We'll read in the book of Romans and chapter 8 Romans chapter 8 and at the end of chapter 7 very famously you have a picture of a man who just can't seem to live up to the requirements of God's law. There's no mention there of the power of the Spirit, or indeed of Christ, really, except in the very last verse. But in chapter 8, it turns much more positive, because the Holy Spirit is introduced. He's mentioned, I think, 14 times, or 15 times in the opening few verses. So, let's listen carefully to what the Holy Spirit enables us to do. Romans 8, 1. There is therefore now no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus, who do not walk according to the flesh. They don't live, in other words, according to the flesh, but according to the Spirit. For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has made me free from the law of sin and death. In other words, that life of bondage is turned around by the Spirit of God. For what the law could not do in that it was weak through the flesh, God did by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh on account of sin He condemned sin in the flesh. That the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us. In other words, that we would begin to live holy lives. Us who do not walk according to the flesh, but according to the Spirit. For those who live according to the flesh, they set their minds on the things of the flesh. But those who live according to the Spirit, set their minds on the things of the Spirit, for to be carnally or fleshly minded is death, but to be spiritually minded is life and peace, because the carnal or fleshly mind is enmity against God, for it is not subject to the law of God, nor indeed can be. So then, those who are in the flesh That's unconverted people, they cannot please God. But you are not in the flesh, but in the Spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God dwells in you. Now if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he is not his. And if Christ is in you, the body is dead because of sin, but the Spirit is life because of righteousness. But if the spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his spirit who dwells in you. Therefore, brethren, we are debtors, not to the flesh, to live according to the flesh, for if you live according to the flesh, you will die. But if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live. For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, that's led into holiness, into holy living, these are the sons of God. For you did not receive the spirit of bondage again to fear, but you received the spirit of adoption. by whom we cry out, Abba, Father, and so on. We pray God's blessing on his word. Let's turn now to the passage that we're mainly considering. That's Galatians chapter 5, if you turn to that again, and reading at verse 16. Galatians 5, verse 16. I say then, walk in the Spirit and you shall not fulfill the lust of the flesh. That's a critical verse which will come to tomorrow. But the next one, especially today, for the flesh lusts against the spirit, and the spirit against the flesh. And these are contrary to one another, so that you do not do the things that you wish. But if you are led by the spirit, you are not under the law. I think we should read the next few verses too. Now the works of the flesh are evident, which are adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lewdness, idolatry, sorcery, hatred, contentions, jealousies, outbursts of wrath, selfish ambitions, dissensions, heresies, envy, murders, drunkenness, revelries and the like, of which I tell you beforehand Just as I also told you in time past that those who practice such things will not inherit the Kingdom of God. But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, long-suffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. Against such there is no law. And those who are Christ's have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. If we live in the Spirit, let us also walk in the Spirit. And that, of course, is our theme, living and walking in the Spirit. Or, as we saw yesterday, just living out our Christian lives in the power of the Holy Spirit of God. And we learned, I hope, in a foundational and powerful way last night. I hope it was like that. I hope it came to us in that way, the foundational importance of knowing that the key to walking in the Spirit lies in realizing fully who we are. Not simply a justified people, not simply an adopted people brought into the family of God, wonderful as these things are, but that we are in fact existentially, if you like, we are new creations in Christ. The old me died and I am a new person. So are you in Christ Jesus. You were born again. Can I just say in connection with that, the fact that you were born again doesn't just mean that something new was born in you. It means that you were born again. You underwent a new birth. It is a new you. Now I want to turn this morning to ask another question which is Still almost preparing the way, in a sense, for tomorrow, but very important nonetheless. And the question is, what does walking in the Spirit actually look like? What is a spiritual person? Somebody who is really living in the power of the Holy Spirit, what does that person look like? It's important to ask the question like that because that person looks like something. Walking in the spirit, in other words, is not an invisible thing, it's a visible thing. You're liable to think, and I touched on this a little bit last night, but you're liable to think that a spiritual person is somebody who just lives mystically on another level. Maybe a touch of that, an element of that, but that's maybe how you think about it. It's