Archived Daily Manna | Rejoice Fellowship | A mission to release people to rejoice in the world.

Message: Some translations depict today’s Scripture as “do this, not that” — that is, “Walk by the Spirit, and do not gratify the flesh.” But the better translation is subtler: “Walk by the Spirit, and then you will not gratify the desires of the flesh.” The first verb (“walk”) is indeed imperative, but the second (“gratify”) is not; it is subjunctive. When we are walking in the Spirit, we do not even want to gratify the flesh, at least in a sinful way. Under the Law, the Israelites sought to change their actions to conform to an external set of laws, the laws of God. (This included sacrifices made in atonement for wrong conduct.) But the very nature of this struggle changed in character when the Holy Spirit indwelled us. Before fleshing out the difference, let’s examine an interesting side-effect of the Bible. While they do not realize it, naive atheists and agnostics who are “good” people, who wants to “do the right thing,” are inadvertently living under a second-hand version the Law of Moses. Their society took its values from the Bible and they have unconsciously adopted, as their own, a watered-down moral code based upon it. They do not grasp the fundamental nature of Jesus Christ and thus treat Him as a legalist rather than a savior. Their naiveté as to the source of their personal values is astonishing. Do they think that people just adopt moral values out of innate goodness? Consider the historical difference between the West and China/Japan when it comes to taking human life, or slavery. For that matter, look at the difference between the Jews at the time of Christ and the Greco/Roman culture. The idea that taking human life or holding another as a chattel slave might be immoral, in and of itself, was nonsense to the Romans (and the Greeks, and pretty much everybody else). This is not to diminish the huge hypocrisy one finds, continually, in twenty centuries of the Judeo-Christian world. The church itself became gradually and terribly corrupt after Constantine co-opted Christianity in the 4th century. But the outcry against the hypocrisy is proof that the morality exists. Consider how much louder the outrage is, today, against Hitler's murder of six million Jews, or chattel slavery in the U.S. before 1865; and then compare these to the mild reaction against Stalin or Mao, who each murdered at least fifty million people, or Japanese genocide and enslavement of Koreans and Chinese in the mid-20th century. The Western world, informed by Judeo-Christian morality, is repulsed by Nazi genocide and Southern racial slavery ; whereas the East, even today, seems comparatively unabashed by the even more horrendous crimes of China, Japan, Cambodia, etc. Jacob Wrestling Angel|Rembrandt But, to get back to the main point of today's Scripture, Christianity changed the very character of the struggle between good and evil within an individual. We do not struggle between our own will and the rules God has given us. Paul forever refutes the idea that we can defeat temptation by willpower. We have lost. We have surrendered. Yet our faith in the Christ, and the Holy Spirit, might yet defeat obedience to the flesh. We do not struggle to follow an external code, which we will be punished for transgressing; we struggle to find true faith in God, through Christ, and let them worry about it! It is a very hard distinction to see, in practical terms, until we grasp the sign that one is living in the Spirit, rather than living by the Law: A mature Christian tries to do good, but does not feel guilty when he fails. He feels remorse; but guilt is an emotion of the flesh. As we come to know Christ better and better, we are more and more driven by love rather than guilt: Love of God and love of our fellow human being. In psychological terms, our growth in faith is characterized by a complete, 100% internalization of morality. A sin committed in secret and a sin discovered and published to the world are not different to us. This ties into the notion of being reborn in Christ. We might say that when we accept Christ, our reborn self is an infant. And like a human infant, a spiritual infant grows in size, strength, and knowledge as he or she matures.