Galatians 5:24-26
Amen. You can be seated. Turn
once again in your copy of the scriptures to Galatians chapter
five. Today will be the last time we
say Galatians five. In a couple of weeks, we’ll finish
up Galatians 6. And then I think in June, we’ll
move to our next chronological book in Paul’s writings, and
that will be 1 and 2 Thessalonians. But for today, Galatians 5, 24
to 26. If you’re using the Pew copy,
it’s on page 975. Let’s hear the word. of the living God together. Paul,
after speaking about the deeds of the flesh and the fruit of
the spirit says, and those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified
the flesh with its passions and its desires. If we live by the
spirit, let us also walk by the spirit. Let us not become conceited,
provoking one another, envying one another. Pray with me. Lord, we thank you for the chance
to hear from you. We pray that our ears would hear,
our eyes would see, our hearts would perceive, and that our
hands and feet would be ready, willing, and able to go and do
all that you command for your glory, our good, and for the
witness of Jesus Christ before the watching world. In his mighty
name we pray, amen. The $64,000 question for every
believer, every Christian is this, how do I live the Christian life? How do I
live the Christian life? And we want to avoid Phariseeism,
we want to avoid legalism, but we also want to avoid anti-Gnomianism
or lawlessness or just an unthinking or uncritical living of the Christian
life. How do I live the Christian life?
Well, if you ask some in our culture, they may say this, say
yes to Jesus, And they don’t say it this way, but it’s what
implied say yes to Jesus and then wait for the chariot to
swing low and take you to heaven and say, yes, I prayed the prayer. I’ve got the card. That’s one
way. It’s not, it’s not a biblical way, but it’s one way people
might answer. The other would be say yes to Jesus and go to
church. Say yes to Jesus. And every time
those doors are opened, you better be there. Every time a committee
meets, you better be on it or edit that sort of thing. Another
answer would be say yes to Jesus, go to church and don’t do bad
things. Or at least if you do bad things,
make sure the good things you do outweigh the bad. That’s bad
too, that’s wrong. Or how about this? How do I live
the Christian life? You say with Paul in Galatians
2.20, I have been crucified with Christ. Meaning my sins were
placed on him at the cross And when he paid for sins through
his suffering and death and the wrath of God being poured out
on him instead of me for my sins, my sin nature died also. I have
been crucified with Christ, Paul says in Galatians 2.20. It is
no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And so we can
answer the question, how do I live the Christian life? We put our
faith in the crucified Jesus. knowing that our sins and our
sin nature were put to death in Him on the cross. And then
it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives through me.
We continue to put to death our sins, and we continue to live
a resurrected life. That’s the whole mortification
and vivification set of terminology, isn’t it? We continue to put
to death our sin, And we continue to live the resurrection life.
I’m going to explain this a little bit more, but back to the question,
how do I live the Christian life? Well, I live it in Christ. I
live it by the power of the Holy Spirit and I must daily die to
sin. Now here’s the question that
I know comes to your mind. I’m not gonna say if, I’m gonna
say since. Since Jesus died on the cross for my sins, because
my sins were placed on him on the cross, since Jesus died for
my sins, my sins, past, present, future, atoned for, paid for,
and since my sin nature that I inherited from Adam died with
him on the cross, why is it that I, who have been born again from
above, still sin? Why do I need to daily crucify
or mortify sin in the flesh? And that’s because of what Paul
teaches us. The scriptures teach us. Yes, we are born again. Yes, our sins past, present and
future are forgiven. But in our life and until our
dying breath, we have what Paul calls the flesh. or what is explained
as remnant sin or remaining corruption. And that remaining sin, that
flesh or that remnant corruption that is in us, when it partners
with the devil and it partners with the world, the world and
the flesh and the devil wreak havoc in our lives unless we
daily put it to death, unless we daily take it to the cross. And that’s where Paul in Galatians
five, particularly verse 24, after the whole book, remember
he’s, he’s yelled at the Judaizers. Don’t say Jesus plus these things. give salvation. It’s Jesus only
give salvation. So we don’t need adherence to
the law and adherence to all these, uh, uh, you know, added
on doodads that we like to add on in the Christian faith. Those
aren’t needed. You just trust Jesus. Then he’s fussed at them
for not living by the spirit. Some of them have said, okay,
if Jesus has saved me and he’s forgiven me, it doesn’t matter
how I live. I can do what I want. I can send my brains out. Uh,
how does the song go? Um, uh, Justification, how blessed
a condition, I can send all I want and still get remission. And
that’s the antinomian song. That’s wrong. We are not to sin
so that grace may abound. Remember Paul’s answer to that
question? By no means. In fact, it was stronger than
that. Now we are to live the Christian
life daily in Jesus, by the spirit, daily putting to death what is
earthly in us, the sin that is in us. And so 5.24 says those
who belong to Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and
with its desires. And then he’s going to say a
few words to the Galatian church as he adds verses 25 and 26. He says, if we live by the spirit,
we’re not going to be conceited. And if we’re conceited, Then
we’ll provoke one another and we will envy one another. So
he’s saying, if you want to keep on living by the flesh in the
church, being conceited and provoking and envying one another, that’s
not going to be the fruit of the spirit in the church. It’s
going to be the fruit of the flesh. So he’s going to say, we need
to walk by the spirit. We need to keep in step with the spirit. But I want to go back to verse
