Galatians 5:19-21
You may be seated. Please turn
in your copy of the scriptures to Galatians chapter five, Galatians
5, 19 through 21 is our passage for today. If you’re using the
pew Bible, you can find that on page 975. For a good bit in
the book of Galatians, we have heard that no person can be justified
by the works of the law. That is no person can say, I
will start obeying God today and I’ll do everything perfectly
and he will accept me righteous in his sight. And the reason
given for that is we’re born with original sin and we commit
actual sins. And so no one can do anything
righteous. But the good news is that Jesus
Christ has come into this world. and lived a righteous, obedient
life. He lived in our place, he obeyed in our place, then
he died in our place. And so we have his forgiveness
of sins because his sacrifice, we have his obedience because
God has accepted his obedience and granted it to our account.
And then we also have all the blessings of the Holy Spirit
to live a faithful Christian life. The problem we’ve been
discussing in Galatians is no, you can’t be a law keeper and
get righteousness, nor can you be a law keeper and find standing
before God. Now, the thing we’re looking
at over the last weeks and into the weeks to come is you will
continue to struggle with the flesh or remaining sin, and it
will wreak havoc in your lives from time to time unless you
put up a good fight. And unless the spirit is at work
in you. And so we pick back up today on this idea of the flesh
or remnant sin and the life of the believer and what it can
look like or how it evidences itself in our walk before God. And so let’s give our attention
now to the words of Paul from Galatians five, beginning at
19. He says, now the works of the flesh are evident. sexual
immorality, impurity, and sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife,
jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy,
drunkenness, and orgies, and things like these. I warn you,
as I warned you before, that those who do such things will
not inherit the kingdom of God. Amen. May God bless the reading
and preaching of his word and write these eternal truths on
our hearts. And may we put them into practice
in our lives. I have a cup, coffee cup in my
office up on the shelf. It’s not one I drink out of,
it’s one to look at when I suppose. And it was given to someone in
my family a while back and it has a John Owen quote on it that’s
rather interesting. It stands out. John Owen was
a 1600s Puritan pastor. If you’ve been listening to Sinclair
Ferguson, it oozes out of him. He’s a John Owen expert. And
the cup says this on it, be killing sin or it will be killing you. Be killing sin or it will be
killing you. Perhaps you go out in your yard
and you find a poisonous snake. You don’t say to yourself, well,
it’s its natural habitat. I’ll leave him alone and let
him build a nest and make babies and more. It’s just, no, you,
you get your shovel and you get your hoe or you get the 12 gauge
and you blast it or chop it or whatever. I was told recently,
uh, the first thing you do when you’re trying to kill a snake,
a boy scout told me this, you break its back and then you chop
off its head. You break its back so it can’t
strike you. Uh, and then you chop off its head. Well, sin,
uh, has entered, our lives, our garden. And Owen is right, be
killing sin or it will be killing you. And as we think of that
quote and this list of pretty rough stuff that’s in our copy
of God’s word today, we want to remember that the gospel of
Jesus Christ is good news. And it’s not just good news because
we don’t go to hell. It’s not just good news because
Jesus died for our sins. It’s not just good news because
the obedience of Christ that he performed on this earth is
now ours by faith. It’s not just good news for those
reasons. It’s good news for all the reasons,
all the things Jesus is. And one of the things that I
think we miss out on is that Jesus has provided us everything
we need for the Christian life. Yes, he saves us from the revenging
and eternal wrath of God. We go to heaven, not hell. That’s
wonderful. Yes, our sins are forgiven and
washed away by his perfect and precious sacrifice. Yes, we have
his obedience and that’s wonderful. But we also are given for the
Christian life, for the pilgrimage of this Christian life, all that’s
necessary. to live faithfully for him. And so the trajectory of the
Christian is itself good news. We are rescued from sin, we are
rescued from wrath, but we can bear the fruit of the spirit.
