Galatians 5:16-17

POSITIVE CHRISTIANITY

‘Walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfil the lust of the flesh.’

Galatians 5:16

These Galatians were a fierce, brave, generous, but untamed race of mountaineers, whose chief vices were unbridled fleshly self-indulgence. And here St. Paul urges them to struggle to be self-controlling men, and not self-indulgent brutes: ‘Walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfil the lust of the flesh.’ It is hardly possible to conceive a greater contrast than that between those wild Galatians and ourselves in our higher civilisation and quiet homes. But the battle, with us, is the same as with them; the same ‘lusts of the flesh’ are with us, and they have to be met and conquered.

I. The chief feature of St. Paul’s teaching in reference to morality was its positiveness.—There are two ways to meet and deal with every vice: one is to set to work to destroy it; the other is to overwhelm and stifle it with its opposite virtue. The former is the negative, and the latter the positive method. There can be no doubt about St. Paul’s way. To the poor Galatian, fighting with his fleshly lusts, he does not set him on a course of stern repression, but rather points him to a life of positive endeavour, to do something opposite: ‘Walk in the Spirit, and—then——’ The Apostle laid hold on one of the noblest methods of the treatment of humanity—one that he had gained most directly from his Lord. These two methods of treatment, the negative and the positive, present themselves to us in all the other problems of life besides morality, and men choose between them.

II.—Throughout the New Testament there is nothing more beautiful than the perfectly clear way in which the positive culture of human character is adopted and employed.—The God of the New Testament, Whose express image and glory we behold in the face of Jesus Christ, is not a God of repression, but a God Whose Fatherhood is made so real that His holiness may be reproduced in His children; a God Whose symbols are everything that is stimulating, everything that encourages and helps; Who leads on His children into that new life where sin becomes impossible, on an ever-ascending pathway of growing Christliness. And this character of the New Testament, of Christianity, is not in contradiction with the best aspirations of the human heart. Man is willing to exercise repression and self-sacrifice for a certain temporary purpose, to do some certain work—the world is full of self-sacrifice, of the suppression of desires, the restraint of natural inclinations; yet all the time there is a great human sense that not suppression but expression is the true life.

III. And yet there arises much in the teachings of our Lord, and in the whole spirit of Christianity, which seems to contradict this conclusion.—Has not the religion of Jesus always been called the very religion of self-sacrifice? Is not self-surrender exalted into a virtue and crowned with glory, as it never was in any other faith? That certainly is true. But in Christ’s teaching self-sacrifice is always temporary and provisional, merely the clearing the way for the positive culture and manifestation of those great results of spiritual life which he loved: the right hand to be cut off, the right eye to be plucked out; mortification of the flesh, that the man may ‘enter into life.’ The self-sacrifice of the Christian is true in proportion as it copies the perfect pattern of the self-sacrifice of Christ. The Christian’s self-surrender is called a being ‘crucified to the world’; when, then, we turn to Christ’s crucifixion we find the key to that of the Christian man. See how the positive power shines through that, the most heroic of all sacrifices. It is not simply the giving up of something, it is the laying hold of something too. He Who suffers is conquering fear by the power of a confident hope, a triumphant certainty. The way to get out of self-love is to love God. ‘Walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfil the lust of the flesh.’

Bishop Phillips Brooks.

Illustration

‘You cannot kill any one of the appetites of human nature by merely starving them. You must try to draw those appetites from the poison they covet, by supplying a true and good food; by providing rational amusements, a healthier and brighter tone to home and public life; in a word, by a positive, and not a negative method of treatment. It is not prohibition which keeps the well-to-do, as a class, from disgusting and degrading lives: it is the comfort of home and intellectual occupation—the positive forces: these, and not negative repression, must be our aim in dealing with the poor man in the squalor of his garret and the hopelessness of his life. The same holds good of religion.’