Transcript

As a 15-year-old girl in 1927, Lois Secrist promised the Lord she would go overseas as a missionary, perhaps to Africa or India. But Lois never made that trip.

At 23, she married Galon Prater, a farmhand who became a heavy drinker. Many years later when he was almost 80, Galon trusted Christ as a result of his wife’s faithfulness and he testified of the peace of Christ to his former drinking buddies.

When he died January 9, 1988, Lois’ childhood desire of becoming a missionary returned. At first, she resisted. At age 76, she felt her opportunity to serve overseas as a missionary had slipped away.

Lois admitted, “I said, ‘Lord, I’m too old to go now. I can’t do this.’”

But this great-grandmother was determined to fulfill her unforgotten promise. Lois, many years later and still pricked by the memory of ignoring God’s calling as a teenager, would not refuse a second chance at becoming a missionary.

So at 87, Lois Prater became the unlikely builder of an orphanage in the Philippines, a lifeline to children whose lives were rescued from neglect, begging in the streets, and parental abuse.

The orphans lived in a two-story, 2,000-square-foot white stucco home, and they called Lois “Lola,” which means “grandmother” in their native Tagalog language.

Lois’ “children,” as she called them, ranged in age from eight months to ten years. Each of their stories was heartbreaking.

Lois built the orphanage without taking out a loan, relying instead on individual financial support from across the United States. Because of her age, she was not supported by any church denomination and depended solely on private donations.

When asked if that made her nervous, she said confidently, “I serve a mighty God. He’s in control. I feel I’m not talented enough to do any of this. But my God enables me.”

By grace, in response to our faith, God enables and empowers each believer by the Holy Spirit to live for Him and to serve Him. And in our walk with God, we must walk in the Spirit.

Galatians 5:16: “This I say then, Walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfil the lust of the flesh.”

The life of a believer unfolds one day at a time. Walking then is a very picturesque metaphor. It pictures the believer’s life being lived out one day and one step at a time.

The believer’s life is a walking life. God’s instructions for our walk concern the pattern, habits, and the routine that He desires for our daily behavior.

The command to “walk” involves human responsibility and choice on our part to obey. The believer is instructed to walk and how to walk.

God desires that we yield and submit our will, and that we decide to trust His Word, take the step of faith, and obey God’s instructions for our walk.

People in the first century could not travel as fast as we do. They, of course, didn’t have our cars, planes, and trains. But even so, regardless of when, people back then and people today still walk to get places. And walking is the slowest way to get there.

But even though walking is slow and simple, walking means progress. When anyone keeps walking, he or she will cover the ground and eventually reach their destination.

So walking is an apt metaphor for the believer’s life. If any believer is walking, that believer is going somewhere.

In going somewhere, we know we are going to heaven, and our walk doesn’t determine that. Faith alone in Christ’s finished work is how we go to heaven.

So when we think of going somewhere with our walk, the direction, progress, and goal of it, and where we are headed in this life, is to be more like our Savior.

And like walking is about slow and steady progress, this is the way we also grow and mature in Christ, over time, steadily by faith, and through the Holy Spirit.

The Holy Spirit resides in each person who has trusted Christ as their personal Savior. He indwells us the moment we trust the gospel of salvation, and He is never leaving us.

As 1 Corinthians 6:19 reminds us, “What? know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you, which ye have of God…”

A saying we hear from time to time is, “What you don’t know won’t hurt you.” But that is not true in the Christian life, where what you don’t know will hurt you.

Each believer needs to know about the teaching of God’s Word regarding the presence and working of the Holy Spirit within. Not knowing this will “hurt” you because you will not be able to live the Christian life as God intended and desires.

When Paul teaches the Church, the Body of Christ, to “Walk in the Spirit,” here in Galatians 5:16, the first thing this reminds us of is that the Holy Spirit lives in us.

Then, knowing He resides in us, it reminds us that we need to be open and sensitive to the Holy Spirit in our lives. And finally, it means to submit and pattern your life after the influence, working, and power of the Holy Spirit by faith.

Every believer has the Holy Spirit, but the Holy Spirit does not have every believer. This is why we are instructed to walk in the Spirit. We are being called to yield to Him continually by faith.

Our responsibility to walk in the Spirit is tied directly to Paul’s instructions to “walk by faith, not by sight” (2 Cor 5:7). Walking by faith means to continually and consciously rely on God and His provisions for the believer’s life and conduct. And the gift of the indwelling Holy Spirit is God’s most gracious and powerful provision for living for Him.

