(This blog is structured a little more like a devotional of Galatians/Romans1 so I encourage you to reflect on the Scripture passages while reading this).
What should I do?
In some way or another, this the question we’re all asking as we go about our lives. Whether you are faced with a difficult choice or decision, considering how to respond to something you’ve experienced, or wrestling with what God wants you to do in life, we all come back to this simple question. And from that question, a bunch of other questions pop up.
What choice should I make? How do I live “on mission”? What church should I go to? Where and with who should I settle down and build roots?
How do I share the Gospel with people in life?What is God calling me to do in this season of life? How do I live a faithful life with God? What does God want me to do today? How do I stay on fire for Jesus? How do I figure out what God’s will for my life is now?
Our knee-jerk reaction might be to do any number of things. Or, as we are overwhelmed with the vast amount of decisions and choices, maybe do nothing. But we all have the same instinct: I need to do something. Based on the Gospel we know, based on all that God has done and is doing in and around us, how should we respond? That’s a big question.
In front of each of us is a potential life, full of possibilities, full of things we could do, full of things God might do. How do we figure out what to do, what steps to take, what direction to go towards?
It’s as simple and as complicated as this: Walk by the Spirit.
Read Galatians 3:24-29.
In the words of Eugene Peterson: “When men and women get their hands on religion, one of the first things they often do is turn it into an instrument for controlling others, either putting or keeping them “in their place.” The history of such religious manipulation and coercion is long and tedious. It is little wonder that people who have only known religion on such terms experience release or escape from it as freedom. The problem is that the freedom turns out to be short-lived.”2
I’d go a step further. As broken human beings, we tend to want to place rules over OURSELVES. We desperately yearn for control; a control that a structure of rules can give us.
The early Jewish Christians of the New Testament struggled with this ALOT. They tended to want to live according to Torah (the Old Testament Law) instead of embracing the freedom they had been given in Christ. They were used to a system full of rules, stipulations, and ethical codes; that kind of system can provide a lot of control and clarity, a lot of structure and order, a lot of simplicity, kind of…but not freedom.
Peterson again: “{Paul’s} letter to the Galatian churches helps them, and us, recover the original freedom. It also gives direction in the nature of God’s gift of freedom—most necessary guidance, for freedom is a delicate and subtle gift, easily perverted and often squandered.”
The Reality of the Good News
Read Galatians 5:1-15.
Freedom. That’s the Gospel, that’s the gift of God, that’s the point. Live into the freedom of God that we have been given, taking each moment and day step-in-step with God’s Spirit who’s with us.
But with freedom comes a massive challenge: agency. Deciding what to do when you have an unending amount of choices can be very overwhelming. We’ve all experienced this before. Just login to Amazon or any online shopping site and you will get flooded with purchase possibilities. The freedom that Jesus has gifted us with can feel similarly overwhelming. At some point or another, all of us have the same question: “Now what?”
And Paul makes two things very clear: don’t return to a slavish submission to Torah (or in our case braindead submission the legalism and man-made rules) and don’t return to ways of the flesh (the infected human condition of sin) that lead to death.
“Just do what you’re told,” that’s what some of us are used to doing, how we have gotten comfortable living as Christians, and maybe what we prefer. If we’re being honest that’s how we can feel many days. We want our marching orders. Do you ever feel that way?
“God just tell me what to do so I can DO IT!!!”
What if, in that request, we’re missing something?
Don’t get me wrong, I totally think God wants to speak to us. He has shown time and time again how much He delights in revealing Himself to us, pointing us to His will, and guiding our lives!! But He has also placed us in a vast world, full of a plethora of opportunities to explore, unique ideas to bring to life, and new experiences to enjoy. And I sometimes wonder if we too often try to turn our relationship with Him into a formula.
“Tell me what to do and I’ll do it.”
No faith, no trust, no patience.
There are many times when we ask God “what do I do?” or “how should I go about this?” and get clear answers and guidance! However, there are other times where it’s not clear, where God seems silent, or where God isn’t giving us the clarity we want. Then what? What if, sometimes, our spiritual growth isn’t found as much in the follow through of God’s will but in the waiting, the asking, the trusting, the dependence on Him?
If we seek God’s guidance just for the outcome, just so we can get on with the plan and skip the tension of waiting, of asking, of trusting, maybe we are missing the point. Maybe part of why the Holy Spirit inhabits us, empowers us, and sanctifies us is so that our new creation selves can make decisions and choices that please God.
This outcome-obsessed way of living and the resulting, subconscious attempt to manipulate God into giving us simple, clear instructions that make us feel comfortable is not how Christians are to live; this kind of law-clinging way of living is what Paul so vehemently opposes in Galatia. Christians are trying to figure out how to live. They were asking questions no doubt very similar to our own: How should I live a holy, set apart life as a Christian? How do I share the good news with others? How do I determine what things I should do and what things I shouldn’t do? What’s a sin and what isn’t? And their answer was largely to make rules, to go back to the Old Testament Law, to map every detail of their world out with legislated religious codes.
