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Do You Give Up Yet?
Galatians 5: 16 – 23

Spencer C. Lawrence, Church of the Cross, Hoffman Estates, IL, November 12, 2006

On a recent rerun of Friends – which I confess to watching on occasion (I like the writing and the acting, not the morality), Ross and Chandler square off in an arm wrestling contest. It just so happens that it occurs at a Halloween Party to which both Ross and Chandler have come in costume. Chandler is dressed as a huge furry bunny. Ross has comes as some sort of space potato – don’t ask me to explain. At any rate, one thing leads to another and Ross and Chandler feel like they need to prove who is the stronger of the two. Ross is eager to impress his new girlfriend. Chandler is eager to defend his honor, even though his fiancée Monica – Ross’ sister - has already said it doesn’t matter to her who is stronger. At any rate, Ross and Chandler sit down at a table to arm wrestle. They are locked in combat for a long time, neither one of them pinning the other. They argue about who should give up. Ross wants Chandler to admit defeat. Chandler wants Ross to give up. The whole conversation goes nowhere until Chandler decides it’s not worth it any more and allows Ross to press his arm to the table. He gives up. While he is not happy about it, Ross is thrilled. The trouble with losing is that it only makes the winner happy.

But what about the possibility of winning by losing? Can a “loser” ever be happy? John Ortberg in his book God is Closer than You Think writes that one way we can discover the closeness of God is to surrender ourselves to God’s care. Giving up is a way to win with God.

Paul wrote a little letter to the church in Galatia - a region in Asia Minor. It was not a happy letter. You see, they were being lured away from the central teaching of Christianity: salvation through faith in Jesus Christ. Much of the letter is an argument why his readers should keep on trusting Jesus Christ rather than trying to please God by their good deeds.

In the 5^th chapter he exhorts the Galatians to live by the Spirit and avoid gratifying the desires of the flesh. (When Paul uses “flesh” he’s not so much talking about the body as he is referring to human desires that do not please God.)  At any rate, Paul says that the works of the flesh include fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, envy, drunkenness, carousing and the like. Living like this will not prepare a person for the kingdom of God. Instead of trying to live by their own strength, they should surrender their lives to the Holy Spirit. Paul says that the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.

Throughout this letter, Paul compares “works” unfavorably with “faith.” In short, it is not by obeying the Jewish Law or any religious code for that matter than allows us to enter the kingdom of God. “Works” don’t work!  They don’t accomplish what we’re looking for. Only faith in Jesus Christ does that. Note that it’s not “work”, but “works.” “Works’ is plural. Our works yield all sorts of bad things: fornication, impurity, licentiousness and so on. The net effect of our sin is that we are fractured people, divided, turned against God and against ourselves. More than that, it includes a fragmentation of our relationships, too. Obeying the works of the flesh results in strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels and so forth. The works of the flesh not only make us unhappy with ourselves, they make us unhappy with other people.

So what does Paul want them to do? Give their lives up to the Spirit. Surrender to the Spirit of God. Why? Well, the Spirit yields “fruit.” An apple tree does not have to work and strain to produce fruit. Apples just come naturally. They are an outgrowth of the very nature of the apple tree. So the fruit of the Spirit comes from our new natures placed within us when we first trusted in Jesus Christ. It means that because of our faith in Christ we are new people and we need let our new natures gain control.

In the fall of 1994 my brother Scott was diagnosed with leukemia. He asked me if I would be willing to be a bone marrow donor. I said I would. They discovered that I was a perfect match – not surprising since we were brothers. Receiving someone else’s bone marrow is a little like receiving the Spirit of God into our lives. The new bone marrow is supposed to bring healing to a sick body. On the day I was to donate the bone marrow they began giving Scott massive doses of chemotherapy and radiation to literally kill all the bone marrow in his body. Once they had extracted the bone marrow from my body and then separated the stem cells, they began putting those cells into his blood so they could form new bone marrow inside him. In the same way the Spirit of God comes into our lives to bring order out of the chaos in our hearts, to bring healing to our relationships and to re-orient us to the God who loves us.

The result of surrendering to the Spirit is that our lives produce fruit. Notice that the word is “fruit.” This was pointed out to me at the Alpha retreat last weekend by one of the participants. While in English “fruit” can be both singular and plural, in Greek the word is singular. One thing that means is that love, joy, peace, patience and the like are not separate qualities. They are connected. Some scholars believe that love is the fruit and that all the rest are aspects of love. Maybe so. But one thing for sure is that these qualities are one fruit, not more than one. At the very least, it suggests that living by the Spirit yields wholeness. Instead of the fragmentation of our selves and our relationships that the works of the flesh produce, living by the Spirit brings unity to our personalities and healing to our relationships.

