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In touch

Up-to-the-minute jumping-off points for sermons, linking the reading to the latest news and global issues

Resisting the flesh

The fruits of the Spirit must resist the works of the flesh (Galatians 5.19-21a).

 

Context

“With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil - that takes religion,” is a comment attributed to physicist Steven Weinberg (1933-2021). Now, history provides many examples of religious atrocities – the Partition of India and the Central African Republic conflict, for example But history also shows Weinberg to have been mistaken in implying that religion was the sole reason for these events. Think of the atrocities that occurred under the atheistic regimes of Josef Stalin and Pol Pot, for example. Nonetheless, his assertion raises the question: Why do religious people do evil? Moreover: Why do they try to justify their evil on religious grounds?

Daily mass slaughter has become so normalised that our news media now select which massacres to report and which to ignore. Killing and maiming on a huge scale is routinely carried out and supported by authorities and individuals who claim to be religious (just as it always has been) and many self-styled Christians are just as heavily involved as adherents of any other faith traditions.

Religion, proclaimed by believers as giving meaning and purpose to their lives, seems to have as much capacity for inspiring evil as good. If we seek to resist such perversion of religion, it’s not enough to be horrified by the suffering inflicted and supported by religious people. We must pray and meditate and reason our way to identifying and rooting out the causes that underlie and influence religious motivations for doing evil, and replacing them with motivations for doing good.

 

Ideas for sermons or interactive talks

If only St Paul had found another word to use in place of ‘flesh’ (Greek: σάρξ, pronounced ‘sarx’), later Christians might have understood the breadth of what he was discussing, and become less hung up on sex! Of course he was referring to inappropriate sexual behaviour, but this is only one small aspect of the problem he addressed.

As anything more than a cursory reading of the text makes clear, “flesh” is, for Paul, shorthand for the entirety of our sinful nature and our tendency to act according to worldly desires and impulses, rather than be guided by the Holy Spirit. It's not simply about the physical body, but rather that powerful aspect of our nature that motivates us towards sin and rebellion against Christ-like behaviour. Paul lists fifteen “works of the flesh” of which only one is exclusively sexual and, at the end, he adds “and things like these”, making it clear that the list is not exhaustive.

Moreover, Paul does not invite us to debate whether “fornication” is a worse sin than “enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions” etc. The point is that ALL of these are “works of the flesh”, and ALL of them are to be shunned in favour of the “fruits of the Spirit”.

But it’s not simply a matter of choosing one over the other. Nurturing and growing the fruits of the Spirit within ourselves, our families, our churches and our communities empowers us to resist the “works of the flesh”.

 

Questions for discussion

• Do we regard some works of the flesh as more sinful than others? If so, why?
• Pick three “works of the flesh” that trouble you, and discuss which “fruits of the Spirit” are required to overcome them.
• Which “fruits of the Spirit” do we find it hardest to nurture in ourselves and in our church? Do we struggle to be completely honest about this with ourselves and other people? If so, why?

Robert Beard is an NHS worker and Church of England priest.

 

Check-in

Connecting faith with everyday, real-life issues for young people

The end of the school year is in sight.

If you live in Scotland or Northern Ireland, that finish line is just days away. Sadly, if you’re English or Welsh, you have to hang in for a few more weeks but, either way, everyone is a lot closer to the end of the school year than the beginning.

How’s your year been? What words would you use to describe it?

Hopefully for a lot of us, we can use words like ‘fun’, ‘enjoyable’ and ‘fulfilling’. But inevitably those words won’t cover everyone’s experience. Other words like “tough”, “lonely” or “challenging” might be more accurate. In fact, for some of us, those words don’t even begin to cover how tricky our year has been.

Let’s throw some other words into the mix: love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.

How do those words make you feel? This year, whether it has been easy or hard, if we’ve met people who exude these qualities - teachers, classroom assistants, friends, classmates, cleaners, admin staff, etc - we’ll remember them and the positive impact they had on our day, week or year.

How do you measure how good your school year was? Is it about the best grades? What teams we’ve made? How popular we were?

And yet, if you think about the impact people’s kindness has had on you this year, perhaps the best measure of success is how kind we’ve been?

People can feel trapped by their insecurities, fears and circumstances. Often these things that trap us make us act selfishly or nastily. You don’t have to check out the news too often to see that this isn’t just something that happens in school. But in Galatians, the apostle Paul writes that those who follow Jesus are set free from these traps, and this freedom should be seen in Christians’ words and actions. Their lives should be full of the fruits of the Spirit - love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.

Whatever words we might use to describe our school year, let’s pray that, as we go into the summer, the weeks ahead will be full of the fruits of the Spirit. May we experience those wonderful things both through how we are treated, but also through how we treat others.

Chris Neilands is the co-founder of Play it by Ear drama company, based in Belfast.

 

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