Fellowship Church Messages
9/1/24 - Galatians 5:24-25 - "Dead And Alive"
We pray with Me, Heavenly Father, we thank You for today, we thank You for what we celebrate this weekend and that is all the things that we have to be grateful for from You. We thank You that You always take care of our needs, that Jesus promised us that we don't need to worry about anything, You already know our needs before we even ask You to grant them. We thank You for always watching over us, for protecting us, for providing for us. And we thank You for safeguarding our souls, sealing them with the Holy Spirit so that we know where we'll be and who we'll be with when all is said and done. We thank You for all the hope and promises that You give to us in Your Word. I pray that Your Spirit would go forth, work in our minds and our hearts as we hear from Your Word this morning and I pray all these things in Jesus' name, Amen. Well here we are on Labor Day, notice the background of the PowerPoint changed, it's now got a fall background on there now, it's an official U.S. holiday, yes, but it's also the unofficial end of what and beginning of what? I already gave you a big hint there, end of summer and beginning of fall. It's also the very first day of the month. It just so happens to be today that we traditionally start associating with the fall, September 1st. Today we recognize one season passing into the next season. In a sense, summer is dying and turning into the fall. We've all seen renditions of old wanted posters where the famous phrase is written "dead or alive" and from what I can find the last official wanted "dead or alive" poster was issued for Al Capone in 1929 following the deadly St. Valentine's Day massacre and that was the last time one of these was put up. The phrase on the poster, as most understand it today, is very misleading though. The government was not issuing an all out blanket immunity on what would legally be murder of the suspect. But the phrase "dead or alive" meant on a poster like this was ideally arrest and prosecution to the fullest extent of the law. If the suspect resisted a citizen's arrest and was killed during the process of arrest, then the citizen making the arrest was not held guilty of murder. You see the big difference there. But one couldn't see this kind of poster, just go grab a gun and lie in wait to kill the suspect in cold blood. They had to be legitimately attempting arrest. But God wants us to see this phrase "dead or alive" as "dead and alive". What in the world does he mean by this? One cannot both be dead and alive at the same time, right? It's impossible. So what does that mean? What does that look like and how does it change our everyday lives? The modification of another's quote, if you stopped anyone on the street and asked them, what is a Christian? They would probably answer someone who believes in Jesus. Maybe they'd go so far as to say someone that believes that Jesus died on the cross for their sin. Most people know enough about Christianity to know that. And if you stop that same person on the street and ask them, how does a Christian then live? That person may say things like, oh, by being a good person, showing love to other people. And here's a question. How is that answer any different than if you ask the same person, how should any person anywhere live? It's because the world today cannot clearly differentiate how a Christian lives differently than everyone else. So what should make everyday life different for the believer in Jesus as opposed to the rest of the world? The basis for the entire way a believer is to filter and process everything through as a child of God and a follower of Jesus is this. So if you brought your Bible with you today, please turn to Galatians chapter 5. We're going to be picking up in verse 24. If you didn't bring your Bible with you, that's okay, there should be one located in the pew in front of you. Please also turn to Galatians chapter 5 verse 24 or look this up on your favorite Bible app on your smartphone. This is what we read. Now those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. Now if you're as you read that, jump up to the couple of verses right before verse 24 there. So what immediately precedes this, the famous list of the fruits of the spirit, right? Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. These are the qualities, the characteristics of God that should be being grown in us by the Holy Spirit. However, that's not all of what the spirit grows in us. In other words, this list of the fruits of the spirit in chapter 5 verses 22 through 23 is not exhaustive. There is a whole way of life that God is transforming us into and that is processing everything in life in a new way and that is through the Holy Spirit's eyes. We are not to see ourselves the same way as we were before committing our lives to God through Jesus. We need to see our lives as something completely new. See that's where a lot of believers in Jesus get stuck. They don't see themselves as completely new. They still see themselves as so and so with the way they see things, the way they respond to things and the way they process through things. But only now with a little Jesus and a little Bible and a little church sprinkled in. This is an incredible truth we must replace that with. If there is going to be any growth, any testimony for Jesus and transformation, you are an entirely new person now. You are not the same anymore. You should not see yourself as the same anymore. You have been made new, your worldview, your outlook, your foundation, your