Galatians 5

Today’s Passage: Galatians 5

Four chapters of argument have been building toward this, and now the whole weight of the letter comes down on a single sentence: It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Paul has proved from his own history that he did not receive this gospel from men, he has faced down Peter over a table in Antioch, he has reasoned from Abraham and from the Galatians’ own experience of the Spirit, and he has drawn a picture of two mothers and two covenants, slavery and freedom. Now he stops arguing and issues the order. Stand firm. Do not put the yoke back on. The first half of the chapter presses the warning to its sharpest point, so sharp that many readers flinch at it: if you take circumcision as the ground of your standing before God, then Christ is of no value to you, and you have made yourself a debtor to the entire law, and you have cut yourself off from the only place a sinner can stand. Then he softens, and remembers them fondly. You were running so well. Then he turns, and the second half of the chapter answers the question the first half has been inviting all along, the question every honest hearer of grace eventually asks. If we are not under law, what on earth is going to stop us doing whatever we like? Paul does not answer with a fence. He answers with a Person. Walk by the Spirit, he says, and there follows the plainest catalogue in the New Testament of what our old nature produces when left to itself, and then, over against it, the loveliest list in Scripture of what God’s Spirit grows in a yielded life. Nine words, one cluster, and the last of them is the one nobody expects to find at the end of a chapter about freedom.

As you read, hold this: It is for freedom that Christ has set us free, and what keeps that freedom from collapsing into ruin is not a rule laid back over us but the Spirit of God, who grows in a life joined to Christ what no law could ever manufacture.

Galatians 5:1–4 (BSB)

¹ It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not be encumbered once more by a yoke of slavery. ² Take notice: I, Paul, tell you that if you let yourselves be circumcised, Christ will be of no value to you at all. ³ Again I testify to every man who gets himself circumcised that he is obligated to obey the whole law. ⁴ You who are trying to be justified by the law have been severed from Christ; you have fallen away from grace.

Read that first line slowly, because it is one of the summits of the whole Bible and it will not be hurried. It is for freedom (ἐλευθερία) eleutheria, pronounced el-yoo-ther-EE-ah. Strong's G1657, freedom, liberty, the state of a free person. Eleutheria was a political word before it was ever a spiritual one, and in the Greek world it burned. A free city governed itself. A free man owned his own body, went where he chose, and answered to no master, and the great dividing line running through every Mediterranean household was the line between the free and the slave. To be set free in that world usually meant one specific thing: someone had paid. A slave might be purchased out of the market, or bought and dedicated at a temple, and the record of the price was the proof of his liberty. So when Paul says Christ has set us free for freedom, every hearer knew there had been a transaction, and the letter has already told us what it cost. But mark what Paul refuses to let the word mean. Freedom is not the absence of a master, because he will say in a few verses that we now serve one another. It is not permission to do as we please, because he will say that using it as an opportunity for the flesh is the one thing it was never given for. Freedom, in this letter, is release from the crushing project of making yourself acceptable to God, so that for the first time in your life you can love Him and love your neighbor without an angle. The chains that come off are the ones you were forging yourself. that Christ has set us free. Freedom is not a side effect of the gospel. It is not a bonus that comes along with forgiveness. It is the very purpose for which the Son of God went to the cross, the thing He was aiming at, the reason He gave Himself. And now Paul draws out what follows: stand firm, and do not be encumbered once more by a yoke of slavery. A yoke was the heavy wooden beam laid across the shoulders of oxen so that a man behind them could steer their labor, and the picture is of a creature that has been unharnessed and set loose in the open, walking back to the shed and putting its own head into the beam again. That is what Paul is watching happen in Galatia. Notice the word again, and notice once more. These Gentile believers had never worn the yoke of Moses in their lives. But Paul says that to go under the law now would be a return to slavery all the same, because a heart that must earn its place with God is in the same bondage whether the terms are pagan or pious. There is only one alternative to grace, and it always ends the same way.

