Hebrews Lesson 69
NKJ Matthew
We started off in Hebrews 6:7-8 with an illustration
that is really a warning that relates to Hebrews 6:4-6 dealing with the dangers
of falling away as a believer and beginning to turn from a passion for studying
the Word, knowing the Word, and applying the Word. Hebrews 6:7 gives the
illustration.
NKJ Hebrews 6:7 For the earth which drinks in the
rain that often comes upon it, and bears herbs useful for those by whom it is
cultivated, receives blessing from God;
NKJ Hebrews 6:8 but if it bears thorns and briars, it
is rejected and near to being cursed, whose end is to be burned.
We have gone through the details here. What I’ve done
the last three or four weeks is take the concepts that we find in this verse
which has to do with production – how the fruit is produced from the soil as
by-product of the nutrients that go into it through the soil itself and the
rain. You have two kinds of production that come out of the Christian
life – that which is positive (which receives blessing) and that which is
negative (which judged or disciplined.)
I started a study in which I was answering the
question, how do we grow? How do we produce fruit? What is
fruit? One of the points that I made as we got into John 15:7 which is
where Jesus uses the vine (the grape vine) as an analogy of spiritual growth is
to emphasize the fact that fruit (when we look at how fruit is defined fruit in
the New Testament) is not evangelism. It is not defined in terms of
Christian service. Fruit is not defined in terms of giving. It is
not defined in terms of how many people you witnessed to this week. It is
not defined in those categories because those categories have to do with
Christian service or our responsibilities in either our priesthood or our
ambassadorship. So we have these priorities, these responsibilities that
are ours because of who and what we are in Jesus Christ at the instant we
become priests to God and royal ambassadors. Now at that stage when you
are a baby priest or baby ambassador, there is not a whole lot you can do in
terms of working out those responsibilities. You have to learn and you
have to grow. You have to learn what is involved in growth. You
have to grow to become mature before you can effectively function in those
areas. I want to make sure that you understand that I inserted the adverb
there – effectively function or fully function in those areas. We can all
begin to function in different areas of our priesthood and ambassadorship when
we are young believers, but as you grow and mature then what happens is that
you become more effective in your service in those areas of priesthood and
ambassadorship.
Some people get the idea that “I am going to wait
until I am more mature before I start serving.”
No, that is not how it works. You start serving
as you grow, but in different areas related to your particular spiritual
age. That has to do with service. Fruit on the other hand has to do
with character. Character is related to the integrity of the Lord Jesus
Christ. The character that is being produced in us is the character of
the Lord Jesus Christ. We have seen this in a couple of passages that we
have looked at.
So we went from Hebrews 6. The first area to
illustrate by comparing Scripture with Scripture was the vine analogy in John
15. A conclusion that we came to in John 15 was that in Jesus’
terminology “abiding in Him” was the sole and necessary requirement to produce
fruit. If you are not abiding in Christ, you are not producing
fruit. You have to abide in Christ to produce fruit. So believers
are either abiding in Christ or they are not abiding in Christ. When you
are abiding in Christ there is first growth that takes place and then there is
fruit production. You have these different stages of growth. You
see that in these agricultural analogies that are used over and over again throughout
Scripture. Psalm 1 is another one. We touched on that
on Tuesday night. You have them in Matthew 13, Luke 8. We went to
those passages and we saw that there are different degrees of growth in
different believers. Some have just a little more growth. They are
just a seed that falls on the rocky soil. It germinates. It
sprouts. It puts forth a little bit of growth and that is it. Then
there are those with a little bit more growth. They fall on the thorny
soil. There is more growth and then it gets choked out. Then
finally there is the plant that grows to fruit production maturity. Even
that produces different levels some produce 100 fold, some 50 fold, and some 20
fold. There are different levels. So everybody is different. So we have
gone through those passages already.
At the end of our study last time I started looking at
the mechanics. How is this fruit produced? What is our
responsibility? What is God’s responsibility? Both are involved in
this. We have certain responsibilities where our volition is
engaged. The Holy Spirit who is the primary agent in sanctification is
also engaged. So where do we see these things separate? How do they
fit together? So we begin to look at some passages in Ephesians 5 where
it ends with a verse that is familiar to many of us.
