Walk by the Spirit
I argued from John
3:5–8 that human nature, with which all of us are born, will
not enter into the kingdom of God unless it is changed. This change is called
being born again. And what this means is that the Spirit of God creates
something new; he takes out of us the heart of stone that rebels against God,
and he puts into us a new heart which trusts God and follows his ways. Or to
put it another way, the Holy Spirit establishes himself as the new ruling
principle of our life. “That which is born of the Spirit is spirit.”
In other words, that
which is begotten by the Spirit has the nature of the Spirit, is permeated by
the character of the Spirit, is animated by the Spirit. This change is owing
wholly to the Spirit’s work of free grace, prior to any saving faith on our part.
The new birth is not caused by our faith; on the contrary, our faith is caused
by the new birth. “No one can come to the Son unless it is granted to him by
the Father” (John
6:65). Therefore, the life we have in Christ is owing wholly to the
work of God’s Spirit, and we have no ground for boasting at all. We live by the
Spirit.
Now what? Galatians
5:25 states concisely what our next step should be. “If we live
by the Spirit, let us also walk by the Spirit.” Paul is in full agreement with
Jesus that it is by the work of the Holy Spirit that we have been given new
life. “Even when we were dead through trespasses God made us alive together with
Christ . . . We are his workmanship created in
Christ Jesus” (Ephesians
2:5, 10; Colossians
2:13). Just as God once said, “Let there be light,” and there was
light, so he “has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the
glory of God in the face of Christ” (2
Corinthians 4:6).
Now Paul, in Galatians
5:25, draws an inference from how our new life in Christ began: if
it began by the Spirit, then all our subsequent life ought to be carried out by
the Spirit (see Galatians 3:1–5). If it was by the free and sovereign
power of the Spirit that our new spiritual life came into being, then the way
that new life should be lived is by that same free and sovereign power. “Walk
by the Spirit” means do what you do each day by the Spirit; live your life in
all its details from waking up in the morning until going to sleep at night by
the enabling power of the Spirit. But what does that mean, practically
speaking? How do we “walk by the Spirit”?
Let’s observe a few things in the immediate context of Galatians
5 and then bring in some other Scriptures in order to get as full an
answer to this question as we can. I’ll conclude by describing five things
involved in walking by the Spirit.
How Do We Walk by the
Spirit?
The phrase “walk by the
Spirit” occurs not only in verse 25 but also in verse 16, “But I say, walk by
the Spirit and do not gratify the desires of the flesh.” So here we see what
the opposite of walking by the Spirit is, namely, giving in to the desires of
the flesh. Remember, “flesh” is the old, ordinary human nature that does not
relish the things of God and prefers to get satisfaction from independence,
power, prestige, and worldly pleasures. When we “walk by the Spirit,” we are
not controlled by those drives. This is what verse 17 means: the flesh produces
one kind of desires, and the Spirit produces another kind, and they are opposed
to each other. Walking by the Spirit is
what we do when the desires produced by the Spirit are stronger than the
desires produced by the flesh. This means that
“walking by the Spirit” is not something we do in order to get the Spirit’s
help, but rather, just as the phrase implies, it is something we do by the
enablement of the Spirit.
“The
life we have in Christ we owe wholly to the work of God’s Spirit.”
Ultimately, all the good
inclinations or preferences or desires that we have are given by the Holy
Spirit. Apart from the Spirit we are mere flesh. And Paul said in Romans
7:18, “I know that in me, that is, in my flesh, dwells no good
thing.” Apart from the gracious influences of the Holy Spirit, none of our
inclinations or desires is holy or good, “for the mind of the flesh is hostile
to God’s law and does not submit to it because it cannot” (Romans
8:7). The new birth is the coming into our life of the Holy Spirit
to create a whole new array of desires and loves and yearnings and longings.
And when these desires are stronger than the opposing desires of the flesh,
then we are “walking by the Spirit.” For we always act according to our
strongest desires.
Therefore, “walking by
the Spirit” is something the Holy Spirit enables us to do by producing in us
strong desires that accord with God’s will. This is what God said he would do
in Ezekiel
36:26, 27:
A new heart I will give you and a new spirit I will put within
you . . . I will put my Spirit within you and cause you to walk in my statutes.
Thus when we “walk by the Spirit,” we experience the fulfillment
of this prophecy. The Holy Spirit produces in us desires for God’s way that are
stronger than our fleshly desires, and thus he causes us to walk in God’s
statutes.
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