[0:00] Now seeking God's blessing and help, we turn back to Galatians chapter 5 and we look at that section from verse 16 But I say walk by the spirit and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh For the desires of the flesh are against the spirit and the desires of the spirit are against the flesh But if you are led by the spirit you are not under the law And you will find as you look through that section that there are two ways of walking Walking in works and walking with fruit Those of you who are of a different generation to some of the ones in here
[1:04] Those who are of a different registration or a different vintage will remember this portion of scripture was always used by the Reverend D.A. McRae when fencing the tables Twice a year he always fenced the tables in his own congregation and this was exactly the passage that he read every time And I remember when he retired and he was staying out in Mary and we used to go downtown and say I remember asking him why he used the same chapter And he said this was always the chapter old Norman MacLeod and old used And this was the he carried on the tradition that the old ministry had used as a format for the communion service It's a wonderful chapter when you read it, when you look at it and I'm sure a lot of you have studied it well You will see that it contains a number of items which are the work of the flesh
[2:11] There's seventeen I think are mentioned and more It doesn't say what the rest are but there are more than seventeen There's seventeen are specifically mentioned and the fruit of the spirit there's only ten items mentioned Plus Now you might wonder why do we have to have seventeen removed to be replaced by ten Now I'm not a great mathematician, I never was but I can't figure it out either Until you realize that the fruit of the spirit needs the space to produce more fruit and more fruit and more fruit If I can use this building as an example When you came into it first, before you came into it first I remember being in the small, what is the small hall now
[3:13] At the end there with the minister and Angus Halleck and we sat down and had a word of prayer before anything was done Before the place even became the property of the Free Church And being blessed in there just the few of us together praying that God would open that door Open a building and provide a building for the church and for you as a congregation Because of your faithfulness to the word of God And as I said in the prayer there it horrifies me today to, not today but yesterday to read in the paper That the church of Scotland minister had asked forgiveness from a certain group of people For the way they had spoken out from the word of God Though it's a poor show when the word of God has to be excused for being preached
[4:14] And I hope it never happens in your congregation and I'm sure it won't But you need to be excused for speaking the truth Even when we can't get it right we make mistakes But when we try and keep as close to the truth as possible God will honour those who honour Him I mentioned seventeen items that are being removed to be replaced by other items You remember this building?
[4:51] You remember all the corridors, the partitions, the divisions, the items that were closed off The dark recesses of this building?
[5:03] You can't see them though, can you? There's no sign of them Where are they? Well they were demolished by faithful servants And so it is with the word of God Faithful servants can demolish the divisions and the departments that people have made for themselves And the compartments that they're hiding in, even in darkness And it's opened out to the light And you can see from end to end of the building And you can see what God wants to do with His church and with His people He wants them to have the light, to accept the light of God Why was this necessary?
[5:43] Well, we read in chapter 3 of Genesis And we have to go back to the beginning to find the cause Because, I'd better be careful here because there are medical experts in here But when you have some ailment, you need to go back to the root of the trouble No problem Well we go back to Genesis chapter 3 And probably the previous chapter before that In verse 17, I think it tells when God warned Adam Adam, what would happen if he ate of this one tree in the garden Don't touch it For the day the whitest of it thou shalt truly die And the serpent came in And the serpent beguiled Eve And told her Well, did God really say Was that really what God meant?
[6:41] Did God mean that you would die? I don't think God meant that at all Eat of the fruit because it's there for your enjoyment And Eve took of it And Eve gave it to her husband And her husband ate it And they were both under the curse Some of you might remember that At the last Communions Which was a target for you as a church To finish it and to be able to worship in it I was involved and I Carelessly fell and broke my leg And if you don't let the circumstances speak to you, they'll destroy you.
[7:37] And I remember thinking, well, this is not the first time I fell. I fell hundreds of times. I fell in many places.
[7:48] Football fields between here and in Ronness, and on Hills, and Harris and Lewis. But this time it was different. I fell and broke my leg.
[8:01] And I remember thinking, well, that's me laid aside. There's nothing I can do about it. It wasn't a dangerous place. It was a place I knew well.
[8:12] I had trampled over it hundreds of times before. And I went out with a warning this day. And I was told to be careful because the ground was slippery. And I went out without a walking stick, without a phone, or anything like that.
[8:27] And on a place that I would never think of as dangerous, I slipped and fell and fractured my leg in two places.
[8:39] And I remember thinking, well, you've fallen many times before and this is your worst fall ever. Until I thought, no, it's not. No, it's not your worst fall.
[8:52] Your first fall was with your father. And he was in a place he knew well. He was walking about in the only place he ever knew, in the Garden of Eden.
[9:04] You were in Adam when he fell. And because you were in Adam when he fell, you fell in Adam. And you're in trouble. This is not your worst fall.
[9:16] This is not your worst fall. The fall in Adam was a lot worse than that. It left you limping from that day on. It left you staggering along life's way.
[9:28] All the time you carry that sign of the fall that you had from the Garden of Eden onwards.
[9:40] You're not a new creature at all. You were there at the creation. In Adam you were. And you fell. You fell. Because he fell in a place he knew well.
[9:57] And this is the danger for us as witnesses that we can fall in the very place that we know best. In church. Or in no neighborhood.