NKJ Ephesians
I connected this verse with Colossians 3:16. Now
just as a point of background. I am not sure if I covered this last
time. Paul was in prison (under house arrest) in
NKJ Colossians
So what we have with this series of participles after
the command “to let the Word of Christ dwell”, these participles indicate the
results of the indwelling of the Word in the mentality of the soul as it has
its impact on the way you live. Notice one of the first consequences
mentioned in both passages is admonishing or speaking.
Ephesians says, “Speaking to one another in psalms, in
hymns, and spiritual songs. Singing is a part of the spiritual
life. Singing praises to God is part of the spiritual life. In too
many churches singing is like something that we kind of tack on Sunday
morning.
“Let’s get through that and get to the real stuff
(which is the teaching).”
I have heard people say that.
“Why do we even sing?”
It is part of what the Scripture says. It is
vital. On the other hand you have people who think that it is the Word of
God - the teaching that has become peripheral. Real praise and worship is
the singing. Let’s go do that for 45 minutes and tack on a little
sermonette at the end. That is much worse because it is the Word of God
that is powerful.
“It is the Word of God,” Jesus said, “that is the
instrument of sanctification in the life of the believer.”
If you don’t learn to think like God thinks, if you
don’t learn to understand what God has written to you as an individual; then
how are you even going to live the Christian life or learn to think. It’s
less of a problem to reduce the singing and more of a problem to emphasize
it. But singing is not some sort of appendix that you stick on the
beginning of a Sunday morning worship service because that is the way things
have been done.
Okay, let’s look at a little chart that I put together.
You have two different commands put two different
places, but the consequences that you read in the following verses are the
same. For example both Ephesians and Colossians have the result of
teaching and admonishing one another or teaching one another with psalms, hymns
and spiritual songs. That is in Colossians 3:16b and Ephesians
Second there is an emphasis on gratitude in both
passages – to be thankful for all things. In Eph
NKJ Ephesians
So there is gratitude that characterizes the
believer. That is part of grace orientation. We are grateful for
what God gave us. The words grace and gratitude are related to one
another. They both come from the same roots in Latin. The English words
do. There is a relationship. If you understand grace, it produces
gratitude. If you don’t understand grace, it doesn’t produce
gratitude.
Third, it affects relationships. Ephesians
NKJ Ephesians
The fear of God governs everything. We talked
about that Tuesday night – the importance of the fear of the Lord is the
beginning of wisdom. It is more than just respect for God.
I can liken it to when I would disobey my
mother. Some of you knew my mother. I would disobey my mother when
I was a little boy.
She would say, “This is pretty serious. Your
father is going to deal with this when he comes home.”
Then I just went to my room and decided that my
life was probably going to end that day. That is comparable to the fear
of the Lord. There is a recognition of and respect for that
authority. Also there is a certain dread or terror that is hanging there because
one realizes the principle of ultimate accountability. God can lower the
boom. That is part of this idea of fear of the Lord. So there is an
overriding command of submitting to one another in fear of the Lord because
that is related to the whole principle of love in the Christian life.
But then Paul begins to demonstrate how that affects
different relationships. First of all, wives are to be submissive to
their husbands. That is Colossians 3:18 and Ephesians 5:22. I
pointed out on Tuesday night (We got into this coming from a different
direction,) that the command for wives to submit to their husbands is the Greek
verb hupotasso and the other words that are
used in this context for obedience. Even in English translations they use
different words. You have wives submit to your husbands, but children are
to obey their parents and slaves are to obey their masters. There is a
difference there. Wives are to be submissive – hupotasso.
Children and employees are to be obedient – hupachuo.
There is a difference.
Husbands, your wife is not to be obedient to you like
a child or like an employee. She is a partner in the divine team that is
going forth to fulfill the responsibilities that God has given a
marriage. There is one leader and one follower. But the leader and
follower relationship is not the relationship of a drill sergeant to an
inductee. It is the relation of two people who are going somewhere.
Years ago I developed the doctrine of dance to
describe this because it is like dancing. I don’t have time to go through
that. Year ago I took dance lessons. I learned a lot of
principles. It was in a class setting where you would switch partners all
the time. I was in a class where everybody got to know each other we
would go out afterwards to some of the country and western places. We
would dance frequently and everybody would switch partners.
Some of the ladies would tell me, “You are really a
good dancer, but I don’t like to dance with this guy or that guy because either
this guy leads too strongly and he is going to break something or this guy
leads too weakly I am not sure what he wants me to do and I am going to run
into somebody.”