Then comes the warning, and it is severe, and we should not file the edges off it. If you let yourselves be circumcised, Christ will be of no value to you at all. Paul is not talking about a surgical procedure in the abstract; elsewhere he can say the sign itself means nothing either way, and he had Timothy circumcised for the sake of a mission. He is talking about taking it up on the terms these teachers were offering, as the thing that finally makes you acceptable. And to take it on those terms, he says, is to sign for the whole document. He is obligated to obey the whole law. You cannot select the clauses you admire. Step onto that ground and every commandment God ever gave through Moses now has a claim on you, and one failure anywhere is failure. Then verse four, which has troubled tender consciences for centuries and needs to be read exactly as it stands. Look at who Paul is describing: You who are trying to be justified by the law. That is the whole subject of the sentence. These are people who are attempting to establish their standing before God on the basis of their own law-keeping, and Paul tells them what that attempt actually does. It severs them from Christ, and it drops them out of the sphere of grace, for the simple reason that the two grounds cannot be occupied at once. If you are standing on your record, you are not standing on His. This is not the picture of a Father losing His grip on a child He has claimed, and the letter itself will not let us read it that way, for Paul has already said that the God who called him did it before he was born and that Christ loved him and gave Himself for him. It is a picture of what a person is relying on. To fall away from grace here is to step off the platform of free favor onto the platform of merit, where no sinner has ever yet been able to stand. Let the warning stay serious, because it is serious. Anyone who quietly moves the ground of his acceptance from the finished work of Christ to his own performance has, in that moment, made Christ of no use to himself at all. He is trying to be saved somewhere Christ is not.

Galatians 5:5–8 (BSB)

⁵ But by faith we eagerly await through the Spirit the hope of righteousness. ⁶ For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision has any value. What matters is faith expressing itself through love. ⁷ You were running so well. Who has obstructed you from obeying the truth? ⁸ Such persuasion does not come from the One who calls you.

But. After the severity, the sunlight. Paul turns from the dead end to the living road and describes the ordinary posture of a Christian in one sentence: by faith, through the Spirit, we eagerly await the hope of righteousness. Every phrase is deliberate. Not by law but by faith. Not by our own effort but through the Spirit whom God gave. And not clutching but awaiting, because a believer’s full and final vindication is still ahead of him, kept and certain and coming. Then verse six, which ought to be written over the door of every church. In Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision has any value. Both parties are silenced at once. The man who is proud of the sign has nothing, and so does the man who is proud of not having it. What is left, when every badge has been swept off the table? What matters is faith expressing itself through love. Hold those two words together and never let anyone pull them apart. Faith is the only thing that saves, and Paul has spent four chapters proving it against all comers. And the faith that saves is never inert. It works. It moves outward. It expresses itself, and the direction it moves in is love. That single line answers the accusation that this gospel makes people careless, and it answers it before the accusation is even made. A faith that has taken hold of a crucified Savior does not sit still; it goes and washes somebody’s feet.

Then Paul’s voice changes, and you can hear the affection in it. You were running so well. He is remembering them, these Galatians who had received him as an angel of God when he first came to them sick, who would have torn out their own eyes and given them to him. They had made a good start. And now someone has cut in on the track. The word he uses is the word for breaking up a road or throwing an obstacle in the way of an advancing army, and it carries a note of genuine grief: who did this to you? Who got in front of you and blocked you from obeying the truth? And then a quiet sentence that is worth carrying with you for the rest of your life: Such persuasion does not come from the One who calls you. Test it there. Not by how impressive the teacher is, not by how ancient the practice sounds, not by how many credentials are produced from Jerusalem. Ask what the persuasion does to your confidence in Christ. God calls people to Himself by free grace, and He never afterward changes His terms. If a message leaves you working nervously to secure what He has already given, then whatever else may be said for it, it did not come from Him.