something that just goes on in their head. In other words, a spiritual person or walking in the spirit has to do with the mystical, the ethereal or invisible. But it's not. Walking in the spirit is a physical thing. It's a visible thing. It's got arms and legs. It involves the totality of your being. It involves your tongue, your hands, your feet, your body. which you are presenting as a living sacrifice to God. So holiness is a visible thing. It is really important to remember that holiness is a visible thing. Now the opposite of course is a visible thing too. I mean if someone is walking in the flesh living in the flesh, whatever that means, we'll see later, but if someone is living like that, that's a visible thing too. You'll notice in verse 19 that Paul says to the Galatians that the works of the flesh are evident, they're manifest, they're visible, they're clear, transparent things, you can tell someone who is living in the flesh. In the same way in verse 22, although it doesn't say it, The fruit of the Spirit is evident too. That's the whole point really of what he's saying. It's a tangible thing. Living in the fruit of the Spirit, that's tangible. It's visible. And he tells us what it looks like. I mean, these are important and precious verses. Here is a spiritual man or woman. The fruit of the spirit is, and he begins with three areas of the inner emotional life. Certainly they reveal themselves outwardly too, but in the first three there's a focus inside. There is love. Now I think the emphasis here falls on loving God. We know of course that true Christian love goes horizontally as well as vertically. Our love for God is also accompanied by our love for God's people and indeed by a love for a lost world. But the emphasis here is on loving God. The fruit of the Spirit is loving God and joy, inexpressible joy or unspeakable joy as Paul calls it elsewhere. That's joy again in God and in what God has done for us. I don't know to what extent you can separate the two. I don't think in a way that you really can, but you rejoice in God and what he has done for you. And peace. If the Spirit of God has come into your heart, He gives you love for God, joy in God, and peace with God. Peace that Paul describes as surpassing human understanding. In the Greek, nous, it's beyond our nous. It's different to the peace that the world has. But then he describes the spiritual walk or the fruit that the Spirit produces in your life. He describes it in terms of our relationship with other people. The focus this time is not Godward really, but outward, manward, womanward. First of all, he says, we begin to long suffer. That means being patient under provocation and in the face of wrongdoing. You suffer long. When Paul uses this word, Speaking about love in 1 Corinthians 13, he tells us that love long suffers and is kind. So as well as being patient under wrongdoing, you continue to show kindness even to the people who are wronging you. The Holy Spirit produces that fruit. I mean, Jesus tells us that it's nothing special to love people who are our friends. It's loving enemies or people who even for a time have adopted a position of enmity towards you. That's the acid test of God-likeness and Christ-likeness. That's where the fruit of the Spirit comes through. So we long suffer. Again, walking in the Spirit means that we become a kind. It means that we show goodness Goodness is a reference to love in all its forms towards our fellow men. Faith, or as it's translated here, which is better, faithfulness. The idea is loyalty, conscientiousness, honesty, dependability, these kind of things that we often call Christian virtues. really important things. Gentleness, sometimes translated meekness. Both gentleness and meekness appear distinctly elsewhere in the Bible. Gentleness is being tender, which a gentle nun is supposed to be. Not soft or effeminate, but gentle nonetheless. And meekness means essentially being humble, not arrogant or self-assertive, which of course characterizes a lot of the world, particularly today. People will tell you to assert yourself, if need be to walk over people, but that's how you get on in life. The Lord Jesus of course famously teaches, blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. Normally it is the aggressive that we think will inherit the earth, the arrogant. But no, Christ says, the meek will one day inherit the earth and they will rule it. They will rule it in righteousness along with himself, the Lord Jesus Christ. Meek, humble, you know your position, you know it before God and before others. And indeed, he says, last of all, the fruit of the Spirit is self-control in relation to everything, even food and drink. You're not mastered by anything, that's what Paul It says in 1 Corinthians 9, he had learned self-denial. He had learned it to the point where nothing controlled him. He wasn't going to be a slave to his appetites, whether these were sexual or an appetite for food or drink or whatever. He said, I won't be brought under the power of any of these things. He is free and free in Christ Jesus to live a godly and holy life. Love, joy, peace, long-suffering, goodness, faith, meekness, self-control, kindness. That is walking in the spirit. Now, nothing in a way could be more straightforward than that. You've got a new life, ergo, new lifestyle. Obvious. New person, new birth, new you, new walk, new way of thinking, new way of feeling, new way of living. The problem is that it's not that straightforward. Our lives are not simply marked out by that. It would be good if they were, but they're not. The problem is that there's other stuff in there. And the other stuff is sadly the stuff that you find in verses 