We can live the Christian life and we will land safely in heaven
where we will be sinful no more, made perfect in holiness and
where we will enjoy God forever uninterrupted. But there’s bad
news and the good news. And this bad news and the good
news is what we’ve been speaking of the last couple of weeks in
our Galatians study. And that’s the ugly fact. That
is the reality that sin remains in us as believers. Yes, our
sin is pardoned and we are justified. But sin is also subdued, original
sin, that sin that comes to us from Adam’s first sin and his
guilt. Original sin in us is our lack
of righteousness. Original sin in us is our lack
of obedience and it’s pardoned in Christ that our coming to
faith and it’s subdued and for the rest of our life. though
the penalty of sin is taken and the practice of sin is broken,
the power of sin is removed from us, we still… struggle with
that remaining sin. Remember, I pointed out to us
a couple of weeks ago that it’s like the ashes. And when you
scrape them back in a fire pit or a wood stove, there’s the
red hot embers and coals and remnant sin is like that. And
if you fuel it, if you stoke it, if you give it oxygen, it
will turn into a raging fire. And that raging fire can look
like this list. The raging fire in our lives
can look like immorality, it can look like social sins. It
can look like religious sins or it can manifest itself in
drunkenness or substance abuse. And so every one of us has remaining
sin. Every one of us has what Paul calls the flesh. It’s a
landing zone for the devil. It’s a landing zone, a point
of entry for the world. And so the world and the flesh
and the devil are the three enemies that Christians struggle with
for the rest of our lives. And if our desires or our lust
go unchecked, it will, as James, the brother of our Lord Jesus
says, it will give birth to sin and it will be like wildfire
in our lives. And so we understand that the
duty of the Christian, this is sort of the good news, bad news,
good news, the ongoing struggle for the Christian is to recognize
we have remaining sin, we have the flesh. And there will be
an ongoing and perpetual, and in this life, irreconcilable
war going on in our hearts. And in this war, you have the
flesh warring against the spirit, the spirit warring against the
flesh. And we’re promised that the spirit will overcome. We’re
promised that if we live by the spirit, we will not gratify the
desires of the flesh. But very often in this battle,
We choose to walk by the flesh, not the spirit. We choose to
gratify the desires offered to us by Satan. We look at the fruit
he offers to us and it’s a delight to our eyes. We take and eat
it and we suffer the consequences. We look at all the shiny things
the world offers and we say, boy, I’d like to have a little
of this, a little of that. And so we gratify the desires
of our flesh or our own flesh manifest itself sinfully in our
behaviors, in our inner thoughts and in our actions. towards others
in our families, in our churches, in our communities. And we remember
that we’re in good company in this struggle. Paul says in Romans
chapter seven, I know the thing I ought to do. That is the right
thing, the pleasing thing, the righteous thing. I know that
thing because I’ve read it in the Bible. God has revealed it
to me. And I know that’s the thing I ought to do, but I don’t
do it. I choose to gratify the flesh and the thing I know I
ought not to do. is the very thing that I do.
And he says, Oh, wretched man that I am, who will rescue me
from this body of death? Who will rescue me from these
fleshly desires? And he says, thanks be to God
for the Lord Jesus Christ. Last week, I mentioned the trajectory
of living in the flesh that one of the Puritans has well-written
and has been passed down to us through the last couple of centuries.