Galatians 5:9–12 (BSB)

⁹ A little leaven works through the whole batch of dough. ¹⁰ I am confident in the Lord that you will take no other view. The one who is troubling you will bear the judgment, whoever he may be. ¹¹ Now, brothers, if I am still preaching circumcision, why am I still being persecuted? In that case the offense of the cross has been abolished. ¹² As for those who are agitating you, I wish they would proceed to emasculate themselves!

The proverb about leaven would have gone home instantly to anyone who had watched bread made. You take a fragment of yesterday’s soured dough, work it into a fresh batch, and within hours the whole mass has been changed by it. Nobody adds much. Nobody has to. And every Jewish reader had the further picture of the days before Passover, when the house was searched by lamplight and every crumb of leaven put out of doors. Paul’s point is not that these teachers were asking for a great deal. They were asking for very little, one rite, one small concession, a single adjustment to make the young churches more respectable. That is exactly the danger. A little of this doctrine does not stay little. Work it into a congregation and in a year you will not recognize the loaf.

Then, in the same breath as the sharpest warning in the letter, Paul says something warm and steady: I am confident in the Lord that you will take no other view. Notice where his confidence is lodged. Not in the Galatians, who have already shown how quickly they can be moved, but in the Lord, who is at work in them and will not let His own people be finally carried off. That is how to hold a serious warning and a real hope in the same hand, and pastors have been trying to learn it from Paul ever since. As for the man doing the damage, Paul leaves him to God: whoever he may be. Rank will not shelter him, and Paul does not need to know his name. Verse eleven answers a slander that was evidently going around, that Paul himself still preached circumcision when it suited him. His reply is simple. If that were true, why is he still being hunted from city to city? Nobody stones a man for offering people one more religious requirement. They stone him for saying that a crucified Jew is the whole of your hope and that your religion adds nothing. And here Paul names the thing that must never be removed: the offense of the cross. The cross is offensive because it tells us we contribute nothing. Add circumcision to it and the offense drains away, and so does the power. Then verse twelve, and it is blunt, and it is Scripture, and we will not pretend it is not there. Paul wishes the men who are so eager with the knife would go the whole way with it, as the priests of the goddess up the road did. It is bitter and it is deliberate. Understand what has raised his temper: these are men laying hands on young believers and telling them the Son of God is not enough. Paul is not defending his reputation. He is standing over converts he loves like a father in a doorway.

Galatians 5:13–16 (BSB)

¹³ For you, brothers, were called to freedom; but do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh. Rather, serve one another in love. ¹⁴ The entire law is fulfilled in a single decree: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” ¹⁵ But if you keep on biting and devouring one another, watch out, or you will be consumed by one another. ¹⁶ So I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh.

Here the chapter turns on its hinge, and everything Paul says from now on is the answer to an objection. If a man is justified by faith and not by law-keeping, what is to stop him living any way he pleases? Paul has heard the question a hundred times and he does not dodge it. You were called to freedom; but do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh (σάρξ) sarx, pronounced SARX. Strong's G4561, flesh; human nature apart from the Spirit. Sarx means meat, muscle, the soft stuff of a body, and in ordinary Greek it carried no moral weight at all. Paul takes it up and makes it a name for something else, and it is important to be exact about what he means, because generations of well-meaning readers have gone wrong here. He does not mean that our bodies are evil or that appetite is dirty. God made the body and will raise it. By the flesh Paul means the whole old nature we were born with, human life organized around self, running on its own resources and answering to its own desires, and the proof that he does not mean mere bodily appetite is the list he is about to write, in which the largest group of sins by far are things done with the mind and the tongue: hatred, jealousy, rivalry, division, envy. That is flesh at its most religious and most respectable. Note too that the same nature which will not keep God’s law is also perfectly happy to use God’s law as a ladder, which is what the whole letter has been exposing. The flesh can be devout. What it cannot do is please God. And here is the mercy in it: Paul never once tells you to improve this thing. He tells you it has been crucified, and he tells you to walk with Someone else. . The word for opportunity is a military one, the base of operations from which a campaign is launched. Grace is not a staging ground for self-indulgence. And then, instead of quickly handing back a set of rules to keep us safe, Paul says something startling: serve one another in love. The verb is the one used of a slave. Christ freed you from slavery in order to make you a willing servant of your brother, which is the deepest paradox in the Christian life and also the plain daily shape of it. Freedom that curves inward on itself becomes a new bondage almost at once; freedom that spends itself on others is the real thing. And Paul adds a line that would have stopped his opponents cold, since they were the ones talking about the law all day long: The entire law is fulfilled in a single decree: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” He is quoting the book of Leviticus, the very heart of the code these teachers were pressing.

"Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against any of your people, but love your neighbor as yourself. I am the LORD." Leviticus 19:18 (BSB)

See the irony. The people demanding law-keeping are getting law-keeping wrong, and the man they accuse of throwing the law away is the one telling them what it was for. Then verse fifteen, and it is a sad little window into what was actually happening in those congregations. If you keep on biting and devouring one another, watch out, or you will be consumed by one another. The words belong to animals, snapping, tearing, swallowing. Churches that fight about who is truly in and who is not do not stay theoretical for long; the argument gets teeth. And Paul warns them soberly that there may be nothing left at the end. Then, at last, the command that governs the rest of the chapter, and it is not a prohibition at all: walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh. Walking is the humblest word for a life, one foot after another, ordinary and daily and unspectacular. And notice the order, because we usually get it backwards. Paul does not say, stop gratifying the flesh so that you may walk by the Spirit. He says walk by the Spirit, and the other thing will not happen. The way to deal with darkness in a room is not to shovel it out but to open the shutters.

Galatians 5:17–21 (BSB)

¹⁷ For the flesh craves what is contrary to the Spirit, and the Spirit what is contrary to the flesh. They are opposed to each other, so that you do not do what you want. ¹⁸ But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law. ¹⁹ The acts of the flesh are obvious: sexual immorality, impurity, and debauchery; ²⁰ idolatry and sorcery; hatred, discord, jealousy, and rage; rivalries, divisions, factions, ²¹ and envy; drunkenness, orgies, and the like. I warn you, as I did before, that those who practice such things will not inherit the kingdom of God.

Verse seventeen explains the war every believer knows about from the inside, and it is a strange comfort to find it written down. The two are set against each other, and the result is that you do not do what you want. Read that honestly and it cuts both ways. There are days you fully intend to be patient and kind and you are not, and there are also, praise God, days when the old nature reaches for something and finds it cannot get there, because Someone else is living in the house now. That inner conflict is not a sign that something has gone wrong with your Christianity. An unconverted man does not have this war; he has peace, of a kind, because there is nothing in him pulling the other way. The struggle itself is evidence that the Spirit has moved in. And then verse eighteen quietly answers the whole letter’s question from another angle: if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law. Paul is not saying the Spirit makes you lawless. He is saying that a life under the Spirit’s leading is not living in the law’s territory at all, because the law could tell a man what to do and could never once make him want to do it.

Now the list, and we should read it soberly, neither flinching from it nor lingering over it. Paul says these acts are obvious, meaning that nobody needs a course in ethics to identify them; they announce themselves. He begins where the ancient world was most careless and where our own is careless again, with sexual sin: immorality, impurity, debauchery, three words moving from the act to the inward defilement to the shamelessness that has stopped caring who sees. Scripture is entirely consistent on this from Genesis forward. God made this good gift and set it inside the covenant union of one man and one woman, and outside that covenant it does damage, always. The other faithful path is the single life, which Scripture honors and never treats as second class. Say it plainly and move on, as Paul does. Then idolatry and sorcery, the attempt to manage the unseen world on our own terms. Then a long run of sins that would sound almost polite at a church supper: hatred, discord, jealousy, rage, rivalries, divisions, factions, envy. Eight of them, and they are the sins of the Galatian churches at that very moment, biting and devouring over who was truly in. Do not miss it. The flesh does not only appear in the gutter; it appears in the committee. Then drunkenness and orgies, the disordered feast, and Paul closes the list with and the like, because he is not writing a code and refuses to let anyone treat it as one.