24. That’s really, really important. How do I live the Christian life?
What do I need to do? daily to live the Christian life.
Well, you need to rest in Jesus and his finished work. You need
to rely on the Holy Spirit and his promise provision, but you
need to, as Paul says here in 24, if you belong to Christ,
you have crucified the flesh. And I want to compare right quick
what Paul says here in 524 and back what he says in 220. In
220, he says, I have been crucified with Christ. That’s past action. passive past action. God did
it. I have been crucified with Christ here. He’s saying, uh,
those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh. It’s
a past action that Jesus did for us at the cross, but in the
new Testament, uh, understanding because of the way the new Testament
was written in the Greek language, it’s a past action. crucified
the flesh with ongoing and habitual work to continue that. For example, you’re born, you’re
a baby. Do you stay a baby or do you
become a juvenile and a teenager and a young adult and then an
adult and then an older person? There’s a progression in that.
You get married, you stay married, you progress in marriage, you
become a Christian, you’re a baby Christian, you’re a juvenile
Christian, you’re a mature Christian, you’re an aging Christian. That’s
the idea here. Those who belong to Jesus have
crucified the flesh, but they keep on crucifying it. with its passions and its desires. So think of the Christian life
this way. You have died in Jesus and you
continue to die daily. You have been crucified with
Christ, but you are continually, you will and you must crucify
the remaining flesh or the remnant sin in your lives. Now I want
to think through a handful of ways that we need to put this
into practice in our lives. I wanna stop for a moment and
say a couple of things. One is, this is the thing every
Christian needs to know. This is the thing every Christian
wish they knew sooner. And this is the thing that the
sooner we get to it by God’s grace in Jesus and by the power
of the Holy Spirit, we will live a more holy and pleasing and
quiet and content godly life. And this will be what witnesses
to the watching world. This will give you peace. This
will stop your restlessness. And this will put an end to so
many things in your lives. And it will be imperfect in this
life, but it’s what we need to do. And here’s the first thing
that I think the scripture calls us to do if we belong to Christ
and we have and are and will crucify the flesh. We must call
sin by its name. There’s a book on my shelf that
has a very catchy title. And it’s by a medical doctor
some years ago, maybe a 50 year old book. And it’s called Whatever
Became of Sin. And it’s a medical doctor’s look
at Christian culture in America sometime ago. And he began to
see that not only in polite company, but even in the church, we don’t
use the word sin. In fact, a couple of weeks ago,
there’s a very popular We’ll use church loosely, I suppose,
because what I’m about to say, we’ll call that into question.
But over Easter weekend, they said, we will not mention blood.
Okay. Stop there. What are you? Rock
concert? Who knows? We’re not going to
mention blood. We’re not going to mention the cross. We’re not
going to mention sin and death and darkness and all those sorts
of things. Several years ago, a man came
to me, he was an elder in one of the mainline Presbyterian
churches, and he says, we’ve just been told by the pastor
that when we serve communion in the front of the church, we
are not to say the blood of our Lord Jesus shed for you. What are you supposed to say?
Tough it out, bud? We have lost our minds, whatever
became of sin. Now we say, well, we all have
shortcomings. Who are you to judge? You know,
mistakes were made. That’s sort of the thing we say.