19 to 21. And you find them all to some degree or another. You might just find the beginnings of them there, just the roots. You might find the shoots and the fruits. But to some degree or another, they are all there. And read the catalogue. The works of the flesh are evident and they are adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lewdness. They are all sexual sins of one kind or another. I'll speak about these things later. And then religious sins of idolatry and sorcery. Other sins that have to do with our relationship again to others. Hatred, contentions, jealousies. We're starting to recognize these. Outbursts of wrath, maybe you're really recognizing these. Selfish ambitions, dissensions, heresies, divisions. envy, murders, drunkenness, revelries and the like. And if we are honest, we all see these things. The big question is why? Why do you see these things? What sense does it make? If you are a new person, what is that doing there? I can understand how that belongs to the old me, but how on earth, why, why is it here in my heart and there in yours? The answer to that, however complex it may be psychologically or even theologically, the answer is that the new you is new, but it's not yet complete. That you are a work in progress radically new, but still growing into the fullness of what you are to be. You are a new birth, a new creation, a new baby, a new person, but you are not yet fully what you are meant to be. It's as simple in its own way as that. God has imparted a new nature. He has changed your identity, but the work of change is not yet complete. You need to grow into the stature of a full man and a full woman in Jesus Christ. And the Christian life is about development and maturity. It's about development and maturity in such a way that the power of this flesh will diminish. Now that may fluctuate. The graph may be rising and falling, but the trend is upwards. as the power of the flesh diminishes and as you grow more and more into the stature of a perfect or complete man or complete woman in Christ Jesus. I want you just to listen to what Paul says to the Ephesians. He tells them that they are meant to grow. This is Ephesians 4. And he tells them that God has given teachers of the word of various kinds, apostles and prophets, evangelists, pastors and teachers. He's given these to you, he says, until all of us come to the unity of the faith. That's unity in what we believe. The idea there, by the way, is not what you often find people saying it is, that everybody is in a fog until one day we understand, usually when we get to heaven. The idea is that the teachers know. That's the idea here. The point is that the teachers are teaching the basis of true faith from the word, so that we will all come to understand it. The truth is not something that we can never reach. Everything needful for life and godliness has been taught to us in the Bible. It is there to be understood, to be received, to be applied. So God has gifted the church with these teachers till we come to the unity of the faith and the knowledge of the Son of God. Now he means there a real, deep, experimental or existential knowledge of the Son of God. Until we reach, he says, a perfect man. Now the word perfect is misleading there, because you're liable to think that he's talking about heaven, where everything is made perfect. But the word really means complete. Until we become complete, well-rounded, men and women, till we reach the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ. Now to prove that, he's talking about what we are on earth and not in heaven, he says this, so that, in other words, the result of this is that we should no longer be children, tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of teaching. That's what happens in your immature state. You're taught this and that, and you don't really know what's right or wrong, but rather, he says, knowing the truth and speaking the truth in love, we may grow up in everything, in every area of our life and conduct and character, we may grow up into Him who is the Head, the Lord Jesus Christ. So don't walk anymore, he says, as the rest of the Gentiles walk. with their darkened understanding. You have not so learned Christ. Keep putting off your former conduct and be renewed in the spirit of your mind and put on the new man's clothes which will come to tomorrow. The new man that is created in true righteousness and holiness. All that's important because it just goes back to what I said last night. I mean, what do you want to be? Who do you want to be? What do you want to be like? Is your life going to be forever marked out by failure and immaturity? Or is it going to be marked out by attainment, by completion? by reaching the stature of a self-controlled, disciplined, godly man and woman in Christ Jesus. A reliable husband or wife. A reliable father or mother. A conscientious, diligent son and daughter. Dependable in your workplace and in your community because your word is your bond. You live honestly, you live truly. You are different and you're known to be different. Okay? These are the things we should be setting before ourselves. Not this idea of, oh, I'm constantly failing and my life is characterized by sin all the time. Sin has its place, I've come to that. But please, keep the ideal in your mind. Not as an unattainable ideal, but as what God really wants you to be. Mature, self-controlled Christians. Having your bodies under control. Having your minds under control. Yes, a lapse and a fall here and there of one kind or another, but that's you. And you're known to be like that. That's what Paul wants us to be. But the problem is that there's this thing inside of us which