Walking by the Spirit means we continually and consciously rely on the Spirit to have victory over the flesh and to progress in Christlikeness.

Thus walking by faith and walking in the Spirit are two essential truths and doctrines for the Christian life that enhance and connect with each other.

We walk by faith so we might walk in the Spirit. And the way we walk in the Spirit is by walking by faith. How much the Spirit transforms your life depends on how much you respond to Him and His Word by faith.

The Holy Spirit is received by an act of faith, and by the continued exercise of faith the blessings the Spirit gives are appropriated. The whole spiritual walk of the believer is a life of faith through the Holy Spirit.

Verse 18 of this chapter tells us the Spirit is committed to lead us, “But if ye be LED of the Spirit…” Romans 8:14 also states, “For as many as are LED by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God.” The Spirit leads and we follow Him by faith.

God provided each of us with a personal Guide in life, someone to show us the way. The Holy Spirit is not out there somewhere directing us like a police officer directs traffic. And He is not like an air traffic controller up in a tower telling planes where to land.

The Holy Spirit is our Leader and our Guide. He is always right there with us, and we know this because He indwells us. He is constantly aware and tuned in to our emotional and spiritual states and our circumstances.

Being led by Him assumes a continuing relationship. It implies fellowship and trust.

As we are led by Him and we walk in the Spirit, He leads us to freedom and fruitfulness, FREEDOM from the lust and works of the flesh and He yields the FRUIT of the Spirit in our lives.

The Spirit in His love and care for us, leads us away from what is harmful to our lives and towards and into that which is good and godly.

And the Spirit always leads us to be more and more like the Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ. He guides us into thoughts, words, actions and deeds which glorify and point to Christ.

The Spirit is not a leader like the pace car in a race, where we follow Him under our own power or strength. He is a leader like a locomotive on a train. We do not follow in our strength. We are led by His power. Walking in the Spirit means being hooked and connected to the divine source of power and going where He leads.

The believer’s life is to be led and carried out in the power of the Spirit. We can’t live the Christian life in our own strength. We are saved by the Savior and we are sanctified, or set apart to God in our daily living, by the Spirit. We need God in every way.

Having the Spirit in us, the believer is given everything he or she needs to live a godly life. The power for Christian living comes entirely from the Holy Spirit. And the power is a Person, the third Person of the Trinity, who indwells each believer.

Walking in the Spirit under grace does not concern the supernatural, miraculous power that the Spirit manifested at Pentecost and after it, with the Spirit’s miracles of healings, tongues, and raising the dead.

Rather, under grace, it is about the Spirit being the daily sustaining, inspiring, and guiding power of the believer’s life so that we might have victory over sin and grow in spiritual maturity to be more like our Savior.

I’ve always liked this quote by J. I. Packer: “We grow up into Christ by growing down…Offloading our fantasies of omnicompetence, we start trying to be trustful, obedient, dependent, patient, and willing in our relationship to God.

“We give up our dreams of being greatly admired for doing wonderfully well. We begin teaching ourselves unemotionally and matter-of-factly to recognize that we are not likely ever to appear, or actually to be, much of a success by the world’s standards.

“We bow to events that rub our noses in the reality of our own weakness, and we look to God for strength quietly to cope. It is impossible at the same time to give the impression both that I am a great Christian and that Jesus Christ is a great Master.

“So the Christian will practice curling up small, as it were, so that in and through him or her, the Savior may show Himself great.”

As we walk by faith and in the Spirit, and we humbly curl up small, the Spirit can work through us to bring about maturity in Christ and He and His life can be revealed thru us.

The Spirit does not operate automatically in our lives; we must intentionally depend on Him by faith. He waits and wants us to do so.

And the instruction to walk in the Spirit is a call to dependence, for us to rely on the presence and power of the Holy Spirit within.

The term walking implies dependence because when you walk you place all of your weight on one leg which allows you to place the other leg forward. Likewise, when we walk in the Spirit, we must put all our weight on Him by faith, and we rely on and depend on His power, and not your own, to take the next step in our spiritual walk.

Depending on your legs means you are trusting them to hold you, and walking in the Spirit means you are trusting Him, knowing He will hold you up spiritually.

The strength to walk the Christian walk, and to take each step in it, comes from the Spirit. How we are to live is one step at a time in the power and wisdom of the Holy Spirit.

To walk in the Spirit means to depend on Him consciously by faith for everything we do.

