Hey, welcome back. We're here in week 16 together of our journey with Jesus. I hope your life is being transformed. I hope you're experiencing His grace and His mercy each and every day. It's new every morning, as the prophet said. And oh boy, it's just great to live in the grace of God, isn't it? I hope you're experiencing forgiveness and love and a whole new life. We're four months together in this series, and I don't know if you began it as a brand new believer in Christ, or if you're just looking to get a good foundation in the Word and a foundation in your walk with the living Word.
But I pray this has been really helpful for you. Feel free to reach out and let me know how things are going, and I'll connect with you gladly one-on-one. Today, we're going to finish out a little bit more about the grace of God, living by grace, and what that means. We talked already about how we're not under a law. It's not like the New Testament. It's an updated version of the Law of Moses that made it more hard and higher standards. I mean, you read the Sermon on the Mount, and if you have done that already, you talk about high standards.
I mean, it's just off the charts. What Jesus came to give us, though, wasn't an impossible life. He came to give us a life that is out of this world and is only possible because the grace of God is at work in us. And that's the main thing to keep in mind as you walk this walk out. Yes, there are issues in life, and probably they're coming to the surface in you, especially as we look at forgiveness, the Father's heart, things like that. There will be things coming to the surface continually. The worst thing that we could do is start making a checklist of all the places that we fall short.
You know what we're doing when we do that is working together with the accuser of the brethren, not the Lord Jesus Christ. He's there for the grace. He's there to give us everything that we need for life and godliness, and He has. So, last week, we closed out by looking at Hebrews 4 and verse 16, where it says, therefore, let us draw near boldly or with confidence to the throne of grace so that we might obtain mercy and find grace in our time of need. And I want to talk to you about that today, how to go after the grace of God and tap into something which is a power that truly is supernatural, that's available to us. A lot of what, you know, early on in our walk with God, and really for the rest of our days, we tend to slip into this thing where we think that being a good Christian means behaving well, don't sin, do this, don't do that, do your devotions, don't do the bad things, and we get back, we're always aiming and getting back into this legalistic, law-based, external standards, tell me what to do and I'll do it kind of life.
And we have a better way available, and I want to really make sure that we all get this in our foundation early on. We have access to strength from on high, which means that Jesus said, I'm not leaving you with a law that's going to make your life more difficult, I'm leaving you with a grace that's going to make you feel like you're flying now instead of running on the ground. So instead of striving, we're learning to live by grace. Remember we looked at Romans 7, the last half of that chapter, where Paul gets honest and he puts out there how, oh my goodness, the thing that I want to do, I don't do, and the thing that I don't want to do, I find myself doing.
And you remember he said a couple of times, nevertheless, not I, but sin that dwells in me. Oh, in my mind, I love the law of God, but in my flesh, it's like I'm serving the law of sin. I got these bad habits in me that just won't die. My flesh, meaning my inner man, my, not the deepest inner man where the spirit is, but everything in me has got this drive to have my desires satisfied with things. And boy, have I trained myself on how to satisfy them in corrupting ways. And so we have this thing that we're back and forth in. And what I want to share with you today is that the key to overcoming in that battle, the way that we win this war within is to feed the right part of us, to feed our spirit.
I heard a story about a guy who was new in Christ. He was kind of a gangster type. And he, um, he was talking with his pastor. He was asking him, how is it going with you? And how's it going with Jesus? And he goes, Oh, pastor, I feel like he was from New York past. I feel like I got two dogs fighting inside of me. And he goes, Oh, wow. Two dogs. What's that like? And you know, which one's winning? You know, the one I'm feeding is going to win.
And, uh, there was a real like word of wisdom on that. There is a war on the inside and the flesh, boy, is it compelling? It really is, you know, name your craving, whatever it is, whatever desire we talked about desires, name your craving and what sinful way you found to satisfy that craving. Boy, is it a pull? It's a real pull. Remember I had a friend who worked for a pool company and he'd just gotten saved and he'd been given over to lust. Like that was his thing when he was in sin.
And, um, they went to a pool and there were women laying around the pool in bikinis. And, um, he was there and the guy that he was working with was mentoring him, discipling him in Christ. And he, he went and looked at his friend and he said, I don't know if I could do this. And he said, yeah, you can, you can do this thing. He said, well, the, the devil's lying to you right now. So, so don't listen to the lie. And he goes, yeah, but he's really good at the lie.