It is this leadership thing.
I would talk to some of the ladies and they would say,
“I don’t like to say anything to anybody because some of these men just can’t
take it.”
What husbands have to learn sometimes is that the only
one who can tell how you are leading your wife is your wife. She is the
only one who can give you honest feedback on how you are doing. The process in
a young marriage is that you have to work out these details of how the husband
leads in relationship to the wife in following. You have to learn to
reach that balance where the husband’s leadership is not overpowering the wife,
but on the other hand he is not so weak that she is not sure where you are
leading.
So wives are to be submissive to their husbands.
Husbands are to be loving their wives as Christ loves the church. There
is that qualification on both of them that is convicting. Wives are to be
submissive to the husbands as unto the Lord. This means ladies, your
relationship to your husband in terms of submission to his leadership is a
barometer of how well you are following the Lord.
Let’s move on to husbands now. Husbands, how you
love your wives indicates something about how you understand what Jesus Christ
did for you on the cross. There is a correlation there. Now that is
probably enough for everybody to chew on for awhile. That gets
terribly convicting after awhile because many of us have sin natures that get
in the way.
Fourth, children obey your parents.
Children are to be obedient to their parents.
NKJ Colossians
NKJ Ephesians 6:1 Children, obey your parents in the
Lord, for this is right.
The fathers are responsible for the spiritual welfare
of the home. Fathers, you men are catching it tonight. The
fathers are responsible. They are not responsible to delegate that
spiritual training to the wife. Let me say that again. It goes right
passed a lot of men.
This passage doesn’t say, “Fathers delegate the
spiritual training in the home to your wife.”
It is your responsibility. There needs to be
male leadership in spiritual things in the home. Otherwise you are going
to end up producing children like one child that was in my church some 25 years
ago.
He said to his mother, “Well, I don’t want to go to
church today. I realized that church is for women.”
His father never went to church. It was his
mother that always took him. So you are setting an example. So men
have to be the ones who are teaching doctrine in the home to the kids.
Don’t delegate that to your wives.
The corollary to that is that men should be the ones
who are teaching doctrine to the kids at church. In an ideal situation we
would not have women teaching any kids in prep school. From the youngest
age up, we would have a man in every classroom. A lot of times it
is good to have team teaching in there. Kids respond well to a man.
To have men in there at the earliest stage says something about the fact that
this is important to men, especially to these young boys that need to have a
good male example.
Then the last thing that is listed in these passages
is the relationship between masters and slaves and that slaves are to be
obedient to their masters. Paul says in Ephesians 6:9…
NKJ Ephesians 6:9 And you, masters, do the same things
to them, giving up threatening, knowing that your own Master also is in heaven,
and there is no partiality with Him.
So we have a model of Jesus Christ who is a pattern
for most every one of these relationships. Notice. All 7 of these consequences
flow out of these commands, but we have two different commands. In
Ephesians it is “be filled by means of the Spirit” and in Colossians it is “let
the Word of Christ dwell richly within you.” Then we can say that those
two commands are equivalent to one another. They are a little
different. One emphasizes the role of the Spirit. The other
emphasizes the role of the Word of God. They work in tandem. They
work together. God uses both. It is not one without the
other. People who teach that it is all the Spirit end up being mystical
or they end up being charismatic Pentecostal. They minimize the
significance of the revelation of God because they are always looking for some
new revelation. Those who emphasize the knowledge of the Word to the
exclusion of the role of the Spirit end up always teaching some form of
formalism, some sort of theology(just a theological approach to the spiritual
life), or they end up with just morality – just do it, do it, do it.
They don’t understand that the real dynamic, the real power in the
Christian life is the Holy Spirit. You can’t have one without the
other. They have to work together.
NKJ Ephesians
Both of these words “do not be drunk” and “be filled
with” are present passive imperatives. Now a present imperative simply
means that this is supposed to be a continuous behavior – a continuous habit
pattern, a continuous lifestyle pattern.
Now wine and Spirit are both in the dative case and
they are both instrumental datives. That means that the noun is viewed
grammatically as the instrument used to accomplish the mandate. So wine
was used in the festivals of Dionysius or Bacchus to promote a pagan spirituality.
You go out and you are worshipping the god of wine so you would go out and
drink a lot of wine and get drunk. The spirit of god would enter into you
and so the means to rapport and fellowship with the god was through wine.
