“I say then, Walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfil the lust of the flesh, for the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh: so that ye cannot do the things that ye would.”—Galatians v. 16, 17.
The passage: Walk in the Spirit, Paul says, and you will not carry out what the flesh craves; for the flesh desires against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh, so that you cannot do the things you want to do.
When I spoke last week on “Give not that which is holy unto the dogs,” my aim was not merely to correct dangerous inferences drawn from it, or to reconcile it with “Judge not.” I wanted still more to fix in your minds that there is in each of us a holy thing and a bestial nature, and that we are most likely to hand the holy thing over to the bestial nature—in ourselves and in our brother—precisely when we see only the worse in him and refuse to credit him with the better. Those lessons are a fitting introduction to the passage I have just read, which I know of nothing more instructive, or more suited to this season.
Few would defend our translators’ rendering of the last clause of verse 17. The Greek has simply the subjunctive of ποιεῖν after ἵνα, so the natural rendering is “the things that ye will, those ye do not,” rather than “ye cannot do the things that ye would.” I mention this because I mean to reverse Paul’s order and begin from the end. There he states the paradox of our lives; in the middle clause he explains it; in the opening sentence he tells us how we may act freely and rightly in spite of it.
I. If we keep our translators’ wording, Paul would be announcing a paradox—and a hopeless one: that by some fixed necessity our acts and our wills must always be at odds, every purpose defeated in the attempt to carry it out. That would be a strange gospel. I believe his object is the opposite: to show there is no such necessity, that the anomaly can be removed—but first we must state it and bring it home to our consciences. We form grand conceptions, conceptions that seem right, that we could not narrow without giving up some principle we believe meant for us. But when these are to become acts, they turn out addled; the results bear little or no resemblance to the conception. How has this happened, exposing us to others’ ridicule and to a bitterer self-contempt? We say, “We will lower our sights, we are earthy, we will stop aspiring to the stars.” But how far down must we go? No resolution is so modest that the act will match it. We may abandon all lofty dreams and settle for what the most worldly man wants—but the same puzzle meets us there too. Selling ourselves to Mammon does not save us from unfulfilled schemes; in his kingdom, just as before, we plot much and realize little, rarely doing what we intended. It would seem the only escape is to give up willing altogether—if we could stop having purposes and hopes, we would at least be spared the pain of seeing them fail.
These remarks apply to more than good purposes. It is not only those who will noble and brave things who must mourn how little comes of their efforts. The man plotting a crime is just as often thwarted, by some outward obstacle or by something in himself he cannot explain—still he does not do what he intended. Others, even if he does not, can see he has been defeated. The king resolves to keep his slaves, yet ends up begging them to leave in haste. The prophet is hired to curse, and wants to curse, but the words that come out are blessing instead.
- That is the fact—what is the explanation? It cannot be satisfactory if it explains only why our good intentions are weak and not why our bad ones are weak too. Paul addresses both. “The flesh,” he says, “lusteth against the spirit, and the spirit against the flesh.” Two powers struggle within us; whichever wins at a given moment, the battle continues, and the weaker one still finds many ways to disturb and supplant the stronger.
Such a conflict has often been described—by mythologies giving it living form, by philosophies trying to analyze it, even to extinguish one side or broker peace. Many have called it a struggle between Reason and Appetite, where “Reason” often means little more than prudence or self-control. This does not match Paul’s account. He speaks of a Spirit and a Flesh, each with strong appetites, each restless until fed, each ready to sacrifice the other to satisfy itself. His Spirit is no cool calculator or overseer; it is fervent, aspiring, and just as far from self-contentment as its rival.
As a glutton’s flesh will endure torment rather than lose its luxuries, and a miser’s flesh will starve rather than lose his gold, so the spirit will lose itself in its hunger and thirst for righteousness. The difference between them lies in the nature of what they crave, not in how moderately they pursue it.
That a man caught between such powers should be inconsistent, that what he resolves should bear little resemblance to what he does, is hardly surprising. Suppose he lets his animal inclinations rule him habitually, feeding and stimulating them—still, at certain moments, lusts of the spirit will rise: a wish to be like some friend, to be the man his mother prayed he’d be, to be as faithful as his own dog or horse. These cross and counteract the fleshly lusts, producing faint dreams of some better state, some other home; and quite apart from any punishment that indulgence brings, these yearnings break in on the coarsest existence and make it uneasy, sharpening pain with memory of the past. Or take a man whose pleasures are mostly intellectual, proud of his superiority to mere sensual men, confident he knows just how far to indulge his appetites. A time comes when his intellectual resources feel cold and abstract; he wants something actual, and begins seeking visible, palpable pleasures. Soon he thinks the intellectual things were only means to these; the lusts of the flesh become supreme; he does not do what he once willed, nor what he wills now, since he cannot heartily enjoy what he long ago recognized as base. Or take one who has more deliberately mastered his bodily inclinations because they interfere with his wish to rule others—he will not be pulled down or made soft by any craving of his own. How long before he discovers that ruling men requires sympathizing with them; before that sympathy, denied to the many, fixes on one or two, perhaps the least worthy; before it becomes subjection, and the tyrant turns into the slave of others and of his own desires?