And you know, this war is going on in this poor kid's mind. He's trying to overcome his former lusts. And, and what I want to share is that we have access to help with that. And it's called the grace of God. So if you were to open up your Bible for a minute, come with me to Galatians 5. What we learned from Galatians or from Romans 7 is that our identity is not with our sin. Remember it's, Paul kept saying, it's not me, it's sin that dwells in me. It's like a disease that I've got on the inside.
I don't identify with that, but it does bother. It infects me. If you have a disease, you know about it because there's symptoms. You have a fever, you, you feel achy, whatever you feel weak and tired, or you're sweating. You get symptoms because of something at work on the inside. Sinful behavior in our life is a symptom. It's not the issue. The issue is we still have sin that dwells in us. And sometimes we give into those cravings. We feed the flesh is what that's called. We crave, we cave, we give into that sin.
And now we've actually given it more power again because we've fed our flesh. Now we have to feed our body, right? You have to eat food or you'll die. We have to feed our soul or we'll get depressed, we'll fall apart. But have you ever considered how important it is to feed our spirit? That we talked about this right out of the gate in lesson one. And Galatians 5 gives a really simple formula for success. Simple, I said, not easy. And the reason why it's not easy is because all of our life we've been trained to think, I got to take care of the immediate needs.
I'm hungry, I got to eat. I'm tired, I got to sleep. You know, we're trained in our minds to meet the immediate need instead of being wise and thinking deeper and going longer term. So Galatians 5, he starts, I'm going to start reading in verse 13. For you were called to freedom, brethren, but don't turn your freedom into an opportunity for the flesh. Instead, through love, serve one another. The whole law is fulfilled with one statement. You shall love your neighbor as yourself. But if you bite and devour each other, you're going to be consumed.
And he says this, verse 16, here it is. This one verse, Galatians 5, verse 16, is the secret to successfully walking with God. But I say, walk in the spirit and you will not carry out the desire of the flesh. There it is. Simple, right? Just walk in the spirit. Easier said than done. I forget, I think it was George MacDonald, the great theologian who once said, Christianity, Christianity has never been tried and found wanting. It's been found difficult and left untried. So I wonder what it would be like for us if we could always walk in the spirit.
And I'll break that down for you in a minute. But let me just finish reading here. For the flesh sets its desire against the spirit and the spirit against the flesh. They're in opposition to one another so that you will not do the things that you please. There we are in Romans 7 again, right? We've got the flesh, we've got the spirit, two dogs at war on the inside of us. Which one's going to win? The one that we're feeding. If you're led by the spirit, you're not under the law, right?
We looked into this. If we're walking with the Lord and we're living our life based on what the Father is saying to us, we're looking around and we're going about our days, always aware of the fact that we now have a God living in us, Christ in us, the hope of glory, then there's no opportunity for sin. I mean, you've probably experienced this already. Fathom yourself in a moment of worship. One of those moments where you're just caught up in the presence of God. Maybe it's been in private. Maybe it's been a church.
And you're just so aware and open to the love of God at work in your life. And you just know I'm with God right now. I'm like in heaven in my spirit with him. And it's just ecstasy. It's like heaven on earth. Can you imagine in that moment, if the temptation to sin came along, would you even take a second look at it? Probably not. That's the goal. That's the ideal. When we're so caught up in this thing where we're with Jesus in heavenly places and the inner man is so connected with heaven, then these things that are temptations, they just, we kind of look at those and go, why did I ever do that in the first place?
You'll discover that along your journey with the Lord as he heals you, as he strengthens you in your spirit, as you grow and mature in Christ, you're going to find the things that used to be a temptation are no longer a temptation. You're going to be able to walk right past it. For me, alcohol was a big one when I was new in Christ. I now can walk past the bar. I can smell the smells. You know what I'm talking about. If you were in alcohol, I can smell the smells.
I could see the things that are in there, the people that are in there, not even a whip of a temptation, not a tiniest little bit. Am I tempted to go in there and get trashed again like I used to? Why? I've grown and matured in Christ. My spirit is strong. So those two dogs, I now got a bulldog and a chihuahua on the inside in that regard. So he goes on, describes some of the deeds of the flesh and he says they're obvious. So I'm not going to take the time to read them.
You and I both know. The amazing thing is before we came to Christ, even something inside of us called our conscience was telling us this is not right. Something not right about the way I'm living, the way I'm doing life right now. And usually what we do is we kind of quiet that voice down. We say, be quiet. I don't want to hear it anymore. And we move on. Now that we've been awakened to it, the deeds of the flesh are obvious. So notice it says the deeds of the flesh.