And sin goes like this. It’s maybe similar to what James
describes in his little epistle. The sin is suggested. Then we
take delight in it and then we give consent to it. And that’s
where the battle is, the spirit and the flesh. It’s wrong. It’s
wrong. It’s wrong. But it looks good. It feels good. I want to
do this where it’s a part of our lives. And so we consent
to it. We act on it. But the good news
is the Christian will come to their senses by God’s word and
by God’s grace will snap out of our sinful trance. And we
will not persevere in that sin, but the righteous, the spirit
will win out and it won’t be the thing that we live in. And so we need to be constantly
under God’s word, under God’s Holy Spirit, receiving the conviction
that what we are doing, the way we are living, what’s brooding
in our hearts is not right. And we need to repent and more
and more live to righteousness, hating what is evil, killing
sin before it is killing us. But the struggle is sometimes
as Christians, sometimes as those who gratify the desires of the
flesh, or our lives go unchecked by the scripture, or we resist
the spirit, or we quench the spirit, or we’re quite happy
living in sin, we can find ourselves living out this list that is
before us. Now I want to say something to
separate us as believers from unbelievers. Unbelievers who
are in Adam, Unbelievers who are still dead in their sins
and trespasses. They’ve not come to Jesus or
been made alive in Christ. This is the way they live. And
if you look at the story of Adam and Eve and their fall into sin,
how quickly sin spread across the face of the earth. Remember
their goal, God’s command was to live in the garden, make it
fruitful, make it multiply. And the glory of God, the obedience
of God would spread across the face of the earth. But Satan
came, tempted them, they ate the fruit and instead of spreading
righteousness, they spread sin and misery. And you see that
in their offspring, Cain and Abel. Cain did not love God and
his worship was not regarded by God, but Abel loved God and
his worship was regarded by God and Cain wasn’t happy about it.
So there was envy, there was strife, there was a dissension,
there was a division and there was wrath. And Cain killed Abel. And by the time you get on into
the chapters of Genesis and see that there is Noah, Noah is the
only righteous one in the whole generation. And the people of
Noah’s generation were living like this list. And so I want
to point out to you that unredeemed people who are still dead in
their sins and trespasses, they live this way all the time. They
can’t help it. But the difference with the believer, yes, our sin
is pardoned and our sin is subdued in us, but we have this lifelong
battle not to scrape back the ashes and find those red coals
and to stir up envy and to stir up anger and to stir up lust
and to stir up drunkenness and to stir up immorality and all
these sorts of things. For if we do, it can rage up
and we can begin to look like a pagan. We can begin to look
like those that we believe will not inherit the kingdom of heaven,
as Paul warns at the end of our passage. And so what do we do
if we’re caught in sin? What if we do if the pattern
of a lifestyle is we are gratifying our sin nature and we are living
unspiritual lives? Well, the thing needed is the
word of God. The thing needed is the gospel of God. The thing
needed is the church and accountability and people to speak into our
lives. And there’s four lists, really, 15 or so words in this
passage, but you can break it up in four lists. And I want
us to think about these four major lists and how if we’re
living this way, if we’re indulging in these things, gratifying these
things, we need to repent and come to Jesus. whether it’s for
the first time, because we need to be saved and need the gospel,
or because perhaps we’re being negligent in our Christian walk.
We’re being negligent in our fight against sin and the world
and the devil. So these four categories are
sexual sins, they’re religious sins, they are social sins, and
then they are sins of substance or appetite. And these are the
works of the flesh. And Paul says they manifest themselves. They are evident in this way
in our lives. Either our lives as an unbeliever
or our lives as a believer, who’s not living by the spirit, but
is dabbling or gratifying the things of the flesh. And we’ll
see in the coming weeks, you compare this to the fruit of
the spirit, what the spirit of God produces in us because of
what Jesus has done. Now, before we look at this list,
I want to remind you, this context is pagan Roman culture. And in
other places, particularly the book of Corinthians, where some
of these same sins are listed, Paul says to the Corinthian church,
even the pagans don’t do this stuff. Even the pagans around
you have a sense that living this way is not right. And so
to the converted people, of Galatia to those he met with and preached
the good news, those he discipled in the Christian walk, those
who have slipped. And you understand the context.
This church is biting and devouring one another. They’ve just gone
full on flesh and they’re killing each other in these churches.
He speaks to them this list. Now the works of the flesh are
evident. And the first group is the sexual
sins. There’s a quote I can remember
very well. I remember where I heard it,
who said it, and what it meant. And it goes like this. This quote
I think is from the 1970s. I didn’t hear it in the 70s,
but it’s from then. We are a sexually stupidified
culture. All we can think of is sex. All we can think of is lust.