I love how R.C. Sproul has put sin back on the
map for believers. And I love how he has also put
the holiness of God back on the map for believers. And he says
so well, sin is cosmic treason. Every sin, big ones, little ones,
and in between. It doesn’t matter if it’s the
little bitty, at least in our mind sin, it’s an affront to
God and his holiness. And it doesn’t matter if it’s
a great big old grand sin. It’s cosmic treason. And I love how the shorter catechism
defines sin. Sin in two ways. Sin is falling
short of the glory of God. So, you know, when you’re young
and you go to the roller coaster, right, you go to Carowinds or
something, and it says you must be this tall, right, to ride
the ride, 48 inches or whatever, so you won’t fall out of their
harnesses when the thing goes off the rails. And if you’re
not that tall, you don’t measure up. And if you stand on your
tippy toes, you’re cheating, right? You gotta be old enough,
tall enough, big enough to fit in the ride and ride it safely.
So measuring up, we don’t measure up to God’s standard. We fall
short of it. And then there’s the, you know, when you’re in
grade school and you go out in the schoolyard and the bully,
school bully draws a line in the dirt. Says, I dare you to
step across that line. He’s saying transgress. cross
that line. And so sin is those two ideas.
It’s way more than that, but it’s not measuring up to God’s
standard and it’s stepping outside or across the boundaries that
God has given us. And so it’s not shortcomings.
It’s not mistakes were made. It’s cosmic treason. It’s transgression. It’s not measuring up and do
sin. because of God’s holiness and
his justice and his truth is his wrath and his curse. It’s
why when Adam and Eve went outside his boundaries, don’t eat from
the tree, they lost fellowship with God. They were under his
wrath and curse, and they went from happy and holy to being
sinful and miserable. And I love how Sinclair Ferguson
in recent years has encouraged Christians to name the sin in
their lives. Give it a name. Think about after
9-11, September 11, 2001, we went to war with terrorism. And
do you remember when we first went to war in Iraq? The United
States made a deck of playing cards and on the backs of these
face cards weren’t kings and queens and jokers and whatever.
It was the most wanted. And so they had the aces and
they had the Kings and they had the Queens and the nines and
whatever else are on cards. And so as the soldiers who were
overseas in tents and in camps would be playing cards, they
would over and over see the faces of those who are the most wanted. And I think in a sense, we may
need to make a deck of cards for our own lives. I’m discontent
with what I’ve got, so I go after what other people have. That’s
coveting. Call it what it is. I covet, Lord. Or we lust after
something, or we pine away for something, or we use language
we shouldn’t use, or we have an attitude that’s not godly,
or whatever that thing is. Make a most wanted list and kill
it. Put a bullet in it, put an arrow
in it, put a knife in it, put an ax to its root, whatever it
is, but name the sin and seek to crucify it. But also, and
importantly, ask God by his word and spirit to help you cultivate
the opposite, the spiritual fruit in your lives. I have a wonderful
little book It’s called putting off and putting on. And it goes
through about 150 or so named sins in the scripture. And it
lets you, if you find that thing and it’s you, you circle it and
it says fruit to be cultivated, thing to be repented of and all
the rest. And so if you have an issue with anger, work on
kindness and self-control. If you have a struggle with bitterness,
work on the fruit of mercy. If you’re a cheater, Ask God
to make you honest. If you’re a covetor, ask God
to help you be content and thankful. If you’re a divisive person,
may God make you a peacemaker. If you’re lazy, be diligent.
If you have uncontrolled thoughts, live a self-controlled and upright
life. If you are seeking to please
yourself, stop and turn and begin to please God. If you are sinning
sins in the body, you remember that your body is a temple of
the Holy Spirit. And on and on, you can read through
this list of biblical sins and biblical fruit. But we need to
call sin by its name. We do not need to water it down.