If you're in Christ, you now have to resist the spirit that's in you to engage in sin. The first thing you resist is this voice, right? The spirit of God, our own spirit and communion with God, Christ in us, our awakened and resurrected conscience. It's all saying, stop, don't do it. Don't go there. Don't do that. So the deeds of the flesh involve us first shutting down that voice and saying, I'm going to press right through that. I don't care that this might bring consequence. I don't care that it's wrong.
I don't care that it's going to harm my life and probably the lives of those I love. I'm pressing through that. The deeds of the flesh require effort, in other words. But then he goes on, he says, but the fruit of the spirit, the fruit of the spirit's love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, self-control and gentleness or gentleness and self-control. The fruit of the spirit. Now I'm living with all of those things. If we're satisfied with those nine fruits of the spirit that are coming naturally out of us, then we're not fulfilling the lusts of the flesh anymore.
We're living a whole different way. It's heaven's way. It's the way that makes the world around us glad that we entered the room because there's a lover in the house. There's somebody who just brings an atmosphere. It's like a garden that smells like heaven that just walked in the room, but it's called the fruit of the spirit. If you ever walk through an apple orchard in the fall, our family goes apple picking every fall. We love doing that together as a family. But have you ever gone through an apple orchard and heard that?
The tree just going, and then it's got apples out on the end of its branches. No, trees don't strive to bear fruit. Nothing in nature strives to bear fruit. All it has to do is have roots in the ground so that it can absorb the nutrients and the water that it needs. It has to be out in the sun so that the leaves can do their photosynthesis thing. And the very natural byproduct of that tree being alive is that it's going to bear fruit. So it is with you and me.
We have the spirit of God on the inside of us. If we're feeding and nurturing that spirit on the inside of us, we will bear the fruits of the spirit. They're all of these things. Those who belong to Christ have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. So those things are in the past. We talked about what got crucified with Christ. Then maybe from time to time we need to revisit that. In fact, that's one of the reasons for breaking bread for the celebration of communion, which I'll teach on in a few weeks.
To be able to sit in the Lord's presence and go back to the cross. For us to go back to the day that we picked up our own cross and began to follow after him. That day when we break that bread, we're back in that place. And if there's anything still alive of sin that's in us, that's dragging us back down, then we say, I'm putting that on the cross. I crucified you. What are you doing here right now? How are you still in my life? How do you still have some kind of control or sway over me when I crucified you with Christ?
And every time we celebrate communion, hear the nail of that thing on that cross. And by faith, believe that now on the other side of the grave, you're going to be free from that thing. So what we do in walking in the spirit, it means that we turn toward God. We access that. So not only like, God, I need your help right now. I'm being tempted. But we also remember and recognize I've got a spirit on the inside of me that's also more powerful than this thing that's fighting against me, than this flesh that's trying to drag me back down into it.
We have, we've been endued with power from on high, not just to work miracles, to heal the sick and work miracles and so on, but also to work the greatest miracle of all, which is to be transformed into the image and likeness of God, to be back to what we were created to be, to be fully restored to how God intended us to be in the first place. That's the best, most amazing miracle of all. And it happens moment by moment, day by day. How do we walk in the spirit? We begin by maintaining an awareness of God all around us. In him, we live and move and have our being and also being aware of Christ in us, that we can't get away from him. He is always in us.
His promise is fulfilled. I will never leave you or forsake you, Jesus said to his disciples. And it's true for us now because he lives inside of us, tapping into that, being aware of that, even and especially when we're being tempted to sin. This is how we come boldly before the throne of grace. We tend to think, if I'm going to come boldly before the throne of grace to obtain mercy and find grace to help in my time of need, I got to go get to God's presence. And the truth is you don't have to go anywhere to get to God's presence. It's inside.
So what am I doing? When I'm being tempted and I'm being sucked into something harmful and destructive, I'm going to turn inside because where's the throne of grace? Right here. Jesus has already taken up residence. He sits on the throne, not just in heaven, but the throne of our hearts. We even throned him in that place. We turn toward that throne of grace, find mercy, find the grace we need in that moment. So here's what we do. The fruit of the spirit happens when we're intentional about a few things and they're all involved in feeding our spirit.
We already know this. We looked at it the first week, be in the Bible. Your spirit loves reading the Bible. You know why? Because it already knows what the words on the page say. And when we read the Bible, our spirit gets excited. Our inner man is happy because our mind is finally catching up with what our inner man already knows. That's the power of the word of God. It breaks down deception in case we ever start justifying sin. Boy, are we good at that, aren't we? Say, well, maybe it's not so bad.
