The Works of the Flesh

So, we've been having fun talking about the battle that goes on between the Holy Spirit who indwells us and the desires of the sin nature, the works of the flesh. And it's really kind of interesting because it describes the battle, I think, that goes on within believers. And like we said last week, that if you don't have this battle, you're probably not a believer because you don't have the Spirit of Christ in you who's contending against the flesh. If you're just a non-believer, your flesh rules and reigns all the time. So we're going to talk about the precise works of the flesh, which we call them sins today. And notice that they're works. I was always fascinated by in Romans where it says that you have to work at sin. It just doesn't, you know, we think, well, I just sort of fall into it. No, I don't. I work at it. And the reward is death. I work really hard to die.

Grace of God is given freely and I can live by grace. So I think Paul proposes enumerating these enumerating these various manifestations of sin nature, to enforce the exhortation way back in verse 13, when he says, For brethren, you have been called to liberty, only use not your liberty for the occasion for the flesh. We're free. We've been called to freedom.

But you can't use this freedom to let your flesh do whatever it wants to do. You didn't get free so that you could be as a friend of mine would say, so that you could be an idiot. So the effect that the Galatian Christians are not to use, to the effect that Galatian Christians aren't to use their liberty from the law, which, think about that, as a base of operation of which to cater to the flesh, but instead are to rule their lives by love. I can give you a personal example of that.

I was one of those guys that I went to a Jesuit boarding high school, right? We went to class six days a week. It was very strict. We went to bed at a certain time. It had to be quiet. You got up at a certain time. Had to go to mass. Had to do all of this stuff, you know. It was like a military academy. And then I came to college. And all of those restrictions were off. Well, I really understood what it meant to be free from the law. It took me a few months in college to figure out, wait a minute, I don't have this freedom so I can do whatever I want and be an idiot. I have to knuckle down and have some discipline. But you find in your life if you're a Jew or you're under some sort of legal system and grace enters into your life, you really think initially, oh, I can just do what I want to do. No, you can't.

Because we are designed and built by God to be controlled either by Him or in the case of all those who are sons of Adam, by the flesh. This catalog of sins is designed, the layout for the persons who are reading this to be a repellent and to cause them to turn away from sin. I notice when you start talking about sins, people don't want to talk very long about them. Because this catalog kind of, you know, what I ought to do is have you all raise your hands and when we hit one of the sins that applies to you, you can put your hand down.

So the works of the flesh speak of the desires and he has in mind the inner emotions of the soul, the natural tendency of men in their fallen estate towards evil things and towards things that are forbidden. That's what he's going through this for. So, here, beginning in 19, he describes a display of the inner motions of sin. So, a man's character is manifested by his works, the deeds of the flesh. That comes from Proverbs 23, 7. As a man thinks in his heart, so is he.

If you've only got one nature, and that nature is the flesh, that's how you think, and that's how you function. I think it's important for us to understand that the source of who we are determines how we act. If we only have the flesh, we only have that source, then we're going to act out of that source. But if you have the Spirit of Christ in you, your new source, and as you grow in the knowledge and grace of the Lord Jesus, we will begin to act more and more out of that source. And Roger next week is going to talk about, or two weeks from now, the fruit of the Spirit. So a man can be no better outwardly than he is inwardly. He can't be. It's impossible. Moreover, no person can hide your real self We kind of all know each other. If someone says to me, well, do you know so-and-so in the church? Yeah.

Well, what are they like? Well, I have an opinion about them. Just like you have an opinion about me. Why? Because you know me a little bit. You watch my behavior patterns. You know that I'm either this or that, or I do this or I don't do that, and I think this way or I don't think that way. Observing one another's behavior will tell you a lot about the source they come from.

I can hide my desires for a time, but my works are manifest. They're obvious. They're easily recognized, I think, just by observation. So it isn't difficult to distinguish between a man who fulfills the desires of the flesh and a man who is being led by the Spirit. On Sunday you get to be led by the Spirit, but the rest of the week you get to be fleshly? I don't think so.

