identifies that the biggest factor in life change is not the habits we have, it is the conversations we have with ourselves. We tend to be mean to ourselves, and it’s not until we start to speak to ourselves with kindness that true change can actually begin to happen in our lives. In order for that interior conversation to change, I believe that our soul needs to be nourished by God.

Second, “walking in the spirit” means having a pattern of life where we are led by the Spirit. What does that look like? Through the Alpha program, we have been blessed with the “Five CS’s” which identify the various ways the Holy Spirit leads us. Each of these ways has the initials “C.S.”. If you like C.S. Lewis, you can think of his first two initials. Here are the five ways that the Holy Spirit leads us:

• Commanding Scripture: Sometimes, the Holy Spirit gives us very clear direction through what he tells us in the Bible.
• Compelling Spirit: This is when we have an inner sense that the Holy Spirit is guiding us in a certain direction.
• Common Sense: This is an often overlooked but an important way that the Holy Spirit guides us.
• Counsel of the Saints: Sometimes the Holy Spirit guides us through advice from a fellow Christian.
• Circumstantial Signs: This is when the Holy Spirit guides us through the things that happen around us.

Third, “walking in the Spirit” means that our life displays the fruit of the Spirit. Paul writes about this in Galatians 5, “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance (or patience), kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.” (Galatians 5:22-23) These are not things we can conjure up in ourselves; they are things that the Holy Spirit produces in us as we go deeper into life with Him.

And the litmus test of our walk with the Spirit is how we relate to other people. Signs that we need to go deeper with the Holy Spirit are when we are comparing ourselves to others and either think that we are better than they are or wish that we had what they have. I don’t know about you, but this is why social media is such a problem for me because when I’m viewing it, I’m often in my head going into comparison mode, and it does something bad to my spirit. Maybe you can handle social media with no ill effects, but I can’t. So going into comparison mode is one issue.

Another sign that we need to go deeper with the Spirit is when we are manipulating other people and trying to get them to do what we want by stirring them up.

On the other hand, signs that we are walking with the Spirit include living with contentment. We likely have challenges that we have to face in life, but God is with us in all these things, and that is good enough for us. Other signs of walking with the Spirit are when we are selfless in our relationships with others, and we naturally love others, that is, we want what is best for them. Asking ourselves “How am I relating to other people?” can give us feedback on the depth of our walk with the Spirit.

A Life Transformed

Matt Elrod was a contestant on the 22nd season of Survivor. In an “I Am Second” video, he talks about how, in his high school days, he was really good at sports and played the role of being humble, but actually enjoyed being the hero. When he was 22 and chosen as a contestant on Survivor, he said he was going to play the game God’s way, but he had his own vision for how he was going to do it. On the first day on set, as he was sizing up other contestants to try to ascertain their strengths and weaknesses so he could defeat them, he sensed God saying to him, “How can you be so arrogant? I’m the one who brought you here into this situation, and now you are going to do things your way.”

On that particular season of Survivor, when people got voted off, they had to go to an island called Redemption Island by themselves. There were two opportunities for them to get back to the main group, but they had to defeat other contestants to get there. Matt got sent to Redemption Island twice and spent a total of 29 days there in isolation. Fortunately, he had been given a Bible by another contestant. Those 29 days on Redemption Island all alone and reading that Bible were exactly what Matt needed to help him become willing to give everything to God.

Taking Action

Let’s go back to our original question, “How can we live an effective and fruitful life in this challenging and complex world?”The answer is the challenge that I want to leave with you today. First, ask the Holy Spirit to show you the source and the goals of the rules and habits in your life.

If the source and the goals are for you, then ask the Spirit to guide you as to whether you need to change or get rid of those things. But if the source is God, and the goal is God, then ask the Holy Spirit to help you keep those rules and habits, not to gain life, but because you have life. And second, ask the Holy Spirit to draw you into a deeper life with Him, so that more and more of God’s love flows through you into the lives of the people around you. Amen.