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.

Paul is not writing to a person. The letter goes out to a group of assemblies (Galatians 1:2), and the command in 5:16 is addressed to all of them at once. We privatise it anyway. Printed over a photograph and handed to a teenager, it becomes a slogan about personal purity and nothing else. That reading is not false so much as far too small, and it skips clean past the trouble Paul actually has in his sights in this stretch of the letter.

The second misuse sounds more pastoral, which is exactly why it does more damage. Someone is struggling, visibly and repeatedly, with drink or with anger or with a relationship they cannot leave, and a well-meaning voice quotes this verse at them: walk by the Spirit and you won’t. The accusation buried underneath is that their continued struggle proves they are not really walking with God. Paul will not have it. These are people he still calls brothers a chapter later, where his instruction for anyone caught in a sin is gentle restoration, with a warning to the restorer to keep an eye on himself (Galatians 6:1). Quoted at someone from outside their struggle, this verse becomes a verdict. Prayed by someone inside their own, it is an invitation. The difference is entirely who is holding it, and towards whom.

Preach 5:16 on its own and you preach half a thought. Immediately before it, Paul warns the Galatians that a congregation tearing at one another will end up devouring itself (Galatians 5:15). That is the danger verse 16 answers. Not temptation in the abstract, but a particular church that had started to eat itself alive over who was properly in.

If you are giving a talk on this, the passage hands you its own shape. Begin where Paul begins, with a church turning on itself (v15). Then the alternative direction he gives them instead of another rule (v16). Be honest that it will feel like a fight, because he says so himself in the very next breath (v17). Then set the two harvests side by side, the works of the flesh and the fruit of the Spirit (vv19 to 23), and ask the room the question those lists exist to provoke: which of these is this meeting, this rota, this long-running quarrel actually growing? Land it on verse 24, where Paul says the flesh has already been crucified by those who belong to Christ. That is the floor under everything else. It means his closing call to keep step with the Spirit (v25) is not a fresh demand stacked on top, but a summons back to something already true of them.

Because Paul reaches for this command straight after warning a congregation about devouring itself, it is a strong text for a difficult leadership meeting, a small group that has begun sniping under the surface, or a church trying to name why its unity has curdled. Read in that room, the works-of-the-flesh list stops being a private confession sheet and becomes a mirror held up to the meeting itself. It sits well at a baptism, too, where verse 24 gives the new believer’s public step some real weight. The old self is not being managed. It has been put to death.

One practical thing, if you are the one chairing that hard meeting. Name your own item on Paul’s list first, out loud, before anyone else is asked to. It costs something to go first, and I cannot think of anything else that reliably stops verse 19 turning into a catalogue of other people’s faults.

It is the wrong verse for a graveside. It describes a daily contest still going on rather than arrival, and read over a coffin it sounds like unfinished business when what the room needs is rest. And if you do carry it into a tense meeting, read verse 15 aloud before you read verse 16. Skip that and the lists become ammunition for pointing at people who are not present. Start there and everyone in the chairs knows, before a word of application, that Paul is talking about us.

The men unsettling these churches wanted new believers circumcised, and near the end of the letter Paul tells us what was really driving it. They wanted to look good, and to boast, in the “flesh” (Galatians 6:12 to 13). He means the cut itself. A mark on the body, visible, checkable, the thing you could point at to prove you were in. Flesh was their trump card.

Then he picks that same word up in chapter five and uses it for the thing that has to die. I only saw this properly a few years ago and it has not stopped being funny to me, in a grim sort of way. Paul does not go hunting for fresh vocabulary to describe sin. He reaches over, takes the word his opponents are waving about as evidence of holiness, and turns it on them. You want something done to the flesh? Fine. Not a knife. A cross (Galatians 5:24).

It changed how I hear “walk by the Spirit” back in verse 16. For years I read it as Paul steering a sensible middle course between rule-keeping and doing as you please, a third option for people who did not want to join either shouting side. He is not being sensible. He is saying the entire currency the other teachers were trading in, proof you can see, proof you can show someone, has been made worthless. There is one mark that counts now and it cannot be inspected from the outside, which is exactly why the men who wanted a good showing could not bear it.

Paul’s sentence is not hedged, and some weeks I wish it were. Walk by the Spirit, and you won’t fulfil the lust of the flesh. Not you will find it easier. Not you will mostly manage. He states it flat, as fact, and moves straight on.