If you're walking by grace and you come up under this pool of flesh and you stick your little toe in, you're in. You're in. You might as well jump right in, because that's where you're going. Now the word manifest means open, evident. Paul says this is evident. Everyone may see, hence we're well known. And really, to be honest with you, a lot of us are well known by our sins. I hate to say that, but we are. Some of us, every once in a while, Christ leaks out of us and we're well known by the life of Christ being manifested.

And I'm thinking about Courtney. I looked over at him and he's smiling at me. But Paul's appealing to common knowledge here. And as if he says to the Galatians, look, you have a clearly defined standard. by which to decide whether you're going to be led by the Holy Spirit or by the flesh.

Each is known by its particular or peculiar works and fruits. The word works here is the word ergon, which means it's referring to the deeds rather than the products of the evil nature, it's just the deeds of them. An interesting word, which, It's relative and an indefinite pronoun, and combined with the one word, the combination having a quality of a function. That is, all the works of the flesh are not here enumerated. There's a lot more than what we're going to talk about today. But enough of them are here that the reader may be able to form an estimate of its character.

First one's immorality. What I find interesting about immorality is that we're studying, on Wednesday night, Genesis. And sexual immorality gets everybody in the Old Testament in trouble. Every single one of them. And it isn't... I mean, there's a lot of reasons why, but I find it interesting that there's all kinds of incest and fornication and all this stuff that goes on in the Old Testament, and the consequences from that go on for centuries. You know, we were just studying Lot and his two daughters, and Lot gets both of his daughters pregnant because the daughters got him drunk. And both of them, the offsprings, fostered a whole nation of people that caused Israel more heat and headaches than they ever wanted, just because of one act. So sexual immorality, like adultery, is an illicit sex between two married people. Now it's interesting that in the Greek, adultery isn't there, but fornication is there, and it talks about just general sexual immorality.

What I find interesting today, I occasionally have the opportunity to talk to young couples that are thinking about getting married, and one couple came to me one time, They were living together. And I said, well, are you both Christians? Yeah, well, you shouldn't be living together. And you know what they said to me? Well, that's what we do now. I said, that's what who does now? And when is now?

The advice that I give young people about fornication is really easy advice. If you're going to get married, and you plan on living together for the rest of your life, And today, as a young person, you're living together and fornicating. Whenever you have a problem in your life, how do you solve it? You have sex, right? But if you get married and you haven't worked out any problems other than that way, you're in trouble. Because you need to learn how to work out circumstances without sex being the center of it.

And the example is this. Freshman year in college, I was at my first psych class. By the way, if you ever take your first psych class, you think you got every disease they talk about. But this guy said, here's how it goes with sex, guys. And this is a room full of 18 year old men. Right.

If you get married and every time you have sex, you put a marble in the jar. And that's your first anniversary. Every time you have sex after that, you take a marble. I'll take you five years to empty the jar. That shows you how important sex isn't for a long-term relationship. And that makes a lot of sense to me. If you're going to get married and you have a sexual relationship, that's the only thing you know how to solve problems with. That's got to stop so you can learn to get along and deal with issues by depending on the Lord and not depending on your sexual behavior. Fornication is just, it's a foregone conclusion that it's just selfish, is really what it is. But like the guy said to me, he said, well that's what we do today.

How solemn are these words of the Lord when he says in Matthew 5.28, But I say to you that whoever looks on a woman and lusts after her has already committed adultery with her in his heart."

So it isn't only the act. It's the desire to do the act. And notice the verses we've been going through that the flesh has strong desires against the spirit and the spirit has strong desires against the flesh. so that we can't do what we would like to do. We want to walk in the Spirit. But there's this war going on. Do you ever think about if it's the Holy Spirit with strong desires against the flesh, and the flesh with strong desires against the Spirit, and I asked this last week, well, where are you?

Are you the Spirit? Are you the flesh? You're not either one of those. So what you have is you have these two really strong natures that are trying to express themselves through you, one from sin and the other through the life of the Lord Jesus. You're the one who has to allow either one of those to manifest through you. The reason for the catalog of sins here is to show you, if you're not really sure, well, if you're involved in a sexual relationship and you're not married, you can bet that that's probably the flesh.

The next one is just uncleanness. It's from the word, I can't pronounce Greek words, but it's used in the New Testament as sensual impurity, whether it's secret or open. It's a thought process. Maybe pornography fits here. Pornography is a big problem in our society today and it's destroying families. It's any thought, word or deed of impurity or lewdness.