Paul calls the flesh. Now by calling it the flesh, I suppose you think it's got something to do with the body. Well, it has got something to do with the body. My point is that it's not got everything to do with the body. The flesh is more than the body. There was a school of thought that thought that all our problems lay in the fact that we had bodies. If we could only get rid of them, we could get rid of sin. Well, the fact is that we will only actually be rid of sin for once and for all once we get rid of these bodies, but we're getting our bodies back. That doesn't reintroduce sin. The problem's not really in the body. When Paul uses the word flesh, he's talking about much more than the body. He speaks of having a fleshly mind. And you'll notice the works of the flesh here in verse 20. Well, he says in verse 19, the works of the flesh are evident, and he goes on in verse 20 to call some of them hatred, jealousy, and anger. Hatred's not in your body. Jealousy is not in your body, anger is not in your body, but they are the flesh. In other words, the flesh is the old inherited nature that you had, and the remnant of it is still there. You've been reborn, renewed, but here, in your being, there is a remnant still of what you were. Now in a way, that's a real puzzle why that should be so. It's a real question why God should ordain that to be so. Why does he do this work in such a way that it's not done perfectly, immediately? Why does he leave us in this state to progress in this kind of way? That's a question for another time, maybe for another conference. But the point for now is that he does. He just does. None of us are immediately what we ought to be we've got to get there and we've got to get there by fighting and by striving because that's the way that God has appointed it to be and all his people will strive and they will fight and all his people will recognize one day that they have to strive and to fight to be what he calls them to be because that's Christianity anything else is something different now of course there are people who are only flesh. And again, like I said last night, it could be the case that you are in that category. Although you are here with Christians, worshipping with Christians, listening to the word like Christians, you are not in the spirit, you are simply in the flesh. The only nature that you have is this nature. the sexual sins, the religious sins, the social sins, the personal sins. And what he gives us here, this list of idolatry, sorcery, hatred, jealousy and so on, it's a specimen list. Because in verse 21 he says, envy, murders, drunkenness, revelries and the like. Things like that he says. And concerning these things he says that those who practice such things will not Inherit the Kingdom of God. The Spirit may strive with you, even as the Word is preached, and as you hear it preached every Lord's Day, the Spirit may strive with you, but if you are in the flesh, you won't inherit the Kingdom of God. The Spirit can speak to you. And, like I said, strive. I mean, you may feel your conscience disturbed. You may feel seriously challenged by the life and conduct of a young man or a young woman that you knew and is now different. You are challenged by them. But it hasn't changed you. And only a change will get you to heaven. Unless you are born again, you cannot see the Kingdom of God. You can't. You need a change, change, repentance, faith. But the staggering thing is that as a Christian, this is the nature that's still fighting against you. And that means that your life is one of conflict. Last night, we thought about the reality of life. This is the reality of conflict in your life. I want to say three things about this conflict. First of all, it's an inevitable or necessary conflict. You can't escape it, and in fact, to some degree or another, even if you gain significant mastery, you'll never be free in this life. You'll be fighting as long as you live. And that's why I can tell you that fighting is the mark of a Christian. It's one of the marks of a Christian. You're fighting and you're taking the matter seriously. There was a woman in my own home country who was listening to a sermon some years back. And the sermon happened to be on the contrast between the spirit fruit and the flesh fruit. And she was disturbed because she felt she knew every one of these things. And she spoke later to her own minister about it. She said, I can see the fruit of the spirit. But she said, I can see the flesh. I can see all these things so clearly. And the minister said that that was a sign of real grace and of real Christian life. He said, if you told me that you could only see the works of the flesh, I would conclude that you were unconverted. If you told me that you only saw verses 22 and 23 in yourself, love, joy, peace and gentleness and self-control, I would conclude that you were utterly and totally deceived. But the fact that you feel you can see every single one of all these things is a sign to me that you are a true Christian. That you are converted. I think what that minister said was the truth. That is right. As you go on in the Christian life, you don't become more fleshly unless there's a lapse which we'll consider later. But you do see more of the flesh. I understand these works of the flesh far better than I did when I was unconverted. I understand them better, I think, now than I did ten years ago when I was still a Christian Prime Minister. I see them all more clearly in myself, but I don't think I'm more under the power of any one of them. I hope not. But I see, I see, and I'm thankful I see By the grace of God I see and therefore I can protect and so on. But it is an inevitable and necessary