strength. It's all new. I love this description of this exchange from 2 Corinthians. At one time, we thought of Christ merely from a human point of view. How differently we know Him now. This means that anyone who belongs to Christ has become a new person. The old life, that's just God, that's disappeared, a new life has begun. See, before, the only way we could process things, before we came to God in repentance of our sins and taking Jesus as Savior of those sins and making Him the King over the rest of our lives, before we did that, the only way we could process things or accomplish anything was through who, ourselves. That's it. It was through a vessel that while endowed with intelligence and skills could only answer to its selfishness and could only answer to the world and what the world held dear. That didn't mean we were stupid. It only meant that we were selfish. We only wanted to do what made us feel good on the inside, and guess what? That includes all the nice things we did for others. Simply being nice is not what being a follower of Jesus is all about. We know this. Selfish people are nice, too. Selfish people still give lots of money to different charities. People who see nothing wrong with themselves go and build wells in impoverished nations. See, a lot of followers of Jesus strip what has happened with them, theologically, from their lives, and just trying to live as a believer by being nice, doing nice things, and trying not to do bad things. What a lot of believers do is that they unplug and disconnect the power of the Holy Spirit's transformation of their entire way of life and replace it with resorting back to their previous way of doing things and seeing things. But here's the glaring problem with that. That whole way of doing things and seeing things, what did we just read? Now those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh, who we once were, with its passions and desires. So what is the glaring problem with that way of thinking, that way of living? That whole way of doing things and seeing things is dead. It's supposed to be dead. As Paul says here in verse 24, it's already been crucified with Jesus when we were pented of our sins and selfishness and surrendered ourselves to God through Jesus. It's already dead, and yet so many of us don't get that. We haven't embraced it. We haven't made it our way of life. Instead what do we do? We try to dig it back up again. Why? Because we're scared. We're scared of going through life any other way. The world has tricked us into thinking that the way it does things and the way we did things our entire lives is the only way to do things. But all of that has been crucified with Jesus already. It's been put to death. What did we read? It's in past tense, crucified. It's in past tense. It's a done deal. If God put something to death, why should we dig it back up from the grave? Put some new clothes on it and say this is my new life in Christ. That might make for a scary Halloween decoration, but that doesn't make any sense for our lives. If we are going to live in the Holy Spirit's power, we must leave what's dead dead. If you think about it, that's an incredible revelation that God has given to us, isn't it? God did not send his son into the world to take fallen human beings and give them some nice life adages so they could become better people. There's nothing different about that from anything else. Everyone from Aristotle to Confucius to Buddha to Muhammad has done that. No, God took it infinitely further than that and had his son be crucified and put to death. Not to stay dead as with every other so-called good teacher, but be raised to life after that. That wasn't for his own good, that was for ours. That resurrected life introduced God's power into the human condition. It put to death the power of the fallen human condition, including its sin, and replaced it with the power of the resurrection. Paul describes this truth elsewhere in his letter to the Roman believers in Jesus. Here's what has already happened when we repent of our sin. We know that our old sinful selves were crucified with Christ so that sin might lose its power in our lives. We are no longer slaves to sin. What Paul is referring to here in Romans is the entire old sinful self, the whole person. We made decisions based on our pride, selfishness, fear, and worry. That's how we made our decisions, that sin. But Paul explains further in Romans 6, 11. So you also should consider yourselves to be dead to the power of sin and alive to God through Christ Jesus. The word for consider in the Greek is a term meaning to compute, to calculate, or to deliberately make a decision based on the facts one has. In other words, we have been shown and we have been given the freedom to not make decisions based on the factors of the world anymore. We've been freed from that. What we are to base our decisions on now is not pride, not selfishness, not fear, and not worry. That whole outlook on life has been put to death. It is no longer available to base decisions on anymore. Who else here listens to specific songs by way of someone else uploading it to YouTube with the lyrics? I cannot be the only one here. All right. All right. A few brave souls to raise their hands here. And YouTube will allow it as long as you put some kind of disclaimer that you don't own the copyrights of the song, right? But if you remember, it didn't used to be that way. At one point, YouTube didn't allow any copyrighted material that wasn't your work to be uploaded by the average person. You would search for a song and click