And any of you who, especially men who are on the web at all, the incursion of pornography is everywhere. One click and you're there. One click and you're there. So it's really, not only is there a desire, but the society is after you too. The web is a wonderful tool, but it's also a deadly tool.

The next one is lasciviousness, which means usually public sensuality. It's a thought process precedes the act. It refers to a lawless disrespect, excessive impulses. It speaks of one who acknowledges no restraints. We all know people like that. Who dares whatever his whim or wanton moodiness may suggest. It refers to one who has an insolent contempt for public opinion and shameless, outrageous public decency. We see that all the time in the news today. It's depravity is another word that would fit with this word. It's one who acts without regard or restraint.

They're brutish, they're lustful, they're desirous, they're lascivious. Webster, as Courtney likes to say, is a good source of spiritual information, describes it as looseness, irregular indulgence of animal desires. It's tragic, nevertheless true, that human beings are devoted to the gratification of their senses or the indulgence of lewd and voluptuous appetite. So it doesn't necessarily have to do with sexual desires, it can be a lot of things. Anything that you have a desire for that's not of the Lord is lascivious. And like I said before, the word adultery isn't in most Greek texts. So this verse, to expand this verse, now the works of the flesh are all well known, well known. Works of such a nature as for example fornication, uncleanness, and lasciviousness can be translated wantonness. Okay, verse 20 now.

Idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, outbursts of anger, disputes, dissensions, factions. I think we're probably more familiar with these too. These are kind of maybe religious passions, religious desires. So we start with idolatry. Idolatry is really interesting.

It's a word which denotes worship of an image, or worship of a god. It's the image representing the god. I come out of Catholicism. You know, those churches are full of images, and you pray to all these saints. It's idolatry, really. putting things, putting seen things before the unseen God to serve or worship something that you can see rather than worship by faith. In a strict sense, idolatry is the worship of a deity in a visible form. It's interesting how man has to always create these icons of who they worship.

And Moses goes up to the mountain, what's the first thing that the rest of them do? They start melting down the jewelry so they can build a calf that they can worship to. It's a symbol. You worship the symbol rather than substance. It's usually false. Golden calves, fetishes, all that kind of thing. I remember talking to a guy one time and he said, Idolatry is the first commandment. I'm the Lord thy God and I won't have false gods before me. And the question was, who's the false god? He said, raise your hand. You're the false god.

And that's really right. I idolize myself. I'm the idol. I care about me. It's all about me, myself and I. And God, in His wisdom, lays out the Ten Commandments, and the very first one, He takes care of my idol, which is me. We should also be connected with another kind of idolatry, which is just as destructive. It's the little gods, the little ones, which regulates the Lord Jesus Christ to a secondary place in a believer's life. Now, we don't think much about this, but I see this everywhere.

It may be my car. It may be my ambition. It might be my position in the society or where I am in the herd, so to speak. It may be just pleasure itself. That's my idol. It may be politics. It may be just people. I'm a people person. It may be loved ones or an associate. Whatever it is, you place your affections before the Lord and it becomes the object that you adore. Whatever it is. My dad used to tell me, you know, you've got to try to get as many of those pictures of presidents as you can in your life. I said, well, where are the pictures? He said, they're on the bills. The point is, what's our first consideration? Are we so utterly abandoned to the lover of your soul that he receives his first consideration in your life?

In other words, is the Lord Jesus the center of your life? If he's not, then you can be described as carnal. I'm an idolatrous Christian. One of the great things about spiritual growth and intimacy with Christ is designed by God to make Christ the most important thing to you.

Have you ever thought about this concept that it's possible that I could love the Lord Jesus more than I love sinning? I like sinning, you know, and no one's ever forced me to sin. I've done every one of them because I wanted to. Could I love the Lord Jesus more? Could He make Himself so dear to me that I would love Him more than I would to satisfy my own gratification, gratify my own desires? Answer, yes.

That's what the Spirit is up to. That's what He's doing in the process of revealing Christ to us as believers. that it isn't a law system, it's a love system, it's a grace system. I love the Lord Jesus and I want to do anything in any manner that would offend Him in any way, and I don't care what it is.