Once more: a man is roused to think of his soul as something wholly different from his intellect, something to be saved or lost forever. He no longer cares for ruling others; fleshly enjoyments seem insignificant. At first he dwells much on the struggle between the evil nature holding him down and the cry within him for deliverance. But gradually he settles into the condition of “a religious man.” He thinks the spirit’s lusts are satisfied, or he keeps them on a meager diet. Then the fleshly lusts, which had been overcome only by the stronger activity of their opposites, reassert themselves—and they are not content with mere imagination. They grow by what they feed on, until they occupy the man almost wholly, with only stray moments left for anything else.
I want you to see, from these examples, that Paul’s account of this struggle is not about a few special cases—it explains what is happening in all men, however different their circumstances, however unconscious they may be of any struggle, however hard they may have worked to avoid one. As long as you live among human beings on this earth, you encounter a flesh and a spirit lusting against each other, neither willing to leave the other in peace. The more each of us admits this is our condition, adapts to it, and abandons the hope of escaping the strife by some arrangement or other, the more manly and true our life becomes, and the more intelligible those otherwise bewildering events of life appear. For then the question arises: “Where do these lusts of the spirit come from? Who awakens them in me? The fleshly lusts I can trace easily enough to a natural origin—I have no right to be surprised at them in anyone. But these others—who brought them into a region where they seem strangers, sometimes tolerated exiles, sometimes troublesome intruders to be expelled, sometimes lords come to claim the ground and dispossess the old inhabitants? Lusts of the spirit, who sent you? What account can you give of yourselves?” At least this: that without them nothing that makes the world fit for human habitation would exist. No love of country, no care of children, no reverence for parents, no trust between man and man, no tenderness between man and woman. Without them the flesh would still lust, but would have only wild fruits to feed on—no beasts hunted, no fish netted, no sheep tended, no seed sown in ploughed ground. These strangers taught us every art, taught us to dream that not everything is left to chance. It seems they have more to do with our true selves, our proper manhood, than the lusts that feel so natural to us—as if we would never know what we ourselves are until we entertained them and learned something of their origin.
It is just this light that Paul, the Jew of Tarsus, claimed he could bring to the Gentiles of Asia and Europe. He said he knew where these lusts of the spirit came from: from the Spirit of God, awakened in each human being by Him, who watched to give them strength and victory over their enemies. He said the Eternal Son of God had also become the Son of Man, taken on man’s nature, wrestled with man’s enemies, claimed publicans and sinners as His Father’s children, and given them power to live as His children—as spiritual beings whom the flesh and its lusts could not separate from Him and drag back into bondage.
- So we come to Paul’s opening words, taken last: “Walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfil the lusts of the flesh.” This is not the miserable “cannot” spoken of before; it sounds like good news, full of hope. But we must look carefully, lest it deceive us as so many such words have. The man anxious about his soul’s salvation who adopts a religious course might, as we saw, surrender himself more shamefully than others to fleshly lust, precisely because he supposed it already subdued and had no idea how near it still was. How does Paul’s teaching differ from a doctrine that daily proves so ineffectual in practice?
It differs in this: he never lets anyone suppose he is safer than his neighbor from the assaults of the flesh. The lusts may change shape through life—youth’s lusts burnt out in age, the poor man’s replaced by others in the rich, the rich man’s never awakened in the poor for want of means. New circumstances redirect the lusts but do not change their essential nature. Childhood’s besetting sins often reappear before the grown man, startling him with his own likeness to his younger self; others arise from opportunities and knowledge unavailable earlier, yet bear a clear family resemblance, coming from the same source. Experience may be gained, wisdom learned from books and from other men’s failures and successes—valuable if it makes us more watchful against our fleshly lusts, but dangerous if it lulls us into thinking they are no longer there and need no watching. Least of all does “religious wisdom” offer any security, since if it is worth anything it will keep reminding us of the dangers, not remove them.