We don’t need to downplay it. We need to crucify it. So we
call it by name. And then secondly, we crucify
it. You think about the cross. We just got through Easter and
we thought about the life and the ministry and the suffering
and the passion and the atoning death of Jesus at the hands of
first Almighty God. It was the will of God that he
be bruised for our iniquities and chastised for our sins. It
was the will of God to lay on him the punishment that was due
us. Because he is the eternal lamb of God who could take away
our sins. But it was the Romans who crucified
him. It was the Romans who beat him. It was the Romans who made him
carry that cross. It was the Romans who nailed
him to the cross. And as he was stretched out on
the cross. It was a slow and painful death. You could not,
because of the position of your body and the condition of your
body, you could not breathe. And for a while you could push
yourselves up and down until they broke the bones in your
legs. And because your arms were stretched out, you slowly died
because you could not breathe. You were asphyxiated. Now remember
Christ, because of the Psalms, promised not a bone in his body
would be broken. But you do remember they pierced
him with a spear. And so we’ll see in heaven, the five bleeding
wounds, the hands, the feet, and the side. We will see the
lamb as though he had been slain, who is worthy to open up the
scroll and to take up its seals and to bring us safely home into
the glorious eternal presence of almighty God. It wasn’t the
beating and the nails that killed Jesus. Yes, they played a role
in his true body. but it was the weight of the
wrath and the curse of God for every named sin that was ours
that was placed on him at the cross. And you remember the charges
placed over his head by Pontius Pilate, Jesus Christ in three
languages, King of the Jews, and remember one group says,
no, no, no, don’t put that. Put the man who said he was the
King of the Jews. And Pilate says, I have written,
what I have written. And so when we name our sins
and seek to crucify it, and I don’t mean this in a funny way at all,
but you need to think judicially in your mind. You need to put
in your Bible reading and your thoughts and your prayers and
your ponderings, you need to put your sin on trial and you
need to say God’s righteous law says this. My life and my spirit
and my desires and my flesh are showing that and it doesn’t measure
up and it transgresses God’s law. And I hereby sentence this
sin in my life to death. Yes, I’ve been crucified with
Christ. Yes, my sins were nailed to the cross and paid for. Yes,
I have a new life in Jesus, my old nature. has been changed
by the spirit and through the merits and the work of Jesus.
And yes, the old man is gone and the new man has come, but
that remaining sin in us needs to daily be put on trial and
condemned and crucified and given a slow lifelong death. We’ll deal with the flesh till
our dying day. You will breathe your last breath, living with
remaining sin and corruption. But as ugly as the cross is in
our minds with Jesus on it, it needs to be that ugly in our
lives because sin is so. And we need to starve it, we
need to crucify it, and we need to let it die. The famous Puritan
theologian John Owen said this, be killing sin or it will be
killing you. So we call sin by name, we crucify
it. Now I want to speak positively
here. We need to third, cultivate fruit. If we name sin, we also
need to name the fruit. Now in Galatians 5, and the list
in scripture can be more exhaustive, it says the fruit of the flesh
is sexual immorality. It’s impurity, it’s sensuality,
it’s idolatry, it’s sorcery. It’s enmity, strife, jealousy,
fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness.
orgies, and then it gives a catch all and things like these. And
it goes on to say, if you do these things, you will not inherit
the kingdom. Not because your sins aren’t forgiven in Jesus.
It’s because people who do these things aren’t saved. It’s the
fruit of the flesh. It’s the fruit of life in Adam
and not the fruit of being in Jesus Christ. But he gives an
important, but the fruit of the spirit is, and we went through
these week by week, love, joy, peace, patience. kindness, goodness,
faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. And I know we probably
got lost in the weeds or lost in the forest for the trees,
going through each of these aspects of the fruit of the spirit. But
these are the character of Jesus given to us. These are the life
of Jesus given to us. You don’t wake up and put a sticky
note on the bathroom mirror saying, today be more loving. You want
to think about it, you want to pray for it, but it’s God himself
who gives you the spirit of Christ to make you more loving or joyful
or peaceful or patient and all the rest. Now we’ve talked about
this crucify metaphor. I want to leave it for a moment
and give you two other metaphors that come in the scripture. One
is we need to put off our old man. We need to put off the old
nature, the things that we once were and still have remnants
of in us. We need to put that off and put
on Jesus Christ. We need to put on compassion,
kindness, humility, meekness, patience, and love. That’s what
Paul writes to the Colossians. So there’s a crucify metaphor. We need to put to death daily
in our lives, those remnants of sin and corruption that pop
up. We also need to put off the old man and put on the new man.
But there’s also this idea of weed out sin, root out sin and
cultivate fruit. So there’s a garden metaphor.
There’s a vineyard metaphor. Several weeks back on Sunday
night when we did Isaiah chapter five, we looked at the parable
of the vineyard where God said, uh, I took Israel out of the
nations and I planted them as a choice vineyard. I got the
most perfect hillside with the most perfect soil and it had
the best sunshine and the best year round weather. And I, I
went to, um, the garden center. And I bought the choicest grape
plants. I didn’t get the chintzy ones.
I didn’t go to the discount garden center and get the dead ones.