The next one is witchcraft. The Greek word here is pharmakia, which speaks in general of drug use. Whether it's by a physician, or harmfully by someone who proposes it to inflict injury. It's almost a sense of poisoning. Aristotle made this point. He talked about a guy named Polybius. He used the word of witchcraft since witches use drugs. Witchcraft, the use of drugs and sorcery. So, we have an increasingly drug-addicted society, and it causes all kinds of problems, and the Word of God calls it witchcraft. Witchcraft.

In Isaiah 47-9, it's a synonym of the word epiode, which means enchantment. were enchanted by drugs and I would say alcohol too. It's always used in a bad sense. The Egyptians were involved in this kind of thing all the time and as you study the Old Testament you find out that the Canaanites, the Babylonians, all of these folks somehow were tied into drug use. How about the American Indians? Society seemed to go this way into some sort of use that, what's the word I'm looking for, that enchants me.

In Revelation 9.21, the word says, and they did not repent of their murders, nor of their sorcerers, nor of their immorality, nor of their thefts." Notice it uses the word sorcerers here, which means they're drugs. In the present passage, the references to witchcraft, sorcery, magic arts, without special reference actually to drugs. It's dealing with the practice of invoking the spirits to produce results which are apparently supernatural as witchcraft. Now you know we talk about, gee, the church is safe from all this kind of thing. How many of you know about spiritual formation? It's been in the church now maybe 15 years, maybe longer than that.

But basically it's a system that some guys came up with, one of them being an icon at Westmont College in Santa Barbara, and the other guy is actually from Denver, where they have used Eastern mysticism as a spiritual program. And here's how they sell it. Would you like to be more spiritual than you are today? And the answer is, who wouldn't? Well, if you want to, then we have a method, and it's called spiritual formation. And it comes from a guy, a Catholic priest, who had this thing called Centering Prayer, Thomas Merton.

And basically what it is is transcendental meditation with holy water on it. That's really what it is. You empty your mind, and you pray that a spirit will come and invade you and make you spiritual. Sound familiar? That's spiritual formation. That's basically what it is. And the reason it sells is because we haven't taught the truth. We haven't taught who you are in Christ, what you have as a son of God, and where you're placed in the heavenlies in Christ.

And so there's this desire within the church to be more spiritual than you are today. The idea is not to be more spiritual. The idea is to behold the glory of the Lord more, to be more and more conformed to His image, that He becomes the object of your life. I remember years and years ago, Miles Stanford said to a group of guys one time, he said, if you are focused only on your own spiritual growth, you haven't figured it out yet. So, me being inquisitive, I said, what do you mean? He said, Christ is your life, not your spiritual growth. Spiritual growth is important, but there's no substitute for the person of Christ. That made a lot of sense to me. It made an awful lot of sense to me. Now, people today, under this heading sometimes, will go to teacup readers, psalmist, spiritualist, fortune tellers, people like that all come under this heading.

You ever met a Christian who wouldn't walk under a ladder? You ever met a Christian who wouldn't open up an umbrella in their house? Or they carry rabbit's feet around with them, or they wish you luck? Here's the one that gets me. Or they cross their fingers? They make decisions based on whether a black cat walked across in front of them or not? Here's another interesting one. You ever met a Christian that had little icons in the corners of their kitchen? Their little angels to keep the demons out of their kitchen?

We think, oh, we're all immune from that kind of thing. No, we're not. No, we're not. Any child of God who has to trust luck or anything like that while refusing to trust His Heavenly Father is guilty of this carnality. It's just guilty before God of minding the things of the flesh. If God isn't in charge of my life and your life, if He isn't absolutely sovereign, and we have to depend on luck, then we've missed it. We've totally missed it.

This next group is what I would call destructive passions. Hatred is the first one. And all it really means is the opposite of love. It speaks of enmity, hostility, in any form, whatever form it takes. The word is plural in the Greek. It's not singular. It's hatreds. It means antipathy or aversion or abhorrence. To hate is to dislike and detest another person.

