By Elliot Ritzema
When I hear the word adventure, sometimes I think of activities that involve physical risk, like rock climbing or skydiving. Or sometimes I think of Bilbo Baggins’s first reaction when Gandalf told him he was looking for someone to share in an adventure at the start of The Hobbit: “Nasty disturbing uncomfortable things! Make you late for dinner!” Adventures can appear fun on a screen or in a book, but when faced with the opportunity for one in real life, I too often balk at first. My desire for comfort and security can sometimes be a way I resist Jesus’s call to follow Him.
In a way, we could see Galatians as Paul’s response to the temptation to play it safe and avoid what seemed risky. Throughout the letter, he opposed the idea that submission to the law is the only way to conquer the flesh—which is best understood as life according to the values and desires of the present age that oppose God.
Instead, Paul said that the desires of the flesh and living enslaved to the law are both opposed to life in Christ. Trying to live according to the law is inadequate to defeat the flesh; it is only living according to the Spirit that can do that.
Just before the start of this passage, Paul warned the Galatians not to “bite and devour one another” (Galatians 5:15), and at the end of the passage he warned them not to “become conceited, provoking one another, envying one another” (v.26). The “works of the flesh” are not exclusively sexual sins, like we might sometimes assume; in the list he provided in verses 19–21, most are relational. He was calling out the conflict-ridden behavior that the Galatians were at risk of returning to.
By presenting his list of works of the flesh in this way, I summarize Paul’s sayings as, “You don’t want to go back to this, do you? If you continue trying to be justified through law observance, you will.” Both the works of the law and the works of the flesh are in the past for disciples of Jesus.
The fruit of the Spirit also emphasizes relational harmony. It is not produced by law observance, and people who live by the Spirit live the lives the law always pointed to but was unable to produce (Galatians 3:21). This is a life of greater harmony within the people of God. And this is what makes living a life guided by the Spirit the greatest adventure.
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