"Live by the Spirit, I say, and do not gratify the desires of
the flesh. For what the flesh desires is opposed to the Spirit, and
what the Spirit desires is opposed to the flesh."

Different translation, but part of the same reading we just heard.
And I’d reckon that a number of you are cringing already. Maybe you’re
not, because you know me, but if you’d walked into a strange church and
heard that those words were about to be preached on, you’d be looking
for the exit signs, or at least bracing yourself to endure some pompous
drivel on the evils of masturbation or something.

Well I am going to preach from that passage, but no I haven’t turned
into one of those tele-evangelists who delivers sermon after sermon
calling down fire from heaven on fornicators and homosexuals when you
know perfectly well that some of them are that repetitive because they
can’t fit much preparation in between appointments at the local brothel!

The first thing I need to say by way of background to this is that I
like human bodies. I admit I like some of them more than others, but
that’s OK, I like some music more than other music too. I believe that
human bodies were created by God and declared by God to be good. I do
not believe that human flesh is inherently evil and that the goal of our
salvation is to liberate our pure spirits from our impure bodies. And I
don’t believe that the Apostle Paul thought that either. I need to say
that because Christian theology has been seen that way for so long that
when we hear a passage like this, that’s what we tend to hear.

To make sense of this passage you need to start from a healthy
Christian view of the human body. God didn’t just create bodies. When
God wanted to reach out to us, to be reconciled to us, what did God do?
John 1: the Word became what…? Flesh. God became one of us complete
with a human body, not to mention a human mind, a human spirit, human
desires etc. If God considered human bodies to be inherently evil then
God would have done without one. Not only that, but what happened after
Jesus had been killed, after his body had been rendered lifeless? What
happened??? God raised him back to life – body and all. If God didn’t
like bodies, then God could have skipped straight from crucifixion to
Pentecost and done without a body. But Jesus wasn’t just sending us the
Spirit, he was also blazing the trail that we are to take. We too are to
be resurrected. I don’t imagine that will be some kind of reconvening of
the molecules that made up our bodies the first time, but it is quite
clear that we will have bodies in the resurrection. Vastly improved
bodies, but still recognizably us. Our bodies, resurrected and
glorified. Made perfect. The image of God fulfilled in our bodies. That
is our ancient destiny, and on that destiny rests our dignity as human
beings.

Now it is against that background that you need to read this
passage. Paul says our flesh, our human nature, wants what is opposed to
the Spirit and what the Spirit wants is opposed to our fleshly desires.
Sure that sounds like Paul doesn’t like human flesh, human nature, but I
don’t think Paul is making a generalized claim about the essential
nature of humans as created by God here, he’s talking about the
situation we find ourselves in now. Paul is talking about the experience
of living in a world that is tearing apart at the seams. A world where
the central harmony and integrity of God’s creation is fractured.
Instead of a unified harmonious system, creation has fragmented and is
destroying itself. At the macro level you find that the species that was
supposed to be the crown of creation, us, is poisoning the air we
ourselves have to breathe and pumping toxic chemicals into the plants we
have to eat. And at the micro level you find exactly what Paul is
talking about here. You find that the fragmentation is even expressed
within individual people so that they are at war with themselves. As
Paul puts it elsewhere, I can’t even do what I want to do. There is a
war within me.

And as any of you who have ever tried to drive a faulty car or
operate a faulty computer will know, once some of the parts start to
become fragmented or distorted, the system doesn’t work properly and the
longer you run it like that the worse it gets. You can have the best
carburettor or microprocessor in the world, but if it is not properly
integrated with the rest of the machine you won’t get much value from it
and there’ll be nothing but trouble. It’s the same with your body.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with the human body, but you could have
the best body in the world, and if it’s not properly integrated with
your mind, your spirit, your emotions, your values, it is just as likely
to run out of synch with them and even war against them.

C.S.Lewis once said that there is no such thing as a pure evil. All
evils are just distortions of things that are good. Hatred is a
distortion of love. Lust is a distortion of passionate desire. Pride is
a distortion of self-esteem. etc. There is nothing wrong with bodily
desires until they become distorted or fragmented off from their proper
relationship with other aspects of you.

Now we’ll use sex as our illustration here for a minute. Not because
sex is the only bodily desire or because it matters more than the
others, but because I know that when we talk about bodily desires or the
desires of the flesh, that’s the one you all think of isn’t it? Come on,
yes it is! I know it is because it’s the one I think of and I’m normal!
I think.

Sex is good. Sexual desire is good. Sexual intimacy is good. They
must be, God made them and God said they were good. But if they get
distorted or fragmented off from the place they are designed to occupy
in your life then they won’t function healthily, they mutate and become
like cancers that start corrupting other parts of your life.