on a video and a window would pop up instead saying that that video was no longer available. No matter how much I wished it to not be that way, that video was removed from YouTube's server never to be accessed by anyone, at least in the States. Ever again, it was gone. You couldn't access it in the same way our spiritual eyes have now been opened. The way we used to do things are not the way it's supposed to be anymore. That's gone, never to be accessed again. We have been given the freedom of something completely new, and that is to base our decisions on the fact that who we were before has been put to death. That has no power over us anymore. We have been made new. There's one biblical scholar put it, "Believers already died with Christ, but they must consider themselves dead." That's what Paul elaborates on here in Galatians 5-24. Believers in Jesus must understand and see and know that they have already been put to death at their conversion. And because of that, that carries over to how they see the sinful passions and desires that war against their new life in the Spirit, in the Holy Spirit. As Paul speaks about earlier in Galatians, we are still in this war of the Spirit, set against our selfishness, and our selfishness set against the Spirit. While Paul goes on here in this verse to reveal that the sides are not equal in that war, it's not an equal tug of war here. One side is already lost. One side, the selfish side in the believer, has already died. Good to know. Take any war from history, knowing who won and who lost. As an American, would you join the British army during the American Revolution? No. They lost. As an American, would you knowingly then join the Axis powers during World War II? No. They lost. That would be pointless. Would you knowingly join the 49ers in this past season's Super Bowl? No. They lost. In the same way, Paul describes this war between the Spirit and the flesh, or our old self, but then points out that the flesh is already lost. It's not an equal war. It's already been put to death in the believer's life. As such, believers in Jesus must base their decisions on knowing their selfishness and the power of that selfishness has already lost, has already been put to death. That side will never bring satisfaction, never bring fulfillment, and never bring life. It's dead. No believer should ever think that the side of selfishness, sin, and pride, could ever bring anything other than that, other than death and powerlessness. A lot of people think that God is this killjoy square, who doesn't want anyone to have any fun, but that's not the way to look at things at all. In fact, that's a very immature way of looking at things. The spiritual reality is that there is this unseen spiritual war going on. God has put to death the world, God has put to death the power of its prince of darkness, lowercase g God of this world, and he has already put to death our selfishness and sin that aligns itself right along with that. He has given, oppositely, new life, new freedom, and new victory to those who identify themselves with Christ's death and resurrection. Who when they go outside for a run or do a bunch of yard work or go to the gym and get all sweaty, after they take a shower and get out, they put those sweaty, stinky, most likely crusty clothes back on? That's disgusting, right? Me and me just describing it, you're like, why is he talking about this? That's the point, that's disgusting. God is not a killjoy, he knows what he's done for us, and it makes us much sense to base our worldview and life on the world and all of its facets on how we used to be as it does, it makes us much sense as it does to put the sweaty, stinky clothes back on. See everything in your life as a new creation, resurrected, risen to new life, to process, see, do, and handle everything newly. That's freedom, and that's life. That's peace, and that's joy. That's being both dead and alive. So what does that mean? We talked a lot about the dead aspect of that phrase, dead and alive. It means this, let's go to verse 25 now. If we live by the Spirit, let us also walk by the Spirit. Paul says, what's happened inside of you is not disconnected from the rest of you. If you have been made alive, that is, if you have been given life as a replacement for the flesh, the selfishness, sin, and pride that has already been put to death, that must be seen in our everyday decisions in our everyday life. Do we make our decisions, and we all have to ask ourselves these honest questions, do we make our everyday decisions based on fear or based on faith? Do we make our everyday decisions based on worry and sleep-depriving worry, or do we make decisions based on God's peace and trust in His sovereignty? Do we make our decisions based on selfishness, or do we make our decisions based on selflessness? What do people see? If they were given a definition from the Bible as to how a Christian should live, with the average person who knew you, see that lining up by looking at the way you live out your life, and the way you live out your faith. It's a difficult question, one we all must grapple with. This term walk by the spirit that we read in verse 25 is actually a military term. It does literally mean to walk, but it's a certain type of walking. This type of walking is described here by this term by meaning to march in line and in time behind the military commander. So in keeping with this illustration, the commander is the Holy Spirit. So walk by the spirit literally means to march in line following him again right in keeping with this theme of a