Here is one difference between Paul and those who use his language while missing his meaning. Another is that he believes there is a spirit in every man to whom he can speak, and whom he can call to rise and walk, however palsied and bedridden. His explanation is universal, and so is his message. “The flesh lusteth against the spirit” interprets a puzzle common to everyone; “Walk in the Spirit” can be said to anyone. There is no respect of persons in his Gospel, because there is none with God.
And here is the greatest difference of all. For Paul, it is not that men have souls which they must somehow save. It is that God created them to be spirits, and all His dealings with the race and with each person aim at accomplishing this, and at overthrowing the lusts within and the temptations without that conspire against it. When Paul says “Walk in the Spirit,” he means: “Be the men God would have you be. Be what God by His Spirit is continually working in you to become. Do not resist that mighty Will acting on your wills every hour; do not fight it, weakening your own will even in its most resolute moments, making it incapable of consistent action even when most impatient of hindrance. Remember always that these lusts of the spirit, which you have often tried to stifle as strange yearnings after the impossible, are gifts from the Father of your spirit, reminders of your glorious origin and high destiny, pledges that He wants you to inherit the real treasures of His Truth and Goodness.”
And then, he says, “you shall not fulfil the lusts of the flesh.” Be as intellectual, determined, or religious as you like—if that intellect, determination, or religion is something that is yours, that sets you above your neighbors, you will fulfil the lusts of the flesh; they will overpower you, and if you cast out one evil, seven worse will replace it. But to walk in the spirit is to be dependent, self-distrustful, seeking help and satisfaction in One who has everything you need. A spirit must be rising above itself; it turns devilish when it sinks into itself. That is why the spirit is rightly described as desiring, as lusting, and why communion with a higher Spirit is the only way to satisfy it. Through such communion it wins a victory over the lower lusts. God brings them to order and submission when we put ourselves in His hands, asking Him—who knows what we need—to give us that, and—who knows what is bad for us—to keep us from it.
Such a walk in the spirit must be silent, deep, unseen by others. Yet all of God’s open and public ordinances give it strength, and show it is not a solitary walk merely because it is invisible. Nothing could be a more dangerous error than to think otherwise—and God has done much, mercifully, to guard us from it. It is the slave of his own impulses, the victim of fleshly lust, who is necessarily alone, working for himself, using others as tools rather than treating them as fellows. The spirit, in its deepest exercises, is building fellowship with countless unseen and unborn others, entering their temptations, bearing their burdens—always breaking through the shell that separates each creature from the rest, seeking what is social and responsive. So those ordinances which give each of us the strongest sense of our own personal relation to God are exactly those that most declare His equal relation to all. “Child, I baptize thee with this name, in the Universal Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.” “Take and eat this bread, for Christ died for thee”—the formula of our shared participation in a death meant for the whole world.
And so, when I call this lesson about the flesh and the spirit especially a Lenten lesson, I mean that the forty days of Lent explain the other three hundred and sixty-five, because I know you will spend this Lent, like every other, not in closets or hermitages but amid the noise of the world, in business and party conflict. There you will be taught—will certainly be taught—that Paul was not describing a dream when he spoke of flesh warring against spirit. That half of the lesson you will learn by heart, if you have not already; every day among your fellow-men, of whatever class or trade, will show you how much in them is fleshly, ignoble, selfish, and how easily made more so by your own arts and appeals. But will you not also believe the other half—that in every poor voter at an English election there dwells a spirit for which the Son of God gave His life, that it might not be sold for corruption and falsehood, that it might be capable of true desires, made like His Father and not the father of lies? Will you not believe that any candidate who degrades that spirit—making it more insincere through canting phrases, or stirring fleshly lusts to smother the higher ones—must reap a just penalty in the loss of whatever was sincere in himself, besides all the harm he stores up for his country through the habits he cultivates in rulers and ruled alike? Is it wrong for me to say this if these are not my own particular temptations, when there are others just as great to which I may yield? Then warn me of mine as plainly; tell me how they have injured you, lowered your standard, furnished excuses for your own failures. Let us not think it merciful to withhold solemn warning against wrongdoing merely because we must not judge the wrongdoer. Let us believe the more our consciences are searched, the better for us—just as the All-Merciful deals with us, as the Judge of all the earth prepares us so that we need not be ashamed to stand before Him. He shows us how strong the lusts of the flesh are in us so that we may ask Him to keep alive, and fulfill, the higher lusts. He gives us repentance for having lived as mere higher animals, born to eat and drink and die, so that we may walk in the spirit and claim, for ourselves and for all, that higher life which is ours—if only, grown to manhood, we remember what we were told as children: that we are members of Christ and heirs of the kingdom of Heaven.