The only handle I have found on that, and I offer it as a handle rather than a solution, is the word “fulfil”. It is a stronger word than “feel”, and stronger than “want”. Fulfil is what happens at the far end: the thing carried out, the wanting taken all the way to done. Paul is plainly not promising that the craving stops turning up. He says the opposite one line later, that the flesh and the Spirit are set against each other and that you will feel the pull of it (Galatians 5:17). What he seems to be promising is something about the distance between the arriving and the doing, and that walking in company keeps that distance open when on your own it closes in seconds.

I have leaned on that in bad weeks and found it takes the weight. I will not pretend it settles the question. There is a version of me that wants to say the promise is really about the direction of a whole life rather than any given hour, and that version is probably right, and it is also precisely the sort of sentence that costs nothing to write and everything to hear at two in the morning. So I leave it where Paul left it. A flat promise I have not fully cashed, written by a man who elsewhere admitted he kept doing the thing he hated.

Set this verse next to Romans 7:15 to 25 and something goes wrong on purpose. There, Paul says he does not do the good he wants and does the very thing he hates, and he calls himself wretched before he gets anywhere near an answer (Romans 7:24). That is not this voice at all. Galatians 5:16 sounds like a man who is through the door and holding it open for you. Romans 7 sounds like a man still on the wrong side of it, rattling the handle.

People have argued for a very long time over whether Romans 7 describes Paul before Christ or Paul as a Christian, and I am not going to pretend for you that the argument is settled, because it is not. I have read careful people on both sides and come away persuaded by whichever I read last.

What I am sure of is that neither passage survives being read on its own. Galatians 5:16 by itself becomes a standard so tidy that an ordinary bad week starts to look like apostasy. Romans 7 by itself becomes a bedsit you move into: comfortable, permanent, an excuse with a chapter number on it. Held together they say the thing neither says alone, which is that “who will deliver me” and “walk by the Spirit” are not two different kinds of Christian. They are one person on different days, and sometimes inside the same hour. Paul wrote both and shows no sign of embarrassment about it. It took me years to stop being embarrassed that I need both.

There is a hymn I cannot get through honestly. Guide me, O thou great Redeemer, pilgrim through this barren land. It came out of Welsh chapel life, it is sung in churches all over these islands, and it is roared by tens of thousands at rugby internationals, a good many of whom would not say they were praying at all. That last fact interests me more than most of what I have read about this verse.

Because the hymn asks for one thing, over and over, and it is not what you would expect people to ask for. Lead me. Feed me. Hold me up. Nobody is singing strengthen my resolve. It is a request to be walked with, sung by people who worked out long ago that their own legs will not manage the distance, and that is Galatians 5:16 with a tune underneath it.

I have sung it on flat Sundays with half my mind already on lunch. I have also sung it in a week when I had lost, comprehensively and more than once, and could not get the second line out. Same words, same building, an entirely different prayer coming out of the same mouth. That is the bit of this verse I keep returning to. Paul does not ask what mood you are in or how the last fortnight went. He asks which way you are facing, and the honest answer to that can change between one verse of a hymn and the next.

Nearly everything in Galatians needs translating down for a child. Circumcision, the law, being counted righteous, the entire row about who is properly in: you do a great deal of work before you arrive anywhere. Then you hit verse 16 and there is suddenly nothing to translate. Walk. With someone. Children have done that literally, hand held, since before they can remember, and they already know the difference between walking beside someone who knows the way and being sent off to find it themselves.

So I do not reach for a clever picture. I tell them the true thing, which is the harder job. I tell them the wanting does not stop. Not when they are grown, not for me, and no vicar has quietly got past it either. What changes is who they are walking with, and so which way they end up going most of the time.

Children take that better than adults expect, because they already know it if you ask them. Every reward chart on a fridge, every promise they have broken to themselves by Wednesday, teaches the same lesson: wanting to be good and actually managing it are two different things, and nobody has ever explained to them why. Paul explains why. And his answer is not a bigger chart with better stickers. It is a hand on the shoulder and someone stronger going the same way. Hand a child that and they have something they can use on a bad afternoon, instead of something to recite in assembly and forget by the school gate.

• 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/.