war. To march behind the spirit means you follow his every order, as already given in God's word without question. It means you keep up with where he's going. It means you don't get a break. It means you don't get distracted, wander off, chase after something worldly, decide you don't want to listen to him or jump enemy lines and join the other side. It means you may or may not know where he's going, but you follow him anyway. It means that you trust that no matter where he's going and what he's called you to do, you know that where he's going will ultimately be what's best for you and for God's kingdom. We have had our old selves put to death. That is not a leader worth following to say the least. We have been given life by marching behind the one who does know what's best. Paul gives us what we can't be following behind anymore, but doesn't leave us wandering and directionless, at the moment of our salvation Paul reveals we immediately get a new commander to replace the old one. As we all know, a positive command is always more effective than a negative one, isn't it? Instead of leaving it at, don't follow your flesh anymore because that's dead. Paul then adds to it, but replace that with marching behind the Holy Spirit and where he's taking you. If we focus on making sure we're in step behind the Holy Spirit and following the orders from God's Word, we won't have time. We won't have time to think about trying not to satisfy our selfishness. If you read and study the book of Galatians, you'll see that one of the situations that Paul needed to address there in general was that there was no love being shown. There was, for all intents and purposes, a complete lack of all the fruits of the Spirit that Paul had just described, being seen in the Galatian churches because of this source of disunity, back biting. There was no unconditional love, there was no rejoicing, even keeled peace, there was no patience as a way of life. There was no goodness-informed kindness, there was no confident faithfulness, there was no gentleness of all things, and there was no spirit control, which is a more biblical way of understanding the term self-control, who you're really being controlled by the Spirit. All that had been replaced by selfish ways of looking at things and dealing with things in the Galatian churches, Paul says, "Because this is what God has given to you, a completely new way of living life and handling situations, don't ever portray anything other than that. Are we portraying a new way of life to the world around us, or are we just giving them more of the same?" I'm talking about everything, handling stressful situations, dealing with the difficult people, being caught in scary circumstances, facing temptation head on in the heat of the battle, walking through times of loss and keeping unity. In our ways of thinking, making decisions, and processing what we're seeing happening in our lives, in the lives of family and what's going on in our country and the world. Have we replaced the commander of our lives, being our old self, that is fear, worry, anxiety, selfishness, and pride, with the new commander who we received at the point of our repentance from our sin and trust in Jesus as Savior and King? And we're faced with a temptation to sin. Are we just trying not to give in? Or are we focusing on all that has been opened up to and given to us by God Himself that He will provide the way of escape, look for that way of escape, and take that way of escape? When we're faced with a dilemma, are we turning to Google first for the answer? Or are we looking to God's Word first? When we're faced with a scary situation, are we trying to figure everything out ourselves and trying to come up with a solution? Or is our first response trusting in God's sovereignty? Trusting in God's sovereignty, receiving His peace and asking Him to give us His wisdom and showing us what to do? When we're faced with a season of lack, is our response that of worry and fear, or of a simple trust, knowing that is Jesus already has promised to us, our Heavenly Father already knows those needs, and He's already got everything lined up to take care of those needs for us. Let us be showing the world something different, something new. Let us be showing the world something new that they cannot get from anywhere else or from anyone else. Live the new life that has been given to you in every area marching behind the Holy Spirit following the orders from God's Word. Live and show the world what it means to be to be both dead and alive. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we thank You for this passage that we all need to be reminded of from time to time. We all need to ask these honest, brutally honest questions of ourselves between us and you and repent of anything that still needs to be repented of. Get things right with you that need to be made right with you. Bring everything in line with what has already been laid out for us in your Word, marching behind the Holy Spirit, keeping up, following Him and Him alone. Knowing we have the hope of eternity to look forward to that no matter where the Holy Spirit takes us, no matter what He's gifted us with, no matter what He's called us to, in individual missions, in participation with the Great Commission, we always know that we have the hope of eternity to look forward to. We thank You for all the treasure that has been opened up to us, this new life in every way that has been opened up to us, and pray that we will embrace all of it in every way. Pray all these things in Jesus' name, Amen. [BLANK_AUDIO]