Who's Leading Your Life

Gal 5:1, 13-25

I have always like to drive around in the car in order to ease my mind as well as to travel. Which is all well and go, except for my horrible sense of direction. Prior to getting a GPS I was prone to getting lost for hours at a time, including one frustrating incident where I got lost in Buffalo, NY for no less than 7 hours missing both of my obligations for the day. While that was probably my worst experience of getting lost, as it ended in tears, more often than not I saw my wonderings not as moments when I was lost, but opportunities for God to teach me something. In those moments when others would consider me to be “lost” I saw the most amazing things – sunsets that streaked the sky bright pinks and dull blues. Children finding the utmost joy out of life. Small family ice cream shops tucked away behind large building.

Now however, I have a GPS, and I no longer feel as if God is leading my life to those little moments of pleasure. Instead I’m solely concentrated on getting to the destination programmed into the monitor and avoiding those dreadful words “Perform u-turn when possible”. Even in the moments I know a better way to get to where I’m going than the automated voice on the GPS, I still get yelled at. It’s one of life’s great paradoxes, I’m losing my God given sense of awe and wonder by knowing where I’m going. No more amazing sights and moments of glimpsing the presence of God because I know where I want to go, even if God may prefer for me to get lost so I could follow the Holy a little bit better. In essence I lost my way by giving up the true freedom of the road.

Maybe this what the Galatians are feeling as well. Lost in their own legalism. Previously in Paul’s letter to the community we are told that they are turning away from Paul’s teaching towards the way of the traveling prophets who are telling them that they must be circumcised in order to be a true believer. Paul comes back with the rebuttal that even if they are circumcised their foreskin they have not taken time to look past the rule to its meaning and application for their hearts. Instead, Paul challenges them to look past black and white rules to the gray matters of ethics. In chapter 5 verse 1 we find the theme of not only the passage we are looking at today, but indeed the entire letter – do not submit to the yoke of slavery of the law that Christ had not given. Regain your freedom by following Christ. This is the freedom that Christ has set us free from and to. Why would we want to go back to rules?

However, then Paul throws a wrench into the Galatians’ new-formed idea of freedom as Paul writes, “Do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgences, but through love become slaves to one another.” In other words, freedom does not allow you to be selfish and live only for yourself, indulging while forgetting the good of your neighbor, going the direction you have decided for your life, or trampling on the dignity and rights of others. Instead, we are called to love the community of God so much that we set aside our idea of freedom for the betterment of the group as a whole. What a radical idea. We are given freedom so we can freely give it back.

Paul goes on to say that the freedom of the Spirit actually restrains us from doing what we want to do with our flesh – those things that we feel that we have the freedom to do, but that could end badly for the community. Notice that each of the works of the flesh he lists may be done in private, but have corporate repercussions. In The Message, Eugene Peterson describes the life of the flesh as “the kind that develops out of trying to get your own way all the time: repetitive, loveless, cheap sex; a stinking accumulation of mental and emotional garbage; frenzied and joyless grabs for happiness; trinket Gods; magic-show religion; paranoid loneliness; cutthroat competition; all-consuming-never-satisfied-wants; a brutal temper; an impotence to love or be loved; divided homes and divided lines; small-minded and lopsided pursuits; a vicious habit of depersonalizing everyone into a rival; uncontrolled and uncontrollable addictions; ugly parodies of community; I could go on.” Gives things a bit of a new spin, right? Perhaps we can look at the list of expressions of the freedom of the flesh in Galatians and pretend that we do not see ourselves there, but it’s a little harder to do so with Peterson’s list. No wonder with personal and communal struggles like those in this letter that are so time and energy consuming and bear no fruit for the betterment of the community, Paul is instructing the community to set aside their own selfish definitions of freedom.

But Paul does not stop at just telling the people what behaviors they need to cease, or leaving them with the ethical quandary of examining their own freedom and the growth of the community. He let’s the Galatians know what type of behavior they should be striving for – that marked by love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, and self-control. These fruits of the Spirit do not come naturally. They can only be grown by setting aside our idea of where we want to go and our means of getting their through our own freedom.

Think of someone who exuberates the totality of peace. Inner peace, peace with others, and a call for all to have peace with one another. Sit with the image of that person for a little while. Is this person working to advance themselves or for the good of humanity? Is the result human dignity or a war on those defined as the “other”? One of the first people to come to my mind is Martin Luther King Jr. who lost his very life in calling a nation forward for recognizing the image of God in every person. MLK was living out of his spiritual walk with God, which resulted in him going a direction he would not have chosen for himself. This is the type of life that calls for us to make a choice – between living for ourselves and living for a greater good. This is a life that only comes from practicing the fruits of the spirit in order to grow them. Actively thinking about the good of another over yourself until it becomes natural. Being generous in sharing whatever gifts God has given you. Finding joy in the simple moments of life, treating each other with respect even when you are disrespected, exemplifying a sweet and gentle spirit instead of getting angry at a situation or your neighbor. This is not just a lofty ideal, but a reality in the process. We cannot just look at the fruits of the spirit and think about what they mean and not attempt to put them into action, and keep trying until they become our own reality. This is the difference between having faith something will happen and not working towards it and being faithful in practicing what you believe. Faith and faithfulness were not meant to be separated, for hope and responsibility bind them together. And both faith and faithfulness require us to be guided by the Spirit.

So who is guiding your life today? Your own directions or God’s? In the moments that you think you are lost on the road of life, do you look around and find the Spirit with you, showing you something about the nature of God or about yourself? Or do you fret because you are not going where you wanted to go? Are you willing to set aside your own freedom for the good of the community? Will you practice actively living out one fruit of the spirit this week, looking inside yourself if you slip back into the old ways of the flesh and ask how you got there? In the moments that you know you have backed away from the road the Spirit is leading you on, will you turn around and run back and try to live in the fruits of the Spirit again and again?

We are a people in process. We are a community that is becoming. May we continually seek together to live out the fruits of the Spirit, by putting faith into faithful action. Amen.