Galatians 5
v.1
It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery.
v.4
You who are trying to be justified by law have been alienated from Christ; you have fallen away from grace.
Although most Jewish people believed that they were born into the covenant by virtue of being Jewish, they recognized that one could be cut off from the covenant by refusing to obey it. But because salvation is only by *Christ (2:21), Paul declares that seeking it any other way leads to being “cut off ” (NRSV).
Similar to 1 Corinthians 15:56.
v.5
But by faith we eagerly await through the Spirit the righteousness for which we hope.
v.6
For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision has any value. The only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love.
A mere intellectual assent to the truth may leave the heart cold and unaffected; mere orthodoxy, however bold and self-confident, and “sound,” may not be inconsistent with contentions, and strifes, and logomachies, and divisions. The true faith is that which is seen in benevolence, in love to God, in love to all who bear the Christian name; in a readiness to do good to all mankind. This shows that the heart is affected by the faith that is held; and this is the nature and design of all genuine religion. Tyndale renders this, “faith, which by love is mighty in operation.”
v.13
You, my brothers, were called to be free. But do not use your freedom to indulge the sinful nature; rather, serve one another in love.
The doctrine that Christians are “free;” that there is liberty to them from restraint, has been perverted always by Antinomians, and been made the occasion of their indulging freely in sin. And the result has shown that nothing was more important than to guard the doctrine of Christian liberty, and to show exactly what Christians are freed from, and what laws are still binding on them. Paul is, therefore, at great pains to show that the doctrines which he had maintained did not lead to licentiousness, and did not allow the indulgence of sinful and corrupt passions.
v.14
The entire law is summed up in a single command: “Love your neighbor as yourself.”
v.16
So I say, live by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the sinful nature.
His plea is for believers not to waste their freedom in Christ on serving their own flesh, and their own selfish desires. Instead, he has told those free in Christ to serve each other in love… Again, the picture Paul will paint is about setting aside our own power and relying on God’s. In the same way we could not fulfill the law by our own effort, Paul tells us to quit trying to serve each other in love on our own. The Spirit of God in us is available and willing to help.
The ethics of Christianity suffered much harm and were degraded into a false and slavish asceticism for long centuries, by monastic misunderstandings of what Paul meant by the flesh, but he himself was too clear-sighted and too high-toned to give his adhesion to the superficial notion that the body is the seat and source of sin.
The text is Paul’s battle-cry, which he opposed to the Judaising disturbers in Galatia. They said ‘Do this and that; labour at a round of observances; live by rule.’ Paul said, ‘No! That is of no use; you will make nothing of such an attempt nor will ever conquer evil so. Live by the spirit and you will not need a hard outward law, nor will you be in bondage to the works of the flesh.’ That feud in the Galatian churches was the earliest battle which Christianity had to fight between two eternal tendencies of thought—the conception of religion as consisting in outward obedience to a law, and consequently as made up of a series of painful efforts to keep it, and the conception of religion as being first the implanting of a new, divine life, and needing only to be nourished and cared for in order to drive forth evils from the heart, and so to show itself living. The difference goes very far and very deep, and these two views of what religion is have each their adherents to-day. The Apostle throws the whole weight of his authority into the one scale, and emphatically declares this as the one secret of victory, ‘Walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfil the lusts of the flesh.’
If we walk in the Spirit, we shall thereby acquire new tastes and desires of a higher kind which will destroy the lower.
Desires are confessions of discontent, and though the absolute satisfaction of all our nature is not granted to us here, there is so much of blessedness given and so many of our most clamant desires fully met in the gift of life in Christ, that we may well be free from the prickings of desires which sting men into earnest seeking after often unreal good. ‘The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace,’ and surely if we have these we may well leave the world its troubled delights and felicities. Christ’s joy remains in us and our joy is full. The world desires because it does not possess. When a deeper well is sunk, a shallower one is pretty sure to give out. If we walk in the Spirit we go down to the deepest water-holding stratum, and all the surface wells will run dry.
Let us learn the one condition of victorious conflict, the one means of subduing our natural humanity and its distracting desires, and let nothing rob us of the conviction that this is God’s way of making men like angels.
v.17
For the sinful nature desires what is contrary to the Spirit, and the Spirit what is contrary to the sinful nature. They are in conflict with each other, so that you do not do what you want.
v.18
But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law.
v.19
The acts of the sinful nature are obvious: sexual immorality, impurity and debauchery;
v.20
But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep.
v.21
For since death came through a man, the resurrection of the dead comes also through a man.
v.22-23
But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, 23gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law.
v.24
Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the sinful nature with its passions and desires.
v.25
Since we live by the Spirit, let us keep in step with the Spirit.
v.26
Let us not become conceited, provoking and envying each other.
The true way to cure envy is to make people feel that in their great and important interests they are on a level. Their great interests are beyond the grave. The distinctions of this life are temporary, and are comparative trifles. Soon all will be on a level in the grave, and at the bar of God and in heaven. Wealth, and honor, and rank do not avail there. The poorest man will wear as bright a crown as the rich; the man of most humble birth will be admitted as near the throne as he who can boast the longest line of illustrious ancestors. Why should a man who is soon to wear a “crown incorruptible and undefiled and that fadeth not away,” envy him who has a ducal coronet here, or a royal diadem - baubles that are soon to be laid aside forever? Why should he, though poor here, who is soon to inherit the treasures of heaven where “moth and rust do not corrupt,” envy him who can walk over a few acres as his own, or who has accumulated a glittering pile of dust, soon to be left forever?