So Paul is contrasting that methodology which was very prevalent in the ancient
world with the biblical pattern which is to be filled by means of the
Spirit. It is not that you are getting more of the Spirit. You got
all of the Spirit you are going to get the instant you were saved. You
were indwelt by God the Holy Spirit. You are not going to get anymore of
Him. Some people get that idea – “I get more and more of the Spirit and
the Spirit is the content of the filling”. The Spirit is not the content
of the Spirit. The Spirit is the means by which the content is put into
the believer. That is the idea of pleroo.
It is to fill up. It is to fill up our thinking. It is to fill up
our lives with the Word of God. So we compare that with Colossians 3:16.
NKJ Colossians
The command there is a present active imperative. To
dwell in you is enoikeo. Oikeo is the verb to live. Oikos
is the word for house. The preposition en that is in the prefix
there means to live in something or to dwell within something. So it is
the same word that is used for indwelling of the Holy Spirit. But here it is
not the Holy Spirit. It is the Word of Christ. It is the content of
Scripture. We have to know the principles, the promises of the Word of
God. We have to understand the doctrine that is there. We have to
learn to think about these things. This is why God gave us the
Word. It is to force us to think about things.
Think about the book of Job. Look at the book of
Job. Job is just walking through life one day and wham - he loses
everything. He loses his children. He loses his possessions. He
loses everything that he has. He is not clued in like you and I are in
the first part of the first chapter that Satan has been up in heaven and that
God has been pointing out Job.
“Have you taken a look at Job yet? He is the
prime candidate. He is the most spiritual believer on the planet right
now. Have you really looked at him and what a tremendous testimony he
is?”
Job isn’t aware of anything that is going on. He
is not privy to any special revelation. All he knows is that he is going
through life one day just like every other day and out of the blue he loses
everything. In fact God doesn’t start speaking to him to give him any
kind of a clue until the 38th chapter - nothing. He is
silent. Why is God silent? That is one of the things that people
are often puzzled and confused about in Job. Why is it that he goes
through all of this and God doesn’t speak to him? He is pleading with
God, but there is this long silence. God answers. Many people want
God to answer right away. We are so self absorbed that we think that if I
stub my toe God has got to tell my why immediately. He is somehow
answerable to me. But you see what God wants us to do when we go through
life and we face conflicts, adversity, problems or decisions; He wants us to
wrestle with the issue. Think about it. Pray about it. To go
to the Scriptures and find patterns in the Scriptures that relate to our
own lives so that we can think through what is happening in the
Scriptures and pull out those principles and apply them to our lives, not in a
superficial manner but in an accurate manner. That is why it is so
important for pastors to be training congregations to think - to think
critically - to be able to work their way through things not just to come and
have a superficial feel good time with Jesus. This is what happens in
most churches and most Christians can’t think their way out of a wet paper
sack. Most of us don’t want to even if we can. That is just the
trend of our old sin natures. So it is the Word of God that is so
important. We have to learn it and study it. We have to think in
terms of the Word of God. That is how we let the Word dwell richly in us
with all wisdom.
Wisdom is practical application of the Word. We always
have a tendency to think of wisdom in the Bible in terms of our own western
civilization Greek philosophical background. We think of abstract wisdom
being able to think philosophically, being able to think in terms of
logic. I am not demeaning logic, but we think in terms of intellectual
process when we think of wisdom. We think of somebody that is wise like
Aristotle or Plato or someone who is well-educated. But that is not the
biblical concept of wisdom at all. The biblical concept of wisdom is
grounded in the Old Testament concept of wisdom. You have your
wisdom books like Job, some of the Psalms, Proverbs, Song of Solomon, and
Ecclesiastes. The Old Testament concept of wisdom has the idea of skillfulness
– doing something with tremendous skill to produce something of beauty,
something that is artistic, and something that has value. It is the
Hebrew word chokmah. Chokmah is translated wisdom. If
you go back to some of its earliest uses you find that in Exodus after the Jews
have come out of from slavery at Mt. Sinai and God is giving them the blueprint
for the tabernacle that the Spirit of God comes upon two craftsmen Bezalel and Aholiab and gives
them chokmah so that they can produce the articles of furniture and
clothes for the priest. They can create all of these things so that they
are works of art. They are not just things that are pragmatically
valuable. They were beautiful. They were artistic. They
had skill in working with gold and silver, precious stones and the wood and in
weaving the fabric.