I mean, you read that passage yourself in Galatians and read all the things that Paul lists in there. And I'll bet you found yourself, as I have, justifying behaving in some of those ways over the years. And the scripture is there to say, nope, nope, that's not it. That's not God. It's not right. And you know it. So reading the word of God, being in the place of prayer, spending that time, not just talking at God, although we do make our requests known to God, but also sitting quietly and listening for his voice, asking God to commune with you and you with him, like Adam and Eve, walking with God in the cool of the day.
Whatever time of day it is, I hope that you've by now made that time to sit in the presence of the Lord, in his word, and in that place. Worship. Feed your spirit. Your spirit loves, loves, loves to sing songs to the Lord and to live a lifestyle of worship. In fact, your spirit's probably, well, it is tuned in to what they're singing around the throat of God 24-7, because you are seated with Christ in heavenly places. So your spirit's there. And boy, does your spirit love it when you use your mouth to express what your spirit's experiencing in heavenly places.
It's just a powerful, powerful thing. So that's feeding your spirit. How else do we walk in the spirit? It's being intentional. It's moment by moment. I know it's easy. Life begins to happen. You get to work. You get involved in whatever your day's things are, your chores, your relationships, and so on. It can be really easy to lose the conscious awareness of God in us and around us at any given time. So being intentional means to turn our thoughts toward God. Some people make a practice, and some of the ancient wise, like the monks and the desert fathers would pray like every hour on the hour or at certain hours of the day, like noontime prayer, mid-afternoon, evening prayer.
They would take times to be intentional, to refocus all of their attention on the Lord and on his presence, which has always been there. But it's just that we're not always aware of it. When it comes to sin and when it rises up, resist it. But you don't have to strive. There's no need to fight and just make it all about the flesh. Resisting temptation doesn't look like, I can't do this thing. Most of the time when we find ourselves in a position where we're being tempted to sin, it's because we put ourselves in a position to be tempted.
So for example, you're a man, you struggle with pornography addiction, you're looking at your computer screen or your phone, you're alone. It really is much simpler than it seems to just put the thing down or walk away from the screen. I mean, that's the simple answer, right? Flee the temptation. Get out of that situation. Maybe you're tempted to gossip, and that's your sin of choice. Because it actually, you know, physiologically, did you know that when you gossip, it actually releases endorphins, the feel good hormone that we have in our body.
Why? It makes us feel good when we cut someone else down in the sight of others. It makes us feel elevated in ourselves. Maybe gossip is your thing. So maybe what needs to happen in fleeing temptation for that, keep away from the people that you're prone to gossip with. Because you know that there are certain friends that you think of right away, you get some news, you hear something about somebody, you can't wait to let them know you're on your phone right away, or you can't wait to see them again. Gossip is sin, plain and simple.
It tears people down, and it causes all kinds of strife, maybe more harmful than the other sins of the flesh, because of how many people get affected by it. Whatever the sin is, what I'm saying is, remember Jesus, in his prayer that he taught us to pray, he said, you know, lead me not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. Lead us not into temptation, temptation. And I saw a funny bumper sticker years ago. It said, lead me not into temptation. I can find it myself. So let's not find it ourselves.
We want to walk in the spirit, keep away from the environments where we recognize I am prone to fall into sin when I'm in such and such a place. If you want to overcome sin, that's a really good, easy way to begin. And finally, I'll urge you again, be patient. Fruit takes time. Fruit cannot be rushed. You can't make a tree bear fruit out of season. You can't make a brand new sapling bear fruit. I planted an apple tree four years ago. Last year, I got my first apples off of it.
Why? It needed some time to get roots. It needed some time for me to prune it and shape it just right. And it needed time to get the leaves and all the things going so that it can make apples. And I'm going to make myself an apple pie this year out of that because I've been patient. Be patient with yourself. Jesus is just getting started with you. No matter how long we've been walking with God, Jesus is not finished. He began a good work in you and he is going to be faithful to complete it.
Only keep a mindset on the spirit. Be led by the spirit, which means put your spirit out in front in your life. And don't treat Jesus like a backdoor option or like a Sunday morning thing or, you know, something or devotions for 10 minutes a day kind of a thing. But keep your spirit out in front of you all the day long and watch what happens when life begins to come alive with the colors of heaven and with the atmosphere that we now live in in heavenly places. God bless you. Have an awesome week with Jesus. I'll see you again next time.