conflict. The second thing is that it is a constant conflict. It's there simply all the time. And you can never rest because the flesh never rests and like I said last night, the devil never rests. Now sometimes you can get tired in this conflict. You can get tired. And sometimes this sense of wretchedness that Paul spoke of in Romans chapter 7 just still captures you again. You say, I can't rise above this thing somehow or other. I just can't. I'm brought under its power. But you've got to fight and fight and fight. And it doesn't matter how often you fall on the canvas. Christianity is about getting up off the canvas. You've got to keep fighting all the time. It's with you. And again connected to that, as well as being inevitable and constant, it's a really intense conflict. You notice how he describes it in verse 17, the flesh lusts, the word there is a strong desire, it lusts against the Spirit, the Holy Spirit, it lusts against the Holy Spirit, and the Spirit lusts, the word is ethically neutral by the way, in itself, it's just a strong desire, so the flesh strongly desires against the spirit, the spirit strongly desires against the flesh, and these are contrary, they are opposed to each other, so that you do not do the things that you wish. And this is one of these places where you'd like, Paul, to add it a little bit. What do you mean? Do you mean that you don't do the fleshly thing because the spirit stops you? Or do you mean that you don't do the spiritual thing because the flesh stops you? I think the answer is both. The answer is both. It's easier to understand, certainly, how the spiritual nature conquers the flesh so that we are able to stop the fleshly desires. It's maybe not so easy to think how the flesh rises up and is able somehow to stop the spirit. That's not so easy to process, but there's no doubt that such a thing happens. And the sad thing, as some of you, as you all know as Christians, as you all know, But as some of you may know, to your cost, to your bitter cost, to your pain and to your grief, is that sometimes the new man, the new you, can seriously come under the power of the remaining old nature, can come seriously under its power. Iniquities, I must confess, prevail against me do. Sometimes they just do, sometimes seriously so. Sometimes to the point where for a time you can wonder if that person really ever knew the power of God. It's only when they rise up again in the power of God, And when new repentance amazingly reappears with new longings and new zeal and new desires, it's only then, and new faith too, it's only then that you see, well, yes, they were alive all right. They were alive. After all, the man who wrote Iniquities, I must confess, prevail against me do, he knew. He knew. David came under the power of sloth and indiscipline. lacking zeal in his duty to the point where he became weak and he was suddenly tempted and he committed adultery and when his conscience troubled him he tried to hide it out of view by committing murder. You know the sorry story. You know the outcome. The death of another righteous good man sin, shame, God's cause everywhere spoken against and in fact God said to David that because you have brought dishonour upon my name and caused the name of God to be blessed by others the sword will never depart your house and it never did. When Absalom died with this hair in which he gloried caught in the branches, David wept Absalom, Absalom, my son, my son, wood to God, I have died instead of you. I wonder what he meant by that. I wonder what he meant by that really. It's the pain of the outworking of the thing being so much worse. He would have rather just have died himself. Peter came to a point where he lacked courage. And he lacked courage because he lacked discipline again in basic matters. I'm going to come to this tomorrow, but he lacked discipline in basic matters and he began just to think a lot of himself. These kind of things happened subtly, almost imperceptibly. He became self-confident. The result, you all know, he denied Christ around the fireside. He learned a deep, life-changing lesson through that, but iniquity prevailed against him incidentally it wasn't the last time he lacked courage you find him later at Antioch eating happily with Gentile Christians until another kind of Christian appeared from Jerusalem who thought that Jewish Christians shouldn't eat with Gentile Christians and Peter just moved away from the Gentile table and sat at the Jewish one and Paul had to talk to him face to face and to rebuke him face to face for that weakness. But for a time, the old nature rose up and it conquered the new, the new man. The new man was brought under the power of an old remnant nature. But it doesn't just happen in the big things of life like that. I mean, if you just go back to verse 14 here for a second, All the laws fulfilled in one word, even in this you shall love your neighbor as yourself. Now listen, if you bite and devour each other, beware lest you're consumed by each other. Walk in the spirit and you won't fulfill the lust of the flesh. Now there's the lust of the flesh, for example, biting each other. You know what that's like? Just biting each other. Devouring each other. Watch in case you swallow each other, he says. Or you can just go on, verse 25 and 26, if we live in the Spirit, let's walk in the Spirit, let's not become conceited, provoking each other, envying each other. And in all these areas, the old you can come back. What place has envy got in your heart as a Christian? For any favour, how can you possibly envy another Christian? How can you think of taking away from them what they've got and having it yourself? Saul was like that when