All we can think of are perversions. I think you would agree with
that quote. I think you would flip through your television
channels and say it. I think you would look at the way people
live, the way people talk, the way they joke. It’s an immoral,
impure and sensual culture. And it’s that on steroids. Satan
is having his way. The world is having its way.
The flesh is indulging in these things. And yes, this is among
non-Christians. but I think sadly it’s hit the
church. Several of the major denominations in America, and
I’m not speaking of the mainline ones that have gotten off the
rails, I’m speaking of conservative Christian circles, over the last
five years have been trying to deal with what do we do about
sexual scandal in the church of Jesus Christ? It’s so general
now, it’s so commonplace now, it’s gotten to where no one blushes
anymore No one blushes anymore when they see the society, the
culture we live in, the attitudes and the actions. And it ought
to be the opposite. It ought to be that the dominance
of Christian faith in this world and the changed heart and the
life by the spirit ought to look so radically different. that
it’s such a great witness to the watching world. Boy, you
people are different. You people have self-control.
You people have morals and all the rest. And it was that way
in Rome when Paul was speaking to the Galatians. It was a very
immoral culture, a very immoral society, much like today. And
those of us who’ve understood history. We don’t want history
to repeat itself and Rome fell because it couldn’t get itself
under control. And I imagine that’s where we’re headed as
well. But what a contrast the immoral world with moral people,
the impure world with pure people and the sensual world with a
modest people. These are the things that are
needed. The people of God and thought and in speech and behavior.
ought to be living for almighty God in a moral, pure, and modest
way. Our thoughts, speech, and behavior
ought to reflect the kingdom. Think of the story in the book
of Genesis where the brothers sold Joseph into slavery. Remember,
he was father’s favorite, got the coat of many colors. They
threw him into a pit and they put some blood on his coat and
sent it back to dad and said, well, he got devoured by wild
beast. And the father was bereft of his youngest son, Joseph. Meanwhile, the Midian traders
who were on their way to Egypt came, they took Joseph. They
hauled him off to Egypt where he became a slave in Pharaoh’s
house. Well, he rose to prominence because he was a good fellow.
God was with him, much like Daniel and some of the others in the
stories of the scripture. And so God prospered Joseph,
but the wife of Potiphar kept coming to him and tempting him.
And Joseph fled, he ran, he literally walked out of his coat. And I
wonder if that’s how we respond to things in this life. I wonder
if that’s how we feel when we see things that are immoral and
pure and sensual. Sometimes it’s like a flickering
candle, I think, and we’re attracted to it like a moth and then it
burns us. But what would the church look
like if we were like Joseph and fled these things? And I think
we’re hardened by them today. I think these things saturate
us and it falls on us rather heavily. You know, within the
Christian conservative circles, not the mainline ones that have
gotten off the rails biblically and theologically, we’re struggling
with in some of our denominations whether you can be a carnal Christian
or not. That’s a fleshy Christian, a
person who says, I love Jesus, but I love the flesh. I love
Jesus, and I’m gonna dabble over here in these sins, these sexual
sins. We’ve even been hearing the question,
can you declare yourself to be a Christian homosexual? And that’s
been debated in our circles. And the answer to that question
is you can’t be a Christian anything and marked by the flesh, because
you’re a new creation in Jesus. The old is gone, the new has
come. You’ve been made alive in Jesus Christ and given all
the blessings of Jesus. Remember the good news. It’s
not just salvation from eternal wrath, but it’s the gifts of
God for the people of God to live for God. And so you can’t
be a carnal Christian. We are set apart for holiness.
And notice the warning at the end of our passage there in verse
21, Paul says about the whole list, but we’re thinking here
about this couple list of sexual sins. I warn you as I warned
you before. This was when he was preaching the gospel to them
first time on the missionary journey. I warned you, as I warned
you before, those who do such things, that would be the unsaved,
the lost, those stuck in Adam, those hardened to the gospel
will not inherit the kingdom of God. The only hope to be rescued
and redeemed from these things is to come to faith in Jesus,
the obedient one. Well, those are the. Sexual sins. How about the religious sins?
