This is the second in a series of messages on the Holy Spirit. Last week we dealt with the cause of the new birth. I argued from John 3:5–8 that human nature, with which all of us are born, will not enter into the kingdom of God unless it is changed. This change is called being born again. And what this means is that the Spirit of God creates something new; he takes out of us the heart of stone that rebels against God, and he puts into us a new heart which trusts God and follows his ways. Or to put it another way, the Holy Spirit establishes himself as the new ruling principle of our life. "That which is born of the Spirit is spirit." In other words, that which is begotten by the Spirit has the nature of the Spirit, is permeated by the character of the Spirit, is animated by the Spirit. This change is owing wholly to the Spirit's work of free grace, prior to any saving faith on our part. The new birth is not caused by our faith; on the contrary, our faith is caused by the new birth. "No one can come to the Son unless it is granted to him by the Father" (John 6:65). Therefore, the life we have in Christ is owing wholly to the work of God's Spirit, and we have no ground for boasting at all. We live by the Spirit.
Now what? Galatians 5:25 states concisely what our next step should be. "If we live by the Spirit, let us also walk by the Spirit." Paul is in full agreement with Jesus that it is by the work of the Holy Spirit that we have been given new life. "Even when we were dead through trespasses God made us alive together with Christ . . . We are his workmanship created in Christ Jesus" (Ephesians 2:5, 10;Colossians 2:13). Just as God once said, "Let there be light," and there was light, so he "has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ" (2 Corinthians 4:6). Now Paul, in Galatians 5:25, draws an inference from how our new life in Christ began: if it began by the Spirit, then all our subsequent life ought to be carried out by the Spirit (see Galatians 3:1–5). If it was by the free and sovereign power of the Spirit that our new spiritual life came into being, then the way that new life should be lived is by that same free and sovereign power. "Walk by the Spirit" means do what you do each day by the Spirit; live your life in all its details from waking up in the morning until going to sleep at night by the enabling power of the Spirit. But what does that mean, practically speaking? How do we "walk by the Spirit"?
Let's observe a few things in the immediate context of Galatians 5 and then bring in some other Scriptures in order to get as full an answer to this question as we can. I'll conclude by describing five things involved in walking by the Spirit.
How Do We Walk by the Spirit?
The phrase "walk by the Spirit" occurs not only in verse 25 but also in verse 16, "But I say, walk by the Spirit and do not gratify the desires of the flesh." So here we see what the opposite of walking by the Spirit is, namely, giving in to the desires of the flesh. Remember, "flesh" is the old, ordinary human nature that does not relish the things of God and prefers to get satisfaction from independence, power, prestige, and worldly pleasures. When we "walk by the Spirit," we are not controlled by those drives. This is what verse 17 means: the flesh produces one kind of desires, and the Spirit produces another kind, and they are opposed to each other. Walking by the Spirit is what we do when the desires produced by the Spirit are stronger than the desires produced by the flesh. This means that "walking by the Spirit" is not something we do in order to get the Spirit's help, but rather, just as the phrase implies, it is something we do by the enablement of the Spirit.