the woman started to say that Saul has slain his thousands and David has slain his ten thousands. If Saul was in his right place he'd say, Lord what a great man you have raised in this kingdom. I'm thankful you gave me grace to kill thousands, but I'm thankful that my beloved brother has been given grace to kill ten thousands. No. The javelin flies through the air. because of the flesh, because of its power. So it's a real intense conflict. Don't underestimate the power of this flesh. Don't underestimate its power. To think that in its remnant it can grow up and pretty near destroy you or destroy maybe your family or destroy a congregation because of your flesh, which ought to be in its place and ought to be kept in check. But all this raises a question. If the flesh is real then, if the flesh is just ongoing, if the flesh is inevitable, if the flesh is constant, and if the flesh is actually powerful and intense, does it really matter then? If I'm always going to be struggling with sin, if I'm sometimes going to be overwhelmed by it, do I really need to worry about it? If a person can live in the Spirit and still end up like this, but still be saved, well, why bother? Surely I just need to relax about the situation. I can relax about sin because, well, hey, I believed in Christ at some point, and I still do, and I still come to church, and I still have written a Bible. So if all these other things are in my life, so, so, David's in heaven, Peter's in heaven, I'll be in heaven too. Does it really matter? Well, I would almost rather you ask me any question but that. I would almost, well, I would rather it if you came up to me and said I'm seriously, seriously struggling with the flesh in my life. I am struggling with a whole host of these things and I feel choked by them and I feel distressed by them. I would be encouraged by that because you know the problem and because you're concerned about the problem and that's a sign of life. If you come up and say to me, well, I'm not speculating here or talking about something abstractly. I came across this not that long ago. I came across it in a gathering of supposedly experienced Christians where there was a discussion on sin and this person said that he stopped really worrying about sin in his life. He just knew it was going to be there, so I mean that was just that. I thought, wow! What on earth are you talking about? Do you understand Christianity? Do you understand holiness? Do you understand justification? Do you understand anything at all? Now don't get me wrong, there is a sense, there is a sense in which we have to accept that sin will somehow be a part of our lives. But that is very different from simply being reconciled to the presence of that sin itself. These are two very different things. I write these things to you, John says, that you might not sin. And I think the devil misleads thousands into a lost eternity By using this very idea that it doesn't really matter whether I'm in conflict or battling or not. Because all Christian sin I sin so fine. That leads us to really understanding what Paul is saying in this passage. He's not just simply saying that the Christian struggles with the flesh. His whole point is that this struggle is not an equal struggle and you must never think of it as an equal struggle where you win some, lose some, win some, lose some. Every day you win some, lose some. It's not like that. Now I'm conscious if you simply isolate verse 17 it can sound like that because he says the flesh lusts against the spirit and the spirit against the flesh. They're contrary and you don't do the things that you wish. But notice that the two combatants are not actually equal, are they? They are not equal at all. The first combatant is the remnant of your old nature, just little old you, just a fragment of the little old you. The flesh that's been crucified, he says in verse 24, those who are Christ's, in other words Christians, have crucified already the flesh with its passions and lusts, so you've crucified that nature, It's been crucified for you actually, but you've crucified it too, you've renounced it, you've died to it. There's a remnant of it there, living like a squatter in a heart that doesn't belong to it anymore. That's the puny antagonist on the one side. On the other side, you have the Holy Spirit of God. It's not even your spirit fighting against your flesh, it is the Holy Spirit of God that is fighting against the flesh. In other words, the whole power of God rests in the one who rests in your heart, the one who has renovated your heart, who has renovated your being. He is the other combatant. We are not talking equal parties here. It is astonishing that the flesh at any time can have an ascendancy. But the fact of the matter is that the ruler in your life is the Spirit of God. You possessed, it's difficult to use that word because of its connotations with demonic possession and so on, but you possessed, you owned, you guided and ruled and reigned by the Spirit of God against this remnant of the flesh. And you'll notice that Paul's call in the chapter is not to accept your struggle but to win the thing. Win it! Verse 16, walk in the spirit and you shall not fulfill the lust of the flesh. That's such a wonderful text. It's for tomorrow. But enjoy it today as well. And receive it today. Walk in the spirit and you shall not fulfill the lust of the flesh. This is a program for maturity. This is a program for conquest, and to use the old-fashioned holiness word, victory. That's the program here. It's not one of reconciliation to defeat. Walk in the Spirit and you shall not fulfill the lust of the flesh. Or again, verse 18, if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law. There