I gave it all I could. And I cultivated it. I tended
it. I built a wall. I had a gardener. I built a tower to watch over
it and keep enemies out. I even built a wine press, because
after the grapes came, I was going to press them out, and
I was going to have the best wine in the world. but I got sour grapes,
God says. Then he says, what should I do
with my vineyard? I’ll tear it down. I’ll break down its walls.
Enemies will come in to destroy it. And he’s talking about Babylon
coming in and destroying the land and taking the people out. And what God is saying, and now
we can see through our life in Jesus Christ, God gives us everything. He plants us on a fertile hill.
He gives us sunshine. We’re the choicest of plants.
There’s nothing that we need for the Christian life that he’s
not given us or told us we could ask for. And what do we return
to him? Sour grapes. We don’t read our
Bibles. We don’t come to church. We don’t
sit under the word. We quench the Holy Spirit. We
cultivate deeds of the flesh and not deeds of the spirit.
It’s our sin nature in us. It’s our spiritual laziness in
us. It’s the influence of the world. It’s the influence of
the devil. And I’m saying to you all, it’s really hard to
live the Christian life. There is no magic bean. There is no
pill to pop. There is no formula except the
dying daily. Remember, Jesus, when he spoke
to those who would listen, He says, if anyone would follow
after me, they must daily deny themselves the flesh and take
up their cross, putting to death their deeds and their desires
and following me. Remember when he says, if your
right hand is causing you to sin, you should cut it off. If your right eye is causing
you to sin, you should gouge it out. He’s saying you need
to starve it. You need to cut it off. You need to get rid of
it. You need to get rid of the thing that is killing you because
God doesn’t want sour grapes followers. He wants fruit bearing,
fragrant, life-giving people. Now, why is this so hard? Well,
we said we need to name our sin. We need to call it by name. We
need to crucify it. We need to cultivate the fruit.
But now we want to answer the question, why is this so hard?
Why is gardening cursed? That’s the question. Why is gardening
cursed? Remember Adam and Eve lived in
Eden. They lived in paradise. They
had beauty. They had goodness. They had perfection.
They had God. They had one another. They had
family. They had worship. They had God’s law and his boundaries. But then Satan came slithering
into paradise and they were happy and holy and living for God.
They had fellowship with him. They worshiped him. They had
work and they had family. They didn’t have yet thorns and
thistles and pain and struggles and strife. And Satan came in
the garden and said to Eve, God is not enough. He’s holding back
from you. You can be a God. You could know
good and evil. You could have your best life
now. God is not enough, and so Eve
saw the fruit, she took the fruit, she ate the fruit, and she gave
some also to Adam, who was with him. Their eyes were open, they
realized their shame spiritually, but also physically, because
they went to the fig tree and took leaves, and in a self-righteous,
self-covering way, they said, this will cover our shame for
sure. Yet they still had to hide from the eye. the presence of
the almighty and all knowing God. They were hiding among the
trees. He came down for daily fellowship, couldn’t find them.
He knew where they were. But what did he say? Where are
you? We’re hiding among the trees. Why are you hiding among the
trees? Did you eat the fruit? Yes, we thought we could be gods
unto ourselves and get away with it. We thought we could transgress
your law and it’d be okay because sin isn’t that big a deal. We
thought we could not measure up because you’d be okay with
that. and God killed an animal and covered them and their sins
with skins of a garment of an animal whose life had be taken. Now, remember in the garden,
it was possible for Adam and Eve to not sin. They could have
never eaten from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and
they would have lived forever in righteousness and holiness
and in beauty and splendor, no stubbing the toes, no hitting
your fingers with a hammer. Every time you planted a seed,
it would grow perfectly and produce well. I mean, they had wonderful
opportunity. And what Adam should have done
in the garden, because it was also possible for them to not
sin, it was possible for them to say no to Satan. What Adam
should have done is what we’ve just been talking about, crucifying
the flesh. He should have said, okay, look,
Satan, I hear what you’re saying, but you’re wrong. God has a law
and we will live within its boundaries. God has a standard and we want
to meet it. And therefore you are sinning against God and I
hereby condemn you to death. And a good old garden hoe would
have ended all our sin and misery that we now experience because
what he did has now come to us. That would have been mortification
of sin. That would have been killing the serpent, slaying
the dragon, stopping the madness before it took over. And Adam
and Eve would have lived forever in righteousness and the glory
of God would have spread across the whole face of the earth.