That word for skill there is the Hebrew word for
wisdom. So wisdom takes you to a new level. It is being able to
take the Word of God and the principles of doctrine and then to apply them in
all the areas of our lives so that the product is that which has beauty and
that which is of eternal value that which glorifies God. So the Word of
God dwells in you richly in all wisdom. That takes us through what we
were doing last week.
I hit Ephesians
Another example I could use is a coffee cup. It
is full of coffee right now because I had some before class. That is the
content. Too many people think of the filling of the Spirit as getting
more content, more Spirit. But that grammatically would have to use a
genitive. It uses a dative. So that indicates it is talking about
how the cup gets filled with something. So we put those two things
together.
Alright now let’s back up a minute because what we see
here is a mandate back in Ephesians 5:7 that sets this up. You might say
that Ephesians 5:7-9 is like the center point or the hub of a wheel and we are
going to have three spokes come out from the wheel. The main spoke is the
spoke that drives down through Ephesians 5:7 -18 which is what we just talked
about. Then the next spoke is (we are going to go off two different
directions) taking principles in Ephesians 5:7-9 and seeing how they are played
out in parallel passages in the New Testament. So we look at these verses
briefly.
NKJ Ephesians 5:7 Therefore do not be partakers with
them.
NKJ Ephesians 5:8 For you were once darkness, but now you
are light in the Lord. Walk as children of light
NKJ Ephesians 5:9 (for the fruit of the Spirit is in
all goodness, righteousness, and truth),
Verse 8 points out two things. You were once
darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. That is positional. At
the instant of salvation we positionally become light. Colossians tells
us that at the instant of salvation we are transferred from the domain of
darkness into the
One of the things I have noticed as I travel internationally
is that you can be walking down the streets of
‘
I would go to
They can spot you in an instant. You have no
idea, but people spot you that way. You are a believer in Christ.
That is your position. You may try to disguise yourself as somebody
who lives in the world. You can dress like ‘em and talk like ‘em and act
like ‘em and everything else; but you can’t get away from your identity in
Jesus Christ. That is who we are.
That is what Paul is talking about here. We are
light in the Lord, but we have to learn how to walk as children of light.
Then there is a parenthetical statement that the fruit of the Spirit is in
goodness, righteousness, and truth. That is the character that is
produced in the child of light. Now where we are going to go from here is
the concept of fruitfulness.
I pointed out last time for those of you who weren’t
here that there is a textual variant in Ephesians 5:9. Some of the older
manuscripts – three of the uncials they call them -(they are 4th century
or so manuscripts) that have fruit of the light there. Light seems to
make sense in the passage. One of the canons of textual criticism is that
sometimes the more difficult reading is the correct reading. But the
majority of documents including one of the older uncials also does not have
light there. It reads pneuma. So I think that is the preferable
reading. It fits I think into the context a little better. But either way
we are getting to the same principle which is character.
Now this takes us over to an important passage in
Galatians. So turn over to Galatians 5. Galatians 5 is one of the most
significant passages in all of the New Testament for understanding the
spiritual life. We are going to jump into the middle of it and then back
out because I think we have to understand what Paul is writing about to the
Galatians if we are really going to comprehend the significance of what he says
in Galatians 5:16. So we will just start at verse 14 to pick up the
context.
NKJ Galatians
This is a quote from one of the commandments in the
Old Testament, Leviticus 19:18. Jesus repeats this in Matthew 7:12,
NKJ Matthew
NKJ Matthew
NKJ Matthew
Now I pointed out a couple of weeks ago when we were
in the Upper Room Discourse in John 15 that John 15 where he begins the vine
analogy ends with the repetition of the governing command related to the whole
discourse there which is to love one another. The mandate that Jesus gave
in John13:34-5 for Church Age believers is “to love one another as I have loved
you and by this that is by the love for one another all will know that you are
my disciples.” Now Jesus upped the ante there. In the Old Testament
the mandate was to love your neighbor as yourself. Your neighbor may be a
believer or an unbeliever. The standard was like you love yourself.
As Paul says to illustrate the importance of men
loving their wives he said, “But no man hated his own flesh, but everyone loves
it and cherishes it.”
