Galatians 5:1,13-25

by Nathan Nettleton

“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