Maybe you say to yourself, well, I’d never do that. Well, maybe
this is your category. They lived in a day where many
Roman gods, pantheons, a god for this, a god for that. They
had rituals. They had rites. They had cultic
practices. And he speaks here of idols and
sorcery. He speaks of their world of idols. They were stone statues, they
were figures, they prayed to them, they looked to them, you
know, bless me this way, do this for me. But there’s also a high
level of sorcery or the occult and witchcraft. And so when he
speaks of the sins of religion, he’s speaking about what our
heart goes after, anything other than God, idolatry. And what
we believe are the means to get it, not prayer to the sovereign
God whom we worship, but sorcery or spells and potions and these
sorts of things. Remember all mankind was made
to worship God. All mankind was made to worship
God, but in our hardness and in our sins, we suppress the
truth about God. Paul writes in Romans chapter
one, and we deny God his due. And so we form in fashion idols. and we forget that we were called
out of paganism and that we must worship him, but we can still
fall into idolatry. We can say, well, as long as
I believe it and as long as I do it from a sincere heart, God
won’t mind me adding to his worship. God won’t mind me adding to his
devotion. That’s what Paul’s been yelling
at the Galatians for. No, you receive Jesus and rest
in him alone. You don’t try to strive after
the law to please him. Now you do obey the law because
it’s the fruit of obedience of a righteous person. But don’t
we love to add to the scriptures? Don’t we love to add some rites
and ceremonies and things and superstitions? And especially
as American Christians, because it sells. It sells books and
it gathers crowds. And our flesh, especially today,
says, I feel this way. I believe this way, I prefer
this way. I love Jesus, yes, but I want
to add some spices and some different things to it because I want to
make him my Jesus. And so we can fall into the idolatry
and the rituals and the rites of the culture. And we’re no
longer resting in Jesus and worshiping him in spirit and truth, but
we’re adding and adding and adding and adding until the Christian
faith looks like no faith at all. And so he warns us of these
sexual sins. He warns us of these religious
sins as well. I warned you as I did before.
You can’t live a pagan life and be pleasing in God’s sight. You
can’t worship idols and find favor in God’s sight. You’ll
be like Cain, worshiping God in your way, not his way and
not receiving acceptance. And so he warns, you won’t be
found in the kingdom of God. What about the social sins? This is the longer list. And
maybe in your mind, you’ve been checking the boxes. Well, I don’t
do this. I don’t do that. And I definitely
don’t do that. And maybe you’re saying, boy,
it’s a good thing I’m not wearing the scarlet letter of sexual
sins. And maybe I’m not wearing the
the the Pharisee name tag because my religious sins are non-existent. Well, perhaps the social sins
will convict you. We love to declare ourselves
righteous, don’t we? We love to say, like the publican
who walked right up to the altar of God, Lord, I’m glad I’m not
like those other people who do those things. When we ought to
be like the tax collector who stands as far off as he can and
beats his chest and says, God, have mercy on me. This list of
eight social sins is sort of a two-sided list. There’s the
list of things that lead to the list of other things. So you’ve
got enmity, you’ve got jealousy, you’ve got rivalries, and you’ve
got envy. Well, enmity leads to strife.