Nowadays, instead of turning to Torah, modern Christians tend to just make up their own rules based on a string of Bible verses and ‘isms’ from within the Christianese vocabulary. Just watch a few Christian TikTok’s or YouTube videos or Spotify podcasts. It’s not that any of these things are bad, but in the words of Dane Ortlund, “Our law-ish hearts”3 resist God’s lavish love revealed in Jesus Christ. In our sinful flesh, we try to pervert the Gospel with legalism and rules. Our “law-ish” hearts resist the grace and freedom of the Gospel.
Make no mistake: returning to the Law is slavery.
So in his letter Paul fiercely pleads with the Galatians to not go back to the Law. Christ’s death has set us free from the Law! In Peterson’s words: “if any kind of rule-keeping had power to create life in us, we would certainly have gotten it by this time.” But now there’s this big, ethical void. If following the rules isn’t the goal, then how are we supposed to know what to do and not to do?
Walk by the Spirit! (Obviously such a simple command comes with some important guardrails of nuance and theological qualifiers). ⏬️4
A Gospel Paradigm for Living
From abiding relationship with the Spirit of Jesus who lives in us, who empowers all of the good things growing in our lives and all of our worship, we rely on His direction and the desires He puts in our hearts.
That’s how we make the call. That’s how we decide what to do. Not some Law, not some formula, not some shaky, house-of-cards stack of Bible verses we patch together, not some long list of rules we make for ourselves, NO, God Himself is with us and empowers us to navigate the challenges of life.
In other words, we say YES to the things we want that our from God and say NO to the things that we want that are of the flesh. The goal is to want what He wants and do what He would have us do.
Wow. What an honor!
I don’t know about you but when I first grappled with the message of Galatians, I was felt both awestruck and inadequate. I felt so honored that the God of the universe would want to inhabit me and my life and empower me. But I also felt a deep unworthiness: “I’m such a sinner, such a failure, such a broken person….how could I ever trust myself to call the shots? How could I (even with God’s Spirit) ever be capable to make decisions and live into the freedom God has given me?”
But here’s the beautiful truth: if the Spirit of Jesus lives in us, we are pleasing to God.
Period.
Read Romans 12:1-2, Ephesians 5:1-2.
We are IN-Christ. Our union with the Son and life in the Spirit grants us relationship with the Father who has unconditional love for us…as He has unconditional love for Son & Spirit. From that Gospel reality, we choose to follow the good desires the Holy Spirit is growing in our hearts and turn away from the bad desires of the flesh.
We are being transformed by the Spirit of Jesus. We now have been given the desires of God planted on our own hearts.
Read Romans 8:1-18.
I wonder how much we rob ourselves of the Gospel’s empowering freedom when we disciple ourselves to be rule-followers instead of Spirit-followers. I wonder how much we might miss out on when we become rule makers instead of students of our desires. The Spirit guides us into new life with new hearts as new creation people.
So walk by the Spirit!
“How do I know what’s a desire of the Spirit within me versus a desire of the flesh?”
Don’t worry! Paul gives you some broad, guardrail guidelines.
Read Galatians 5:16-26.
“That doesn’t feel specific enough for me. I need more direction…”
You feel that tension? Me too. And that’s the tension of the freedom we have inherited. I’m learning day by day just how profoundly difficult it is to walk by the Spirit.
There’s this giant void, this chasm, this vacuum of space that exists in our lives when we relinquish all of the legalistic rules and “law-ish” ways of living. That freedom can feel scary, disorienting, confusing, or just different. And it’s convicting: I’ve realized just how much room for growth there is in my life in terms of recognizing the Spirit in all the places He is speaking and moving in the world and in my life.
Maybe this is where the Lord begins to plant a deeper trust in our lives, a richer love in our hearts, and a stronger joy in our lives. Maybe that’s when we start to fully embrace the reality that God the Father is always for us, God the Spirit is always with us, God the Son is always loving us. Maybe it’s here that our full identity as children of God set free from slavery takes hold of us. Maybe it’s in a full surrender to God, not just of the selfish things we want to do but of the legalistic ways we want to control everything, that God begins to reveal more of Himself to us. Maybe it’s in this tension that we learn to discern the voice and activity of the Spirit more clearly than we ever have before.
- There’s a lot of theological debate surrounding how to read Paul and interpret the apostle’s theology in Romans and Galatians. There’s a flood of books and papers and lectures and debates on the Old vs. New Perspective on Paul. I find myself appreciating aspects of various vantage points, not completely loyal to any one side on such a complicated issue.
To read more on this, start looking at technical commentaries of Pauline writings or reading scholars on NPP. Or a much simpler option I suggest is to read my friend’s article reflecting on this predicament. ↩︎ - The Message, Introduction to Galatians. ↩︎
- From one of his chapter titles in Gentle & Lowly. ↩︎
- Important note here: The Spirit of God will always point us to Jesus. As the third person of the Trinity, He will always be in line with the character and will of the Father and Son. And His direction and guidance will never contradict the Scriptures’ teachings but rather align and harmonize with them. The Holy Spirit will guide people in ways that point them to Jesus, conform them into the image of God displayed in Christ, aligns with God’s righteousness, and is unison with the will of God the Father and God the Son. So for example someone who murders someone else is not walking by the Spirit no matter what their subjective experience and perceptions may tell them). All of this is important to keep in mind as it is vital for us not to get swept away in endless subjectivism and sentimentality in our endeavor to live step for step with the Spirit of God. ↩︎
Faithfulapprentices 