One of the problems I see within the body of believers is that if Christian A commits a sin, Christian B doesn't like Christian A because Christian A committed that sin. We're called to hate the sin but love the sinner. We love the sinner. You can't identify a believer with the sin they commit. Yeah, you need to restore such a one to the Lord Jesus, but we have a tendency to hook the sin onto the sinner and hate them both.

And we resent that, and we get all upset about that because so-and-so doesn't do what I think he ought to do. We put some sort of level of behavior on them and we condemn the behavior and the person. That's part of what hatred is. A Christian who is horrified by another sin of adultery, fornication, idolatry and cleanness often nurtures a dislike against that Christian.

It's a really important point for us as believers to understand. The believer is not to be hated, he's to be loved. The Lord Jesus loves them. He gave his life for them. The sin is a whole other thing. Sin is to be hated. The believer is as guilty of manifesting the deeds of the flesh as an adulterer or an idolater. The thing is that God doesn't distinguish or differentiate between the deeds of the flesh They are related to each other and are contrary to the law of love and devotion to God. The point is this. God saved us from our sins. He separated us positionally from our sin nature. He loves us as persons. Sometimes He doesn't love what we do, but He loves us.

And that's an important distinction. We need to know that distinction. Variances or contentions. strife, fighting, discord, quarreling, wrangling. Again, believers are guilty before God as some of the choicest servants of the Lord can be charged with causing discord and dissension.

How do you cause discord and dissension within a body of believers? How do you do that? Usually it's because you don't like how they act, or like what they do, or they somehow don't fit up to your standard. And so you start to talk about them, or you don't like them. It's a really interesting thing, and I think this, or maybe I don't like their doctrine.

They just didn't quite get all the boxes checked. They left two unchecked, and boy, you've got to get those checked. I can remember back in the days as a young believer, I can remember going to Bible study at Bob Eccles' house, and there were a couple of ladies there that, boy, if you didn't check all the boxes, you heard about it. And they would jump you, you know, well, you should have said. And I used to think, do they love me? I don't think so. I don't think they do. I better get the doctrine right, because if I don't get it right, they're not going to love me. So, I sin nature civil, I'm not going to love them either then.

The next one is emulations or jealousies, and it comes from the word zealos. The unfriendly feeling excited by another's possession of goods, to envy be competitive or be a rival to. Pull into that parking lot with a Mercedes Benz someday and see how much envy there is in this body of believers. Or how about a motorcycle? It's really interesting how jealous we are that sin nature can be jealous of somebody else's possessions.

I started a thing years ago, which I probably am totally guilty of this, because Vern was an engineer, right? And Courtney's an engineer. And they look like engineers. And you can tell they're engineers just by being around them. But their daughter is stylish.

So I thought, I'm going to get as stylish and loud as I possibly can just to show him off. I'm confessing my sins in front of you. I shouldn't do that. I was hoping to make him jealous. Of course, he never did get jealous. Do you strive to be equal or surpass in achievement your Christian brother? You know, I want to make more money than you. dress better than you, I want to be better at some athletic function than you are, I go places that you don't go, I know people that you don't know, that kind of thing.

The next one is wrath. Thumos. It refers to a passionate outburst of anger and hostile feelings. Heated outbursts of anger. Fierceness, outbursts of wrath. It means violent anger, vehement exasperation, raging resentment. We have a new term in our society for these kind of people. You know what we call them? Toxic. Can't be around that person, they're toxic. If you scratch them, they're going to blow up. I don't want to be in their line of fire when they go off.

Believers. These manifestations of the flesh are believers. You know, you didn't think that when you became a Christian your flesh somehow got better than the person who's not a believer sitting next to you. No, it's the same. So too often we have spent this, seen this prisoner break forth within and angrily attack another believer. We've all seen it here. We've all seen it here.

The next one is strife. self-seeking selfishness, factionalism, the existence of or conflict between groups within a larger group. Not a few pastors must take valuable time to refer to a contest for superiority between two of the brethren, each of whom claims superior spirituality.

But it's the flesh. You know, you see that in bodies of believers, in environments where you are, by grace, growing in the knowledge and grace of the Lord Jesus, and you've learned identification, position and condition. You know grace. You know some of these things that your Christians in your block don't know. Well, you're superior. you know so much more than they do.