That is a universal principle. Everyone loves
himself despite the fact that modern psychology says about people having a low
self image and they hate themselves. Well, they are wrong. The
Bible says that every person is born with an overdose of self love. Self
is number one. We are all self absorbed and we have to learn to transfer
that to other people. So that becomes a standard under the Mosaic Law
because that is the best you can do without the Holy Spirit. The reason
Paul quotes that here is because – what is the issue in
NKJ Galatians
NKJ Galatians
See there is a problem in the church at
NKJ Galatians
The implication is a contrast.
The lust of the flesh is what is happening in verse
15. You bite and devour one another. Beware lest you be consumed by
one another.
Just so you see where Paul is driving here when he
said, “Walk by means of the Spirit.” He then has to develop out the contrast
between the flesh and the Spirit in verses 17 – 18. Then 19-21 it gives
you the manifestation of the characteristics of sin nature controlled people.
Then in verse 22-23 he gives the manifestation of the production of
people who are walking by means of the Spirit. What is the first thing he
says? The fruit of the Spirit is love. What is he talking about in
this context? He is talking about love. They are not
fulfilling a Mosaic Law mandate to love one another- to love your neighbor as
yourself. They are not fulfilling that.
What he is pointing out is that you can’t fulfill
God’s requirements on your own. You can produce spirituality by morality,
Remember the sin nature is all an unbeliever has. It is hard for us to
remember that. Sometimes I get really aggravated at the world around me
and then I have to remember.
“Well, why am I mad that the world is acting like the
world? Why am I mad that these pagan unbelievers are acting like pagan
unbelievers? They can only operate according to the one nature that they
have and that’s the sin nature.”
That sin nature is a source of everything that comes
out of their lives. That produces morality and that produces
immorality. There are some cultures in the world that are incredibly moral.
There are some religious systems that have a very strict moral code. All
of that comes out of the sin nature. We forget that the sin nature
produces a lot of morality and religion as well as immorality and
disillusion. But what we have here is Paul emphasizing that their
morality hasn’t cut it yet. Even though they are saying that
you have to obey the law in order to grow as a believer, the end result is that
they are eating each other up. Paul can spot this pretty well because in
Romans 7 he describes how he was trying to live the Christian life on the basis
of the law. When he finally dealt with the 10th commandment,
he realized he hadn’t gotten anywhere on his own efforts. The flesh just
can’t produce spirituality. You can’t have a pull-yourself-up-by-your-own-bootstraps
approach to the spiritual life. It is a supernatural way of life that can
only be produced supernaturally. God the Holy Spirit is the one who has
to do it. You can’t do it on your own.
You can’t just get up in the morning and say, “Here I
am going to do these 10 things today and that is gong to make me a better
Christian.”
But on the other had you don’t just say, “Well I am
going to confess my sins and I am in fellowship and it is just going to
happen.”
There is that balance between the Holy Spirit.
You have to be in right relationship to the Holy Spirit. Our
responsibility is that we have to be applying doctrine and then the Holy Spirit
uses that to produce spiritual growth in our life.
Now to understand this passage in
The verb there is a present active imperative of peripateo and it emphasizes to walk step-by-step, to
go forward step-by-step. We are to walk. The Spirit is in the
instrumental dative indicating that we walk by means of the Spirit.
Then he says that you shall not fulfill the lusts of
the flesh. It uses a double negative. In English a double negative
means that they cancel each other and you end up with a positive. But in
Greek if you want to state that something is impossible, you do it
grammatically. You use a double negative – both the ou
and me. Both of those are words for no or not. You use a
subjunctive mood verb.
So he says, “You shall not fulfill the lusts of the
flesh.”
That basically means when you are walking by the
Spirit you can’t sin. It won’t happen. You just can’t do it.
So you say, “Well wait a minute. How do I sin
then?”
Because, you stop walking by the Spirit. Then
you have sinned. It naturally falls out. It is like water flowing
downhill. Walking by the Spirit demands a conscious moment-by-moment
dependence on the Spirit. It is like Peter walking on the water.
When his eyes are on the Lord he does just great. As soon as he took his
eyes off the Lord he sunk. That is a great illustration for this.
As long as we are consciously dependent on the Holy Spirit we can’t sin.
But as soon as we take our eyes off of Him, we sink right into the cesspool of
the sin nature. It is automatic. Taking your eyes off the Spirit
isn’t sin. It’s sinking. Then we fulfill the lusts of the
flesh.