being under the law means you are not under its condemning power of this endless cycle of sin and condemnation and defeat. The Spirit has liberated you from that into something new and different. So you must never define yourself as partly flesh, partly spirit. You must think of yourself as a spiritual man and a spiritual woman. If I ask you, who are you? You say, I am a spiritual man. You don't answer me saying I'm part flesh, part spirit. You are spiritual. And it is just an anomalous fact that lurking around in there is this thing that belonged to the old you that needs dealing with constantly. But that's who you are. Like I said last night, identity really matters. You never say that you're in the flesh, you say that the flesh is in you. You never say that you are in sin, but that sin is in you. These may sound subtle distinctions, they are huge distinctions. Huge, huge distinctions. This is a struggle that you've called on to win. And you say, well that's all very well, but I still come back to my question, does it really matter? Well, read the passage. The stakes are very high. Paul's answer to that question is simply that only those who are seriously fighting this battle make it. Only those who are fighting it, win it. If your life comes to be dominated by the flesh, You've lost any evidence you ever had that the Spirit of God was ever in you, or that He ever changed you. Listen to verse 21. After He's given this long list of fleshly things, including outbursts of wrath and envy and murders and so on, He says, Of which I tell you beforehand, just as I've told you already, those who practice such things will not inherit the Kingdom of God. If so, then you can't relax about them, can you? You can't just say, I'm a jealous person, that's me. It's not. Deal with it. Outburst of wrath, that's me. It's not. Deal with it. And so on. 1 Corinthians chapter 6. Go back to that for a second. In verse 9. In chapter 6, believers are taking each other to the law courts. in a scandalous situation, one of several scandals in this young congregation. And he says to them in verse 7, it's a failure that you're going to law against each other. Why don't you even rather accept wrong? Why don't you just let yourself be cheated rather than take a brother to law? And he says, no, it's worse in verse 8, you yourselves do the wrong. and you do the cheat and you do these things to your brethren and notice now how he cuts across them and says do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God in other words think about who you are and who you might be Don't be deceived, he says. In other words, you are being deceived because you think you can just behave like this and be okay. Well, he says, don't be deceived because people who fornicate and who are idolaters and adulterers and who are practicing same-sex relationships, sodomites, thieves, covetous people, drunkards, revilers, nor extortioners, they will not inherit the kingdom of God. In other words, why are you practicing such things when you know that if you really start practicing these things, you're cutting yourself off from heaven? Such were some of you, but I believe with all my heart that you were washed, that you were sanctified and justified in the name of the Lord Jesus and by the Spirit of God. So why on earth don't you live like that? If you live in the Spirit, in other words, walk in the Spirit. Come back to our chapter, Galatians 6. In verses 7 and 8. Don't be deceived, he said. Same expression again. God is not mocked. Whatever a man sows, that he will also reap. The one who sows to the flesh... Now, think about this in connection with the flesh-spirit conflict. The one who sows to his flesh will reap corruption of the flesh. The one who sows to the spirit will reap everlasting life. Everlasting life is heaven. Corruption is one of the standard terms used to describe hell. Because hell is full of corrosion. Hell is corrosion. It's the corrosion and destruction of what I am. where everything good and the vestiges of what is good disappears. We corrode. The soul corrodes, decays. Every soul corrodes and decays. And he says, that's the issue facing you all the time. With the choices that you make and the life that you are choosing to live, you are either sowing to reap corruption and hell or you are sowing to reap eternal life and heaven. Don't be deceived. Because if you sow to the flesh, you will not inherit the kingdom of God. I think this idea, this truth, these principles are so important and I honestly don't think they're being taught in a lot of reformed churches, never mind evangelical churches. I honestly don't think they are. There's a kind of easy believism that has crept into reformed churches where just You're saved because you're in the right church and you mix with the right people and you've been baptized and you do a few things and you tick some boxes. That's the oldest heresy in the book. That's the heresy that Jesus was confronted with when Nicodemus came to him man to man and brother to brother and you're a wonderful teacher and Jesus said to him, unless you are born again, you cannot see the Kingdom of God. Nicodemus was a man, a Pharisee, who used to think of the Gentiles as people who needed to be born again. They were people who needed to be changed and transformed. He was okay, because he was born to the right people and he moved in the right circles. He was an Israelite. He belonged to the people of God, you see. And it was an absolute shock for him to discover that he had to be born again. He didn't think he needed to be. He was okay. I don't want to trundle on my life just thinking I'm okay irrespective of how I'm living. I'd like