But now because of Satan and Adam, it is possible only for
people to sin before Jesus Christ. Satan lied, they said yes, and
here entered worship me and serve me in curses and sin nature. And as the writer of Genesis
tells us before Noah, there was only evil continually, only evil
all the time. Now, thanks be to God for Christ,
that in Christ our sins are pardoned. And in the Holy Spirit, our sin,
our remnant sin, our sin nature is subdued. And the Christian
life is one of gardening. It’s weeding it out and letting
the fruit grow, but it’s under the curse. We still have passions. We still have appetites. We still
have lust of the eyes, lust of the flesh. We still have the
pride of life. And often we can find ourselves
living ungoverned, following unbridled those passions, which
the world, the devil and the flesh offer us. But Romans chapter
eight, Paul says, we are to put that to death. It is to die daily. It is to die every time it pops
up. But our desires, need to follow
in the commandments of God. And we need to do things lawfully
and in moderation and for God’s glory so that sin will not give
birth in our lives. We and our neighbors share a
wisteria problem. And I think I know where it comes
from. It comes from the woods up the
hill from us, but it spreads through a couple of our yards.
And it in fact grows under concrete through our yard and it comes
out towards the front. And every time it pops up, you’ve
got to chop it. But the best way to get rid of
it would be to go find its root and cut it at the root. And it
can pop up sometimes as beautiful green vine with wonderful and
fragrant purple flowers, but it is a pest. And sometimes sin
looks good, doesn’t it? Sometimes it looks enticing.
In fact, that’s why C.S. Lewis gave sin for Edmund and
the White Witch. It was all the Turkish delight
that you could want, but it killed him. It froze him. It took away
his spiritual vitality. And so brothers and sisters,
we are called living under the curse of gardening under sin. We are given the curse and the
difficulty of battling daily, our own remnant sin, the flesh,
the desires of the world, the temptations of Satan. And this
is how we need to live the Christian life. In Jesus Christ, by the
power of the Holy Spirit, with the ingredients for success God
promises. We are people of the word. We
are people of the sacrament. We are people of prayer. We are
people of fellowship. And we are people who fight and
we garden and we battle daily through our daily disciplines,
the Christian life. Now, I want to say this very
clearly. Just because you come to church, just because you pray. Just because you hear the word
or take the sacraments or read your Bible or get on your knees
or whatever does not mean you will succeed. It’s not Catholic,
right? Ex opere operato. In the doing
of the thing, the thing happens. It needs to be spirit blessed.
It needs to be under the hard work of your daily discipline,
but God blessing it by his spirit. Now there’s a reality. in addition
to our daily dying to sin that we need to understand. And it’s
this, our remnant sin is left in us for a reason. Our remaining
corruption is left in us that we might be chastised for our
former sins, not in an eternal way, but a temporal way. God
is saying, look at what you are apart from Jesus. It’s ugly,
isn’t it? It’s also left in us to humble us. You think of King
David, all that he was, and he lost it all through his sin with
Bathsheba, but in his older days, he was more humble and grateful
and godly. Or you think about Peter after
he denied Jesus three times, what a better servant he was.
And so God in his mercy, God in his providence, God in his
purposes, he uses these things to humble us, to make us more
like Christ, to be more watchful, To be more aware, to be sure
not to neglect the means of grace and to remember that, say like
in King David’s life, if you quench the spirit and neglect
the means of grace and you fool around, sin can break out in
your life and it can wreak havoc in your life. And if you don’t
kill sin, it will fill in the blank. It will kill you. And
so whatever you got to do, you got to shoot it. You got to chop
it off with a hoe. You’ve got to poison it. You’ve
got to uproot it. You’ve got to do whatever it
takes, but it is all by the merits of Jesus. It is all by the power
of the spirit. And yes, it is through the discipline
of the Christian using the means that God gives word, sacrament,
prayer, fellowship, and suffering. So what’s the secret? to the
Christian life. It’s the cross. Way back then,
2000 years ago, but every day in the Christian’s life, pray
with me. Lord, we pray that you would
help us to be watchful, to be diligent, to be merciless, naming
sin, crucifying and condemning sin and cultivating fruit in
our lives and let us not lose heart when there’s rocks in the
garden and weeds among the plants, and help us not to lose heart
when Satan bombards us and the world entices us, but help us
to keep our eyes on heaven, our eyes on the cross, and to die
daily as we seek to live for you. Help us and bless us, we
pray. In Christ’s mighty and holy name, amen.