The warning at the end of verse twenty-one must not be softened, and it must not be twisted either. Those who practice such things will not inherit the kingdom of God. Look carefully at the verb. Paul does not say those who have ever done such things, for then no one would be left. He says those who practice them, and the word describes a habit, a settled and continuing way of life, the thing a person simply does and goes on doing without repentance. That is how the same expression works everywhere else in Paul, and he makes it unmistakable when he writes something almost identical to the Corinthians and then adds the sentence that changes the air in the room:

"Do you not know that the wicked will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who submit to or perform homosexual acts, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor verbal abusers, nor swindlers, will inherit the kingdom of God. And that is what some of you were. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified, in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God." 1 Corinthians 6:9–11 (BSB)

And that is what some of you were. There is the gospel standing in the middle of a vice list. The warning is real, and it is aimed at anyone who imagines that a profession of faith is a receipt he can carry while his life runs unchanged in the opposite direction forever. But the door is wide open, and the blood of Christ is sufficient for every single item on both lists, and the people Paul is writing to had walked through that door out of exactly these sins. If your conscience is troubled as you read verses nineteen through twenty-one, that trouble is itself the Spirit’s work and not the flesh’s, and the remedy is not to go back under the law but to come again to the One who washes.

Galatians 5:22–26 (BSB)

²² But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, ²³ gentleness, and self-control. Against such things there is no law. ²⁴ Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. ²⁵ Since we live by the Spirit, let us walk in step with the Spirit. ²⁶ Let us not become conceited, provoking and envying one another.

Before you look at the nine words, look at the one that governs them, because everything depends on it. Paul has just written of the acts of the flesh, plural, a scattered heap of separate deeds, each one manufactured. Now he writes the fruit (καρπός) karpos, pronounced kar-POSS. Strong's G2590, fruit, what a tree or vine produces. Karpos is the ordinary word for what a tree or a field yields, and the whole Bible is full of it. The first psalm plants a blessed man like a tree by streams of water that yields its fruit in season. Isaiah sings of a vineyard God dug and cleared and planted, looking for good grapes. Jesus takes up the image and says that a tree is known by its fruit, and then, on the last night, that He is the vine and we are the branches and apart from Him we can do nothing. Notice what the picture rules out in both directions. It rules out the anxious man who thinks holiness is a product he must manufacture by effort, and it rules out the idle man who thinks that since it is all of grace nothing is required of him, because a branch that is not attached to the vine bears nothing at all, and remaining is something you do. Fruit also takes time, and that is a pastoral mercy for anyone who is discouraged. You cannot pull an apple into being by wanting it. You can only keep the branch where the life is and let the seasons pass. And fruit is never grown for the branch’s own consumption. It hangs there to feed somebody else, which is exactly what Paul said freedom was for a few verses back. of the Spirit, and it is singular. Not fruits. One fruit, with nine flavors in it, one ripening life that shows itself nine ways. And the change of image is the whole doctrine of Christian growth in a single word. Fruit is not made; it is grown. No branch ever strained a muscle. No orchard was ever exhorted into a harvest. Fruit appears on a branch because that branch is joined to a living trunk and the sap is running through it, and the fruit is not even the branch’s own achievement but the tree’s life showing at the end of a limb. So the character described here is not a set of nine virtues for you to work up in your own strength, which would be the law all over again in prettier clothes. It is what the Holy Spirit produces in a person who is joined to Christ and staying joined. This does not mean you are passive, for Paul will command you in the next breath to keep in step. But it means the power is not yours, the credit is not yours, and the growing happens the way growing always happens, quietly, unevenly, in seasons, and mostly without your watching it.