We depend on Him to resist temptation. We ask Him for insight into His Word. We seek Him for wisdom when we make decisions. We rely on Him for the right attitude in difficult situations, and so on.

And in depending on the Holy Spirit we must then depend upon prayer and God’s Word.

To be led by the Spirit and to walk in Him and His power and wisdom, we must listen to and take heed to what the Spirit says in His Word, rightly divided.

For all the instructions concerning our walk under grace, found in Paul’s epistles, they need to be carried out “in the Spirit” and by depending on Him.

It is the Spirit that empowers us to walk worthy of our calling, to walk not as other Gentiles walk, to walk in love, as children of light, and circumspectly, or carefully.

The obstacles that confront the believer in our walk are massive and powerful. We live in a world system which is contrary to God and the things of God. In it, we are under constant pressure to love the world, to compromise with it, and to conform to it.

The believer is under the constant barrage of the devil’s fiery darts of deceptions and temptations. And as Peter states in 1 Peter 5:8, “as a roaring lion, [he] walketh about, seeking whom he may devour.”

In addition to the confrontation of both the world and Satan, a believer is faced with his own inner weakness, which Paul talks about in this context, as the flesh has a powerful desire to control us and a bent toward sinful works that can destroy a believer’s life.

A believer does not have the strength to confront these formidable foes in himself and in his strength alone; we NEED the power and presence of the Holy Spirit.

Of course, God knows this, and by His grace, He has given us the very power of God within to be able to walk in and through the midst of these foes all the days of our lives and still maintain a God-honoring, Christ-like testimony.

The second half of verse 16 states, “Walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfil the lust of the flesh.”

Paul does not say we will no longer have “the lust” and desires of the flesh, but that we will not fulfill them and carry them out when we walk in the Spirit. The Spirit and His power give us victory over the flesh.

It’s important not to invert Galatians 5:16, thinking that you first have to deny the flesh and by so doing you are then walking in the Spirit.

That is not Paul’s order. It’s the Spirit first, then the flesh. By a consistent walk in the Spirit, we will not fulfill the flesh’s desires.

Paul says walk by the Spirit and you will not carry out the desire of the flesh, and the opposite is true too, if you don’t walk by the Spirit, you will fulfill the lust of the flesh.

But Paul’s grace teaching here is that the way to triumph over the flesh is not a matter of negative restraint or prevention of the flesh, but of positive possession of the boundless resources of grace and power available through the Spirit.

The key is not to suppress the flesh, but rather to surrender to the Spirit.

If I said to you, “Thou shalt not think of a multicolored beach ball,” suddenly, you wouldn’t be able to think of anything else.

But, if I then set before you a huge hot fudge sundae: creamy vanilla ice cream, laced with deep dark fudge, topped with mounds of whipped cream, with peanuts sprinkled on the top, the beach ball suddenly wouldn’t enter your mind because you’d be captivated by something so much better right before your eyes.

That’s what walking in the Spirit is about. It’s not trying to deny and suppress the flesh but allowing ourselves to be captivated by something so much better.

It’s about keeping our focus on Christ, being occupied with Him, getting to know Him, thinking and living by the spiritual, the eternal, our hope, what is good, right, and true, and living a life of faith and love. And by doing so, we will not fulfill the lust of the flesh.

Galatians 5:17 reads, “For the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh: and these are contrary the one to the other: so that ye cannot do the things that ye would.”

A tough-looking biker walked into a diner and sat at the counter. Turning to the fellow sitting next to him, he slowly uttered, “Combat. Battle. Warfare. Skirmish. Brawl. Scuffle.”

The other man slammed his fist down on the counter, got up out of his seat, turned to face the tough guy, and said, “Them’s fightin’ words!”

Speaking of fighting words like combat, battle, and warfare, Paul talks about the war between the flesh and the Spirit that takes place internally in the believer.

I believe that the flesh is synonymous with the old nature. The flesh is our fallen nature, inherited from Adam, which is opposed to God and continually seeks its own desires. The core problem of the old nature, or the flesh, is sin and self-centeredness; its bent is toward sin and to serve self.

The sin nature is received at birth and is never eradicated in this life. While it is a defeated foe, defeated by the Cross of Christ, it remains in us and is active. But it can be controlled and overpowered by the Spirit.

So while the believer is exhorted to walk in the Spirit in verse 16, verse 17 warns the believer to expect opposition from the flesh in endeavoring to do so.