Now we go back to Galatians 3:2. This is where
you tie a whole book together. I just love doing this kind of stuff
because most of us are so used to pinpoint exegesis and microscopic analysis on
each leaf in the forest that we don’t know what the forest looks like any more.
Some times you have to stand back and take that big picture. In
Galatians 1 and 2 Paul deals with the problem of legalism and the gospel.
He has that famous statement in Galatians 1:5-7
NKJ Galatians 1:5 to whom be glory forever and
ever. Amen. 6 I marvel that you are turning away so soon from Him
who called you in the grace of Christ, to a different gospel, 7
which is not another; but there are some who trouble you and want to pervert
the gospel of Christ
If you add anything to grace (grace and law, grace and
works) you nullify grace and there is no gospel. There is no
salvation. He ends up bringing his point home. He goes straight to
Galatians 2:16 saying….
NKJ Galatians 2:16 "knowing that a man is not
justified by the works of the law but by faith in Jesus Christ, even we have
believed in Christ Jesus, that we might be justified by faith in Christ and not
by the works of the law; for by the works of the law no flesh shall be
justified.
Notice the vocabulary there - not by the works of the
law, but by faith in Christ.
One and two deal with the problem of legalism at
salvation. But chapters 3 through 5 deal with legalism in the spiritual
life – legalism in progressive sanctification if you will.
So he starts off in Galatians 3:2 and he says, “Okay,
now I want you to answer a question.
NKJ Galatians 3:2 This only I want to learn from you:
Did you receive the Spirit by the works of the law, or by the hearing of faith?
Which was it? What we expect in the answer is
for them to say the hearing of faith. He just got through developing this
in chapter 1 and chapter 2.
He says, “Do you receive the Spirit by works of the
law?”
The law here refers to the Mosaic Law and the teaching
of the Judaizers that if you really want to have the full blessings of the
spiritual life, you have to enter into the blessings of the Mosaic Covenant by
virtue of circumcision. Remember circumcision is the sign of the
Abrahamic Covenant. So if you are really going to benefit from the
blessings of the Abrahamic Covenant, then you have to get circumcised.
Then you have to do all of the other rituals related to the Mosaic Law. We see
this contrast between the law and faith and works and the Spirit so that
throughout the book. We are going to see this contrast between law vs.
grace, works vs. faith, slavery vs. freedom and flesh vs. the Spirit.
These are the contrasts. The left column
indicates how you try to live your life under religion - law, works, you are
enslaved to the flesh. The other side is by grace through faith we have
freedom in the Spirit. It all connects - freedom to grow and freedom to
fail.
Galatians 3:3 drives the point home.
NKJ Galatians 3:3 Are you so foolish? Having begun in
the Spirit, are you now being made perfect by the flesh?
There is that instrumental dative again. There are
about 6 of these instrumental datives –datives with the Spirit in the book of
Galatians. Every time it has this emphasis on instrumentality. Here
is how you see it.
It says, “Having begun by means of the Spirit.”
How did you begin the Christian life?
Regeneration. Who produced regeneration? The Spirit. So the
means of regeneration is the Holy Spirit.
NKJ Titus 3:5 not by works of righteousness which
we have done, but according to His mercy He saved us, through the washing of
regeneration and renewing of the Holy Spirit,
Hear that word “by”. That is
instrumentality.
So Paul says in Galatians 3:3…
NKJ Galatians 3:3 Are you so foolish? Having begun in
the Spirit, are you now being made perfect by the flesh?
That is how he got regenerated – by faith alone.
The word there for perfect is the word epiteleo
which means to perform or establish, to finish or to bring something to
completion. That is a form of the same word that we have in Galatians
5:16 where we read…
NKJ Galatians
That is teleo.
This is an intensified form of the verb epiteleo.
So it is the same thing. What do we have here? Spirit, epiteleo (being made perfect or fulfilling) and
flesh. Those are the three key words you have over in Galatians
5:16. Of the four key words you have in Galatians 5:16, three of them
come out of Galatians 3:3. He doesn’t explain how to continue in the
Spirit until you get to Galatians 5:16. He raises the question here
in this rhetorical question to bring home the point that they got saved by the
Spirit. They are no longer trying to live by the Spirit. They are
trying to do it all on their own. So then he has to go off and go through
all the intricate doctrinal development so they can understand why you have to
walk by means of the Spirit. That is how the book of Galatians
develops.