Jealousy leads to fits of anger. Rivalries lead to dissensions,
and envy leads to divisions. And it can be that way in the
church. You know, sometimes you hear people say, I’m not going
to go to church, it’s full of hypocrites. And the answer to that is, well,
come on in. We got room for one more. Right. That’s the right
answer. But there’s also another right answer. That’s probably
a church that’s bound in the flesh, everyone lusting after
what they want, when they want it, how they want it. And there’s
no order in the church, but there’s chaos. And I think that’s what
Paul is speaking to here socially in the Galatian church. And it
can pop up in our churches in our day. There’s enmity, jealousy,
rivalries and dissensions. And it’s leading to a church
of strife, a church of fits of anger, a church of dissensions
and divisions. They’re believing Paul. They’re
believing Apollos. They’re following Jesus. And
what was going on in the Galatian church pops up in Paul’s next
sets of letters when he writes to the Corinthians. Well, these
social sins can pop up in our homes, in our workplaces, in
our churches, and in other places where we’re out and about. And it causes us to think about
our inner life. Are we cultivating a spirit of
Cain, hatred towards our brother? Are we cultivating a spirit of
Esau, jealous at others’ birthrights? Are we cultivating a spirit of
Nabal? Remember, Nabal is the one that
wouldn’t feed David and his men. But thankfully, Abigail, had
the sense to feed them. And then Nabal fell over dead
because his heart, I think, burst in his chest, but he would not
take care of the people of God as they fell within his boundaries. And so in our inner lives, we
can be Cain and Esau and Nabal, and we can be like the Corinthians
with unsatisfied appetites. And so we can hate, we can resent,
we can get full of selfish ambition. And it expresses itself outwardly.
What’s in the heart will come out, Jesus says in Matthew. What’s
in the heart, out of the overflow of the heart, the mouth speaks.
And so there’s quarrels and outbursts and seditions and heresies. And
I think as we sit here, all of us can think through when the
fruit of the flesh has manifested itself in our lives in this way.
It’s rather ugly. And that’s where if we backtrack,
where Paul says, if you bite and devour each other, take heed
lest you fall. The church had become as wild
beast to one another. Their inner lives were not spirit-led,
but flesh-led. And so their outer behavior was
division and strife and anger. And so he contrasts that, we’ll
come to next week, the spirit is love, joy, peace, patience,
kindness, gentleness, and self-control. It’s opposite of these things.
Well, maybe we come to the fourth list and you think, whoo, I’m
getting by so far. But what about our appetites?
What about our desires? What about the abuse we have
of substances or even food or drink? He mentions here excess. He speaks specifically of drunkenness
and orgies, drunkenness and parties around drinking. But I think
you could put in here substance abuse, drug abuse. You could
put in here overeating. Whatever we do in excess that
leads us to be addicted, we can’t live without it, we can’t do
without it, and it becomes the rule of our lives. These lists, they really hit
us between the eyes. And maybe you say, I don’t drink,
no problem here. I don’t party, no problem here. But what in
your life is full of excess? We talk about, binge drinking. We talk about binge partying.
We talk about binge watching. We put binge before something
in our lives, which means we overdo it. We over indulge. We over participate. And so what
is Paul pointing out here? He’s pointing out two things.
One, if you’re not redeemed and you’re living this way, you need
to come to Jesus. Otherwise, there’s no place for you in the
kingdom of heaven. But what he’s saying to the Galatians, to the
Christians, and he’s saying to us is, yes, your flesh, your
remaining sin can bring these things out in you. We’ve all
seen it, haven’t we? We’ve all seen every one of these
categories, every one of these lists in the lives of ourselves
or others. And like Paul, we hate it. So
how do we keep these things in check? How do we keep from raking
back the ashes, finding the hot coals and fueling them? Well,
I think we need to have faith in God. We need to believe that
God is able to save us. We need to believe that God is
able to provide for us. We need to be praying people.
We need to every day be nurturing our faith, be killing sin, or
it would be killing you. It’s like in a few weeks, some
of you will, will scrape some dirt and you’ll, you’ll open
up the ground and you’ll put some seeds in. and your seeds
will begin to grow. But as the summer comes, there
will be weeds. And if you don’t do a little
weeding every day, your garden will be overgrown and will not
produce fruit. And there’s something to that
about the Christian life. There needs to be a daily weeding.
There needs to be a daily pulling of the weeds, saying to yourself,
Lord, these things in the garden of my life ought not be there.
And I love the encouragement that I know many of you have
heard Last year and this year through Sinclair Ferguson’s Daily
Little Podcast, he says, you need to name a sin. You need
to name it for what it is, and then you name its opposite virtue.
Lord, this thing is growing in my garden. It’s a noxious and
poisonous weed that will overtake and destroy my life. And if I
let it go, it’s gonna be awful. But Lord, this is the opposite.