So you can create strife rather than love one another. Seditions, I just noticed the time so I will speed this up. Seditions again have to do with disputes, subversion, stuff like that. It's cause is commonly known as cause church splits. We all know about church splits. The next one is heresies.

It stems from the act of taking or choosing. It means to that which is chosen, you decide that your doctrine or your whatever is better. And so what do you do? You create a schism. And it subverts the faith of everybody because the focus goes off of the Lord Jesus and on the contention. So, an expanded translation, idolatry, witchcraft, enmity, strife, jealousies, angers, self-seeking, divisions and factions. Envies. Envies. It's just a desire to have what somebody else has. I wish I had your car. I wish I had your position. I envy and I waste time and I corrupt because of that.

This is a very common sin, a very common sin. And the last one I have here is murders. And murders isn't really in this, but the manuscript shows, and some of them it is, it's just unlawful intentional killing of a human being by another human being. being of sound mind.

But in 1 John 3.15 and 1 John 2.11, whoever hates his brother is a murderer. But he who hates his brother is in darkness and walks in darkness. I have said this a thousand times. Have you ever murdered somebody in your mind? I have. Someone did me wrong. And I spent half the night not sleeping, figuring out, oh I wish they would. Die.

No. So, the last group are drunkenness and revelings. Drunkenness is just to be intoxicated with strong drink. Boy, there's a lot of drunkenness in Genesis. People are getting drunk in there all the time. The first thing that Noah does is get drunk. I mean, it's all over the place. So it just means indulgence of alcohol or something that causes you to, like a pharma-kia does.

And reveling has to do with carousing, engaging in loose, boisterous behavior. Don't you find it interesting that if I am, let's say, a reveler or a carouser, I'm going to go on a campaign to recruit some of you to come with me. It's no fun if you're doing it alone. We all try to recruit people to help us sin. We do. It's just the way that the old man works.

So, an expanded translation is envy, murder, drunkenness, rivalries, and the like. And the last part is, I tell you beforehand, as I told you in times past, that those who practice such things aren't going to inherit the kingdom of God. The interesting word here for practice means that this is something maybe a believer, a non-believer, does duratively all the time. They're always acting like this. Even though they may show up at church on Sunday, they practice these things. They're part of what they do all the time, and they're actually known by that.

If the Word of God bases its estimation on a person's character, not upon his infrequent use of sinning, but upon habitual ones, then what do we do? Do we make a judgment about them that, oh, they're not going to inherit the Kingdom of God? And oh, by the way, do you want to inherit the Kingdom of God? Is that what you're after, is to inherit the Kingdom of God? as believers, are we kingdom oriented and want to be inheritors, and that we better clean up our act or we're not going to inherit? That's the great secret of completed work of Christ on the cross. We are sons. We are inheritors. And as we grow and find out about who we are, where we are and what we have, this practice won't be who we are. But if even with that, if the practice continues, then there has to be a discussion.

Do you really belong to Christ or don't you? Because if you only have one source animating your behavior, and it's the flesh, what about the Holy Spirit of God? To the point where Romans 8, 5, for those who are according to the flesh, they set their minds on things of the flesh. If you're from the flesh, you pay attention to the flesh. If you're from that, that's what you deal with.

So, I would say this, no matter how you start as a believer, and no matter what the trials and suffering you go through and the sins you commit during your life, the Spirit of God is more powerful than your sin nature. And He will bring you along to the point that you will begin to function and walk in the Spirit, and you won't fulfill the desires of the flesh.

You won't do it. because of Him. Not because you got real smart or you have a lot of discipline. It's because of Him. And there'll never be a question about who we are as believers. So I think that Paul is very smart here to lay out these sins, to show believers, well, if you're going to walk in the flesh, this is what you get. You don't get one or two, you get them all. And these desires are really strong. But the Spirit of God's job is to apply the cross of Christ to that sin nature so that the life of the Lord Jesus can be manifested not only to you, but through you.

Let's close. Dear Father, how we thank you for your word. How we thank you how careful you are to cause us to behold the glory of your dear Son, the Lord Jesus. We recognize that Without Him, we wouldn't grow. Without the circumstance He creates in our life, we wouldn't value the Lord Jesus like you value Him. Thank you. We pray in your Son's precious name. Amen.