So he comes to the end and he says, “If you want to
fulfill the Christian life then you have to walk by means of the Spirit...”
The in verses 17-18 he talks about the warfare that
takes place - the flesh lusts against the Spirit and the Spirit against the
flesh. There are two things here that are conflicting. Sometimes if
you are a Christian you think that you have a multiple personality
syndrome. On the one hand you have this sin nature that when you let it
go, it really rips.
You think, “Who is that person? I thought I had
dealt with this.”
It can really surprise you sometimes. If your
husband or wife is around, it can really shock them too. We just don’t
want to let that go. There is this warfare. On the other hand there
is this new person that is being matured and developed by God the Holy Spirit
as we walk by the Holy Spirit. There is this internal struggle.
This is the essence of spiritual warfare. Spiritual warfare isn’t going
out and fighting the demons and casting out demons which is how most people
want to understand it today. It is the warfare that goes on between your
ears. The center point of that is your volition. Are you going to
chose to apply doctrine and walk by means of the Spirit or are you going to try
to live life on your own. That is the conflict. They war against
one another.
Then in verse 18 we have our second key phrase.
NKJ Galatians
To be led by something, what do you have to do?
You have to follow it. Leading presupposes a follower. To follow something
you have to have a clear objective path out in front of you. The clear
objective path that is placed in front of us is the Word of God. The Holy
Spirit leads us by the Word of God. If we are led by the Spirit, we are
not under what? The law.
That is the problem in
Now how do we tell how we are walking by the
flesh? Some times people don’t do what they say. They talk about
how much they love you and how important doctrine is, but you look at their
life and that tells you what dominates. If the works of the flesh are
present - adultery, fornication, lewdness (these all have to do with sexual
sins), idolatry (which has to do with worshipping anything other than the
Lord). We don’t go out and have primitive idols of stone today. We have
sophisticated idols of the mind. In Colossians 2 Paul talks about greed
or materialism which is idolatry. You think that things and money are
going to give you what only God can give you. That is idolatry. Sorcery
is the Greek word pharmakeia. This
has to do with hallucinogenic drugs in order to solve the problems in life
rather than being dependent upon God. Hatred is a mental attitude sin that
produces overt sins of contentions, jealousies, outbursts of wrath, selfish
ambitions, dissentions, heresies, envy, murder, drunkenness revelries and the
like. All of these are characteristic of somebody walking in the sin
nature. Those who practice such things on an ongoing continuous basis will
not inherit the
NKJ Galatians
NKJ Galatians
Now one last thing before we finish. What we see
here is one of the most important principles that you find in all of the New
Testament. Too many people today overlook this. That is that you
are doing one of two things. You are either walking by the flesh or you
are walking by the Spirit - one or the other. There is no little bit of
this. If you have mixed motives, you are walking by the flesh.
I remember a seminary professor saying, “I do a lot of
things. Part of it is to glorify God and part of it is selfish motives
there.”
Then it is all garbage. It is either one or the
other. That is clear from the grammar. If you are walking by the
Spirit, it is impossible to walk by the flesh. These are mutually
exclusive. It is either one or it’s the other. It’s not both.
It isn’t a little bit of one and a little bit of the other. You are
either in fellowship or out of fellowship. We have people walking around
today. There are some guys on the radio that say that these aren’t
absolutes. That falls against the grammar. We see the same kind of thing
when we went through Ephesians 5. You are either foolish or you are wise.
You are either walking in the light or you are walking in darkness. You
are either walking by the Holy Spirit or you are not. You are either
redeeming the time or you are not redeeming the time. You are either
walking by the Spirit or you not being led by the Spirit. They are
mutually exclusive.
So we have to understand how we walk by the Spirit
once we are walking by the flesh. That is where I John 1:9 comes
in. Whenever we get out of fellowship, whenever we start walking by the
sin nature, the way to recover is through confession of sin. The key
there is cleansing. Confession of sin cleanses. You see cleansing
all the way through the Bible from the Old Testament to the future millennial
temple. If you are going to come into the presence of God, there has to
be cleansing. In the Old Testament under the Mosaic Law and in the
NKJ 1 Corinthians
James 4 says,
NKJ James 4:8 Draw near to God and He will draw
near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners; and purify your hearts,
you double-minded.
It is all the same principle of cleansing. It is
important because it restores us to a position where growth can take place and
we can go forward. So we will come back and in the next lesson we are
going to cover that.