Before we were saved, we had a single nature, the old, sin nature. But at salvation, we are immediately given a new nature, and the Spirit dwells in us.

Unbelievers do not have a war within them. The only inner conflict they might have is with obeying the laws of our country, the moral teaching of their parents, or their conscience.

But for the believer, there is an internal battle, conflict, and struggle going on between our flesh, or our old nature, and the Spirit within the child of God.

These two forces are locked in a constant struggle, a battle that every believer experiences as part of their normal Christian life.

In this conflict, we are pulled by two opposing forces. There is a downward pull by the flesh, and an upward pull by the Spirit. They draw us in completely opposite directions. The Spirit of God would lead us one way, and our flesh would lead us another.

And in this context of Galatians 5 we see how the Spirit leads us toward the fruit of the Spirit, but the flesh pulls us toward the works of the flesh.

It is an unrelenting struggle. God’s Spirit and our flesh are perpetually at war, they will continue to be at war until we are taken home to glory.

Peter wrote his countrymen about this war in 1 Peter 2:11: “Dearly beloved, I beseech you as strangers and pilgrims, abstain from FLESHLY lusts, which WAR against the soul.”

As Paul wrote, these are contrary the one to the other. “Contrary” means to lie opposite to, to oppose, withstand.

In 2 Thessalonians 2:4, speaking of the Anti-Christ, it says that he “OPPOSETH and exalteth himself above all that is called God, or that is worshipped….” The word “opposeth” is the same word translated “contrary” here in Galatians 5:17. The Anti-Christ will be completely against, opposed to, and contrary to God and the true Christ.

Likewise, the flesh and the Spirit are polar opposites, they oppose each other, they don’t agree, and they are enemies. There is no such thing as peaceful coexistence between the flesh and the Spirit.

The sinful desires of our flesh are at odds with what the Holy Spirit desires for us, which is to be free from sin. It might be obvious, but the HOLY Spirit leads us toward HOLINESS.

But the flesh opposes the work of the Spirit and leads the believer toward sinful and selfish behavior.

When the flesh wins that inside battle at times, the believer frustratingly finds that we do not do the things that we would. The flesh keeps us from doing the good we desire, the righteousness we desire to carry out. It’s like what Paul said in Romans 7:19: “For the good that I would, I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do.”

A believer can and does yield to the flesh, and a believer can even live constantly by the flesh and not by the Spirit. Living this way, the believer puts God over here to the side in their lives and lives according to all that self and the flesh desire.

Walking in the Spirit, however, is to join our hearts, minds, and wills to God by faith and to allow the Spirit and His power to overwhelm the selfish desires and control of the flesh, and to yield to His leading and control for our daily walk.

Walking by the Spirit keeps us from stumbling and falling into the ditch of depravity, sin, and wickedness. When our flesh is in control and in the driver’s seat, bad things happen in our lives according to Galatians 5:19-21:

“Now the works of the flesh are manifest, which are these; Adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, Idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, Envyings, murders, drunkenness, revellings, and such like…”

As Paul summed this up in Romans 7:18: “For I know that in me (that is, in my flesh,) dwelleth no good thing…”

And one pastor put it well, “The flesh wants to control you. It wants to have you think bad. It wants to have you feel bad. It wants to create anger, hostility, bitterness, jealousy, envy, strife. It wants to make you sure that you have reason to fear. It wants to make you doubt God. It wants to take love out of your heart and replace it with hatred.

“It wants to make you do wrong things and fill your life with guilt…The flesh lusts all the time desiring what is wrong, what is destructive. And the only hope of overcoming it is to walk in the Spirit.”

To deal with this strong enemy of the flesh, we are not alone. Since the believer is indwelt by the Holy Spirit it is no longer inevitable that we must yield to the evil and destructive ways of the flesh. Instead, we can enjoy liberty from the bondage of the flesh.

The power of the flesh may be great, but the power of the Spirit is greater. The Spirit is present and is at work in us by God’s grace, and we can turn from the strong desires and works of the flesh which tear us down.

And the Spirit of God can lead the believer into a whole new way of life, into what is good and true, and what builds us up: love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance.

We cannot gain victory over the flesh in our own strength and by our own will. The solution is not to pit our will against the flesh, but to surrender our will to the Holy Spirit.

The resources of the Holy Spirit are available so that a God-pleasing life is possible for every believer.

We never outgrow our need for the Holy Spirit, and that is why we must continuously walk in the Spirit.