This is the virtue. This is the grace. And this is
the thing I want to grow in my life. And I would guess, I would
venture to guess we’ve gotten so busy Our calendars are so
full, our minds are so full because of the internet and all the information
that’s just always coming at us. We rarely take time to read
the scriptures and to know what doesn’t please God and to call
it by name and to even say, Lord, that’s what’s in my life and
I need it pulled, I need it tugged, I need it eradicated, rooted
out, and I need it replaced with this. And that I think is the
challenge to us. If we want to live the Christian
life, knowing it as a battle, knowing it as hard, knowing it
as difficult, knowing they’re real and deadly enemies. And even though we know we’re
justified and we will fully and finally be brought safely to
heaven, we need to lean into this bit of gardening, don’t
we? We need to lean into the Christian
life because God calls us to bear fruit. And so we need to
fertilize our lives with the gospel, fertilize our lives with
the doctrine. We need to examine ourselves
to have our faith strengthened, but also to identify sins and
replace them with godliness. Easier said than done. That’s
why Satan loves to get us busy. That’s why we begin to stay out
of church or get outside the means of grace. Our lives get
stale or we get in a spiritual funk. or the flesh wins out more
than the spirit. And so we need to recognize these
difficulties. As we come to the Lord’s supper
today, I hope that as you approach the Lord’s table and see before
you the bread and you see before you the cup representing Jesus’
body and Jesus’ blood, that you will remember that yes, God has
saved you from the eternal revenging wrath of Almighty God that would
be due to us for our sins if Jesus had not stepped in as our
substitute. We also need to remember that Jesus’ righteousness, his
perfect obedience is now ours. And so God looks at us and he
sees us. As he sees his son, he sees obedience. But God is also looking for fruit
in our lives. And the fruit in our lives, the
good works in our lives, the living righteously for God does
not merit our salvation or justification. But that fruit will be judged
at the last day. Remember, God says when we are
raised up and openly acknowledged and acquitted, there will be
the opening of the books and the deeds of the righteous will
be judged and we’ll be given rewards according to those deeds.
And the motivation is not to earn our salvation. That’s been
earned for us through Jesus. But the motivation is to say,
Lord, I’m called to be pure. I’m called to be righteous. I’m
called to be a fruit bearing person. and to strive after that
with the Spirit’s help, so that when the books are open, he will
say, well done, good and faithful servant. But I think another
important thing to think about that is you will be a bright
light in this dark world. God has rescued and redeemed
us, as Paul said in the early chapter of Galatians. He’s rescued
and redeemed us from this present evil age. And as you live a life
of gardening and tugging the weeds and producing fruit, not
only will there be a fragrance that the world will smell and
want to know, what is this? They will see fruit in your lives
and give glory to the Father in heaven. So let’s ask for God’s
help and blessing now. Lord, as we come to your table,
as we hear this word that we should not live like the world,
we should not live according to Satan, we should not live
according to the flesh, We can’t do this, but we thank you that
in the bread and in the cup we see your shed blood, we see your
broken body, we see that our sins were born in your body on
the tree, that we might die to sin, we might die to the flesh,
we might be killing sin so it doesn’t kill us, and that we
might live to righteousness. Lord, put into each of us a desire
to live by your spirit. Put within each of us today a
desire to have fruit-bearing lives, put within each of us
a desire to bear the fruits of righteousness so that our lives
are overfilled, overhanging with great fruit that’s beautiful
to see and pleasing in your sight, but serves as a witness to the
power of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Or we cannot do this
in our own strength. Our best efforts would end at
the door. but we pray for a lasting power
of your spirit today in each of our lives, revive our hearts,
oh Lord, that we might serve you. We do pray this with all
our hearts and pray it in the name of Jesus, the great vine
dresser, and it’s in his name we pray, amen. We want to prepare
for the Lord’s table, 259. Oh Lord, how shall I meet you? And we’ll stay seated to sing.