Who doesn’t want to be more whole? Who doesn’t want better relationships? Internal conflicts and bad relationships are the sorts of things that drive people to drink too much or take drugs or have affairs or fall into depression or abuse family members. They are the kinds of things that lead to divorce and bitter disagreements in the workplace and conflicts in the church. At odds with ourselves and at odds with others, we often don’t know what to do.

Paul does. He urges us to give up, to surrender to the Spirit.

The key thing is to make sure that God has given you the new nature through faith in Christ. This involves three things. First, it means acknowledging that we are sinners – that we have fallen short of God’s glory. It doesn’t mean that we have to view ourselves as worms in the dust, worthy only for God to smash us. It just means that by ourselves we need help to please God. Second, it includes believing that that help has come through Jesus’ death on the cross. We become children of God when we entrust ourselves to Jesus Christ. Third, it means committing all we know of ourselves to God. We really know very little about ourselves, but we can give what we know back to God, and when we learn something new we can offer that as well. Scripture says that when we do these things God sends the Holy Spirit to live within us and the Spirit begins to give us a new nature.

Once we have God’s Spirit living within us then we can begin surrendering arenas of our lives to the Spirit’s control. In one sense we may be losing, but in another sense we are winning.

What can we surrender?

We can surrender our failures. How often we so focus on failures of the past that we are not able to let them go. They come back to haunt us in our dreams and in our waking moments. We wish we hadn’t acted that way, but we did. There is nothing we can do to change the past. Peter had denied Jesus three times – even after he had boasted about dying with and for him. After Jesus’ resurrection, Jesus met Peter along the Sea of Galilee. Three times Jesus asked him, “Do you love me?”  Three times, Peter said that he did. Three times Jesus told him to feed his sheep, nurture his followers. In that little but difficult conversation, Peter surrendered his failure, and Jesus restored him to his place among the apostles. Do you have failures that loom large in your life? Do they color your existence gray? Surrender them to the God who loves you enough to send Jesus to you.

We also can surrender our resentments – those memories that make the adrenaline flow, that cause our stomachs to churn. Memories of a former spouse who lied and deceived you, who made your life much harder than it needed to be. Memories of relatives or teachers who abused you, who hit you and cursed you and made you feel like dirt. Memories of business partners and co-workers who took credit for things they didn’t deserve to take credit for. Memories of brothers or sisters who said and did things that gnaw at you to this very day. This is not an attempt to wipe them from your memory. To forgive and totally forget may not be possible. There are some things we may never forget. But we can offer them to God acknowledging their hold over us and asking God for help to live beyond them. Do you have resentments that are hard to let go of? Paul invites us to surrender them to the Spirit who is in us to make us whole.

We can surrender our pride, too. One of the things that keeps us from admitting that we can’t make it by ourselves is pride. We’ve had it drummed into us since we were children that we have to work hard, that there’s nothing we can do if we only work hard enough. We have achieved much. And it’s hard to admit that we need God’s help, let alone someone else’s. John Ortberg tells about a time when he was on a trip with some other men. They stayed in a rather nice hotel that included free cable. He noticed that one of the channels was labeled an adult channel, and discovered that it was also free. No one would ever know if he had watched it. No one expect God and himself. He knew he needed help to keep from turning it on. So he screwed up the courage to ask one of the men with him to hold him accountable by asking him the next morning if he had watched that channel. It was embarrassing – after all, he had a Ph.D. in psychology and was a highly regarded author. But he asked for help anyway because he knew he couldn’t do it alone. When we surrender our pride by being honest before God and one another, the Spirit works to make us whole.

We can surrender our inattentiveness. It is easy for me to get so involved in what I do for God and the church to neglect taking time to pray and read Scripture. C.S. Lewis wrote in The Screwtape Letters about the enemy’s tactic of not confronting us head on, but simply redirecting our attention. (I have mentioned this to you before.) For example, one man just before lunch began considering the question that perhaps Christianity was true after all. The enemy suggested that that was a much too important subject to think about on an empty stomach. It could wait until after he had eaten. It is really easy for me to get sidetracked like that – not that I am debating in my mind about the truth of the Christian faith. For me it’s other things. The point here is that when God invites us to engage in a conversation, it’s time to turn off the TV or the computer or to put down the book. There is a time to listen to God – to what God says in Scripture and in our hearts. There is a time to tell God what’s on our minds. There is a time to pay attention to what the Spirit is saying to us.

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Church of the Cross
475 Higgins Road
Hoffman Estates, Illinois 60169
 (847)885-1199