The Flesh And The Spirit

Galatians is one of Paul’s rawest letters. He is writing to a group of churches he had planted in Galatia, part of Asia Minor in what is now Turkey, and he is genuinely upset. Other teachers had arrived after him and told these young believers that faith in Christ was not quite enough, that they also needed to take on the marks of the Jewish law, circumcision above all, to be fully accepted by God. Paul sees this as a betrayal of the gospel itself, and he says so without the warm thanksgiving he usually opens his letters with.

That heat matters for reading 5:16. By the time he reaches chapter five, Paul has spent four chapters arguing that we are put right with God by trusting Christ, not by keeping rules. But a fair question lands. If we are not under the law, what is to stop us simply living however we please? Verse 16 is part of his answer. Freedom from rule-keeping is not freedom to indulge the old self. It is freedom to walk by the Spirit. He is not handing them a new law. He is pointing to a new power.

The word Paul reaches for is ordinary and physical. To walk is not a single heroic act but a steady, repeated motion, one step after another, the way you cross a room without thinking about it. In the wider Jewish world, “to walk” had also long been an image for how a person conducts their whole life, the daily pattern of their behaviour before God. So when Paul says “walk by the Spirit,” he means a way of living that you keep up, not a feeling you sit and wait for.

There is a detail in the wording that is easy to read straight past. The promise is firm: walk by the Spirit, and you “won’t fulfil the lust of the flesh.” It sits much closer to a confident outcome than a cautious maybe, and readers of the Greek have often noted how strong the negative is. Paul is not saying you might cope a little better. He is saying that one way of life genuinely crowds out the other. He is not naive about the struggle, the very next verse admits that flesh and Spirit are at war in us, but he refuses to let the struggle have the last word. The direction of your walking decides what gets fed.

It is worth being careful with the word “flesh,” because we tend to hear it as the physical body, or shrink it down to mean only sexual sin. Paul means something wider. When he lists the works of the flesh a few verses on (Galatians 5:19 to 21), the list is full of things with nothing to do with the body at all: jealousy, outbursts of anger, rivalries, divisions, envy. The flesh, for Paul, is human nature turned in on itself and away from God, the self running its own life on its own steam.

That reframes the battle. The problem is not that I have a body, or appetites, or longings. The problem is a self that wants to be its own god. And the remedy is not to despise the body or to grind those desires down by sheer force. It is to be led by Another. I find that oddly freeing. It means the goal is not to become a person scrubbed clean of strong feeling, cool and careful and half alive. It is to have my whole self, feelings included, increasingly carried along by the Spirit of God.

Behind these words sits a promise made long before Paul. The prophets had spoken of a day when God would put his own Spirit inside his people and move them to walk in his ways, a change worked from within rather than stamped on from outside, and you can hear it in Ezekiel 36:26 to 27. Paul believes that day has arrived in Christ. The law could tell you what was right. It could not hand you the power to do it. The Spirit can.

This is why Paul can hold together two things that feel like opposites. He tells the Galatians to walk, which is something they must actually do, and yet the fruit that grows is the fruit of the Spirit, not the produce of their own effort (Galatians 5:22 to 23). It is the same Christ who, as Paul puts it earlier, now lives in him (Galatians 2:20). I have slowly stopped picturing this as a tug-of-war between trying hard and giving up. It is more like learning to follow a lead in a dance. You are genuinely moving, and yet you are being moved.

I will be honest about where this catches me. The flesh rarely turns up as some dramatic temptation. It is the curt reply I have already drafted in my head before I have finished reading the email. It is the score I quietly keep against someone who hurt me. It is the small refusal to forgive that I dress up as being sensible. In those moments, telling myself to try harder almost never works. The harder I clamp down on the thought, the more it seems to fill the whole screen of my mind.

What I have found is that the timing of this verse is realistic rather than romantic. Walking is not a mood you achieve and then keep forever; it is a step, and then the next one. Some mornings I have clearly been going my own way for an hour before I even notice. The mercy of a verb like “walk” is that you can begin again at any point in the day, in the kitchen, on the bus, mid-argument, without having to wait for some fresh start. You simply fall back into step. That, for me, is the difference between a rule I keep failing and a companion I keep returning to.

• Where in my ordinary day, not just the obvious temptations, does “the self running its own life” quietly show up?
• When I want to change, do I reach first for willpower or for the Spirit, and what does that instinct reveal about who I am really trusting?
• What would it look like, in plain terms, to keep step with God for the next hour rather than vaguely hoping to do better this year?
• Which fruit of the Spirit do I most long to see grow in me, and have I actually asked him for it?

If you would like to keep walking through Paul’s letter, you can read more from this book at /bible/galatians/, or find a verse for wherever your heart is today at /bible-verses-for-how-you-feel/.