Sexual desire is good, sacred even, and like anything sacred, handle
it wrongly and its sacred power becomes destructive instead of
life-giving. Just think about your own experience of the expression of
sexual desire, even at simple preliminary levels with your clothes on.
Seductive talk, suggestive gestures, sexy innuendo, intimate touches.
When they come from someone with whom you share a secure, committed and
mutual loving relationship they feel exciting, affirming, wholesome,
sacred. But from someone who’s offering you nothing, who seems to be
driven by unspoken agendas, who doesn’t respect your boundaries or
wishes, and especially if their words and actions don’t match – they say
they’re just a friend but their behaviour doesn’t fit within normal
friendship bounds – it doesn’t feel sacred at all does it? It feels
sleazy, cheap, threatening. Degrading even. It mutates into something
deceptive, manipulative, selfish and almost inevitably poisonous. If you
want to cause maximum damage to a person with minimum effort, you hurt
them sexually.

Now I know as well as anybody that a pang of sexual desire can hit
you anytime, anyplace and with anybody. And there’s nothing you can do
about that because that’s what our bodies do. The problem comes in if
your bodily desires are ruling your actions on their own and are not
integrated with your mind, your spirit, your emotions, your values. If
they are integrated and mature you’ll have no trouble knowing which ones
to express and which ones hold in check till they pass, and no trouble
carrying it through.

But the trouble is that none of us have our bodies and spirits fully
integrated. All of us lack integrity in some areas because all of us
live in and are part of the dis-integration of creation. Our spirits,
minds and bodies do not always work well together and it affects us all
in different ways. The world wide craze for Viagra is evidence that for
many men the dis-integration expresses itself the other way round –
their minds say yes and their bodies say no. Fortunately that variation
is not such a threat to others around them, although it may sometimes
underlie other destructive behaviours.

I suspect that the image of God within us means that it is not
possible to eliminate all aspirations to goodness from our hearts and
minds, so you can’t achieve a negative integrity by becoming
consistently evil in both thought and deed. So the path to integration
is in fact the pathway of sanctification. They are one and the same.
Becoming good, fulfilling the God-given potential that is in you,
becoming holy is basically about a reintegration of all that was created
good in you in the first place. A reconciliation of body, mind, spirit,
emotions, values. A reintegration of all that is you.

And the good news, the gospel, is that you are now free to make that
journey. If it were not for what Jesus Christ has done for you, for the
power of God’s Holy Spirit poured into your heart, you would not be free
to do that because there is no way you could overcome the forces of
fragmentation all around you. There is no way you would not succumb to
the tidal waves of selfish ambition, of competitive greed, of
self-centred hedonism that sweep through our world, our society, our
hearts.

But in Jesus Christ you are free, free to grow into love and
maturity and integrity. You will occasionally find idiot
"Christians" who claim that their freedom in Christ means they
can do as they please without any concern for the moral and relational
outcomes. That’s not the freedom of the gospel. You were already free to
be stupid. You were already free to be immoral. You were already free to
be unloving and disrespectful and callous. The freedom of the gospel is
the freedom to start dismantling those things and reconstructing the
integrity of your soul.

And between here and the fulfilment of that reconciliation, that
sanctification, you will need to develop the disciplines that enable you
to live with the war inside without letting it get the upper hand again.
You will need to practice some discipline and denial to prevent your
unintegrated impulses from bursting out into behaviours that violate the
bounds of love and peace and goodness. Sometimes that will mean saying
no to something just because you know it’s wrong even though every other
part of you is screaming "go for it". And you will need to
practice some discipline and denial because they also help make you
strong, because they are actually techniques that aid the reintegration
of your component parts.

That’s why nearly every major religion in the world practices
physical disciplines of some form. They are most obvious in things like
yoga and tai chi, but kneeling and meditating and fasting have long
Christian heritages too. Every ancient wisdom tradition knows that
discipline in one area of your life has spill over benefits in others
because all your parts are interconnected, even if some of the
interconnections are faulty. These disciplines are techniques for
building spiritual strength and wholistic integrity. They might sound
masochistic and lifeless on their own, but as an integrated part of the
whole journey of sanctification they become part of the toolkit by which
the Spirit produces in us love, joy, peace, patience, kindness,
goodness, faithfulness, humility and self control. They become aspects
of the movement into wholeness and fullness of life. You can choose not
to do any of them, sure. But then you were always free to stay in
slavery instead of taking the hard road through the wilderness to the
promised land.

God has created us good. If everything had stayed good, it wouldn’t
even make sense to us to think of bodies, spirits and minds as separate
things – we would just think of whole people. But with our essential
integrity fractured, we think of those things separately because so
often they operate separately and even make war within us. But the good
news is that Jesus has freed us to undertake the journey of
sanctification, the journey that involves reconciling or reintegrating
our warring parts back into whole people. The good news is that, if we
are willing to respond to his call, Jesus Christ will lead us all the
way to resurrection, and in resurrection there will be no more war
within. Our destiny fulfilled, our beauty renewed, our integrity
restored, we will be distinguishable from Christ only by the physical
features of our bodies. Our resurrected, glorified bodies. Thanks be to
God!

Nathan Nettleton
Pastor, South Yarra Community Baptist Church
Melbourne, Australia