you to come up to me and say, do you realize that your life openly and evidently is full of all that rubbish? Do you not stop to think that maybe you're just not on the right track? I'd like somebody to speak to me like that. I might not like it in one way, but I'd like to like it, if you know what I mean. It's right, and it's good, and it's proper. You can't sow to the flesh and expect to reap everlasting life. You can't do it. He says, God is not mocked. Don't be deceived. God is not mocked. What a man sows, he reaps. Sow to the flesh, reap corruption. Sow to the spirit, reap everlasting life. Your life simply can't be characterized by these bad things and you still make it into heaven. Don't call David an adulterer. Just call him a man who committed adultery. Because his life was not characterized by that. It was there, but he repented and he turned and he changed. He wasn't just habitual like that. Don't call Peter a weak moral failure or something of that kind. That came in and it happened, but he moved on and he repented and he changed. Christianity is about that. Unless we lose these basic distinctions, we're all finished. We really are just deceived simply into hell. After all, Jesus said it. very, very powerfully himself. He said it often, but I was thinking of Matthew's Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus says, not everyone who says, Lord, Lord, shall enter the Kingdom of Heaven. I know people who think that if someone can say Jesus is Lord, that that means that they are a Christian. They base that on another text, but a text without a context is a pretext. I'm sure you've all heard that saying. But listen to this, not everyone who says, Lord, Lord, shall enter the kingdom, but the one who does the will of my Father. Notice the emphasis on the fruit and on the doing and on the life. Saying, Lord, Lord, is cheap. I mean, that's cheap. Many will say, Lord, Lord, we prophesied in your name. We cast out demons in your name. We did wonders in your name. Well, fantastic. But what was your life like? And I will declare to them, I never knew you. Depart from me, you who practice lawlessness." In other words, you spent your days cheating on your wife, but you were able to perform something fantastic. Well, I had rather you never performed something fantastic and stayed faithful to your wife. Or even if something went wrong, that you had put it right. That your life was not just marked out as a serial failure. We are called to conquer, to walk in the spirit and not to walk in the flesh. These things really matter. Just one more text to highlight the importance of this. Again in Romans 8 and the passage we read and in verse 12, Brethren we are debtors. because of what God has done. Not debtors to the flesh, to live according to the flesh. In other words, I've dealt with this point already, saying you can't live in the flesh, because if you live according to the flesh, you'll die. But if by the Spirit, and you'll notice, living by the Spirit again isn't simply, oh, I live by the Spirit and led by the Spirit. It's if you live by the Spirit and put to death the deeds of the body, you'll live. Right? You're in the conflict. If you put to death the deeds of the body, you live. For as many as are led in that way by the Spirit of God. This text isn't talking about guidance and how you know which car to get or what job to take. It's talking about being led into holiness. As many as are led into that kind of putting to the death of the deeds of the body, they are the sons of God. Not the people who just think they are or claim that they are. Am I teaching that a Christian can be lost? As Paul said, God forbid. I'm just saying that a true Christian walks in the Spirit and strives to walk in the Spirit and is serious about the conflict. That's all. I remember just before I close saying, the late Professor John Murray, who was Professor in Westminster Theological Seminary, Professor of Systematic Theology from I think the 1930s to the 1960s or maybe early 70s, but there was a lot of discussion in the sixties, I think, about dropping the expression perseverance of the saints. Most of you will know what that is. It's the pea and tulip. Most of you will know what that is. It means essentially that the Christian makes it. There was discussion about dropping the term in favour of eternal security or even the more snappy once saved always saved. And John Murray said these terms are okay They're true. Once saved, always saved. And eternally secure. That's right. But he says they don't contain something that perseverance of the saints contains. He says perseverance of the saints is an active expression. Eternal security is a passive one. Perseverance of the saints doesn't simply say that the saint makes it, but that the saint perseveres. The saint keeps fighting. The saint keeps going in the conflict until they finally win. It focuses on the fact that we need to do something in life. Once saved, always saved is a kind of, oh, well that's fine then. Perseverance of the saint means that you roll up your sleeves and you get going with it. That's the difference. You fight and you fight to win. And the fact is that you reap what you sow. You reap what you sow. So walking in the Spirit isn't just a useful thing and a helpful thing. It's a vital thing. I mean that in the literal sense of the word. It's to do with vitae, with life. So I hope we can understand that. And next time we're together tomorrow, I want to turn to the big question, which is, how do we fight and how do we win? Maybe you're sick of losing. Maybe you need to start winning. Well, how do you do it? That's the big question. God willing, we'll look at that tomorrow. Let's pray.