Take them one at a time. Love stands first because it is the root of the other eight, and it is the self-giving love that goes toward people who have earned nothing, which is the only kind God ever showed us. Joy comes second, and it is not the same thing as cheerfulness, for it can live in a prison and did, in this same apostle. It is gladness that rests on what God has done rather than on how the week has gone. Peace is next, and it begins where all our peace begins, in being reconciled to God, and then it works outward into a settled heart and into a person who is not at war with the people around her. Patience is a long word in the Greek that means being long-tempered, slow to boil, the quality God Himself displays toward us year after year, and it is aimed mostly at people rather than circumstances. Kindness is the everyday grace of being easy to live with, useful, considerate, the opposite of harsh. Goodness is its backbone, moral generosity that can also be severe when severity is what love requires, for the same Lord who blessed children also turned over tables. Faithfulness is simply being someone who can be counted on, who keeps promises when keeping them costs, and it is a small word with the weight of God’s own character behind it. Gentleness is not weakness but strength that has been brought under control, the tamed horse rather than the broken one, and it was the word our Lord used of Himself. And then, at the very end, the one nobody expects to find at the close of a passage about freedom: self-control (ἐγκράτεια) egkrateia, pronounced eng-KRAH-tay-ah. Strong's G1466, self-control, mastery of oneself. Enkrateia meant holding yourself in hand, having power over yourself, and it was the prized virtue of the Greek moralists, the mark of the disciplined man who had mastered his appetites by sheer trained will. Paul takes their favorite word and does something remarkable with it: he puts it at the end of a list of things the Holy Spirit grows. Self-control, in the New Testament, is not finally self-generated. It is fruit. And it is stunning to find it here, in a chapter that has spent twenty-five verses insisting that we are free, that the yoke is off, that we are not under law. This is where a certain kind of reader has always stumbled, assuming that if grace is free then restraint must be optional. Paul closes the door on that with one word. The Spirit who sets a man free from earning his salvation is the same Spirit who teaches him to say no, and He does it not by handing back the rulebook but by planting a stronger love in the heart. A man who has been genuinely mastered by Christ is the only man who has ever truly mastered himself, and he knows better than anyone that he did not do it. . Then Paul adds a line with a smile in it. Against such things there is no law. Of course there is not. No legislature ever sat down to prohibit patience. The law was never against these things; the law simply could not produce them. And that is Paul’s final answer to the men who said grace would breed lawlessness. Turn the Spirit loose in a congregation and you will get the very character the law was always aiming at, and you will get it from the inside.

Verse twenty-four tells you why any of this is possible, and it is the letter’s great confession said again in another key. Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. The tense is past and settled. Something has already been done to the old nature, and it was done at the cross, and it was done for everyone who belongs to Him. Paul said it earlier about himself in the words that stand at the center of this whole letter:

"I have been crucified with Christ, and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself up for me." Galatians 2:20 (BSB)

So the daily fight is not an attempt to kill something that is still in charge. It is the mopping up of an enemy that has already been sentenced. Then the two closing lines, which are the practical shape of the whole chapter. Since we live by the Spirit, let us walk in step with the Spirit. The second verb is a marching word, keeping rank, staying in line with the one setting the pace. Paul’s logic is beautiful and simple: you already have His life, so now match your steps to Him. And the last verse comes down out of the heights and lands squarely in the room. Let us not become conceited, provoking and envying one another. After love and joy and peace, after the vine and the fruit and the cross, he ends with three ordinary church sins: thinking too well of yourself, needling the people near you, and wanting what somebody else has. That is how you can tell this chapter was written to real congregations and not to an ideal one. And it is where the fruit is actually tested, not in solitude but in a room full of other people who are also being changed slowly.