[10:10] Or anywhere else like that. Unless we're very careful. We can fall. You remember Peter. Peter the fisherman.
[10:22] In the boat this day and he saw Jesus walking on the sea. And he wanted to prove that it was Jesus and he said to him, call me.
[10:33] And Peter did that marvelous thing that is not recorded of any other person in the world of God. He got out of the boat and he walked on the sea.
[10:45] We don't know how far he went. But while he looked at Christ he was walking on the sea. While he had his eyes stayed on him, he was walking on the sea.
[10:56] But once he took his eyes off Jesus and looked at his own feelings, he began to sink. He began to go deeper and deeper and deeper into the ocean.
[11:10] Until he called to Christ to save him. And he reached out his hand and grabbed him and saved him. I'm sure you remember these things well.
[11:27] It's always more dangerous when we become complacent. When we become careless. When we forget that we're vulnerable.
[11:40] That we're open to all sorts of dangers. But there's a roaring lion out there waiting to devour us.
[11:59] That is the reason why we have this conflict in this chapter of God's Word in Galatians. Because Adam fell and he was thrown out of the garden and then Jesus had to come and Jesus had to take the form of man and Jesus had to die and Jesus had to be crucified for you and for me if we believe in him.
[12:28] And he shed his blood on Calvary's cross and there's nothing else that is able to save you. Your sins are so horrendous that nothing else has any possibility of washing the stains of sin from your soul.
[12:45] Nothing else but the blood of Christ can cover the stains of sin from my soul and your soul. Nothing but Jesus' blood. And the battle is raging on.
[13:01] And we've got the flesh and the Spirit warring against each other. One wanting its own way. And the Spirit wanting Christ's way and God's way.
[13:12] Because the Spirit is God. And God the Spirit is offering us a way to walk. Circumcision or uncircumcision don't count.
[13:24] The law doesn't count until you come to Christ. And then your desire is to keep the law. But if you live by the law you have to fulfill every little chart of the law.
[13:38] Every little item that's contained in the law you've got to live by it wholeheartedly, completely. Everything. And nothing left amiss. And you can't.
[13:50] If anybody had been able to do that, Christ did not have left the glory he had with the Father in heaven. If anybody else was able to fulfill the law, nobody else would have asked for a saviour.
[14:06] And nobody would have needed a saviour. But because there was none righteous. Not even one. The Word of God tells us. You weren't righteous. I wasn't righteous.
[14:17] He wasn't righteous. Because there was none righteous. A righteous will have to be found.
[14:28] And there was only one. Only one righteous being. And he came and he lived a righteous life. Fulfilled the law completely. But truly. And you're here tonight and you think to yourself, well, I've lived a good life and I haven't done my life. My neighbour or my friends or anybody else any harm and I haven't done my neighbour or my friends or anybody else any harm and I haven't done my life.
[15:05] Anybody else any harm and I haven't done anything that will send me to a place of torment. Well, have you believed in Christ?
[15:18] That's enough to send you to a place of torments if you haven't believed in the finished work of the Lord Jesus Christ. See, all these things that are listed in this passage are the works of the flesh.
[15:40] What is natural to a man? It's natural to a man. Maybe you don't fulfill all of them. But some of them, some of them are following you around.
[15:55] There's a story told about an old man, a man who lived in a black house. And the black house was getting a wee bit dilapidated and he decided to build a new house close by to it.
[16:08] The old black house was of sentimental value to him and it had a lot of stuff that his father and his grandfather and those who had gone before him owned.
[16:19] So he built his new house in classic style and it was furnished and finished and it looked good. And he was down in the black house one day and he said to himself, well, that belonged to the old man.
[16:34] I'll take it home with me and I'll give it pride of bliss in my new home. And every time he went down there was something else in the black house that touched the heart strings and he took it home with him.
[16:49] Clearly, most of what was in the black house was in the new house. And so it is with us if we're not careful. What we thought we had discarded can follow us and be our pets and we take them home and nourish them and feed them and keep them.
[17:14] And they'll destroy us eventually if we're not careful. We pray to God that he keeps us and looks at us and looks after us.
[17:28] Well, I'm not going to go through the list of items that the work of the flesh listed us here. But we know that work, if we have to do it like that.
[17:40] And the work that is mentioned here, they say it's a wage and the wages of sin is death. The wages of sin is death.
[17:52] Now the confirmation of that is that Christ died for your sins and for my sins if we believe in him.
[18:03] Believe in his finished work. Christ died, paid, he was paid the wages of sin. Death. Didn't deserve it.
[18:14] It wasn't his sins. Your sins and my sins caused his suffering and his death. It's difficult to take, isn't it, that you are responsible and that I was responsible for the death of Jesus.
[18:33] You and I put the Son of God to the cross. It's difficult to accept that we were responsible. Were you there when I crucified my Lord?
[18:47] Were you there when they nailed him to the tree? The hymn writer asked the question. And until you say, yes, I was there.
[18:58] I was there. But for me he did it. For me he died. For me he bled. And you will find in your own soul tonight a response to the call of Christ when he says to you, come unto me, all ye who labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.
[19:27] Are you resting in where you are outside of Christ? There's no rest there. There's no rest there. There's no rest there. Let's look at the fruit.
[19:41] We sang about the tasting of God. Test and see that God is good.
[19:55] I mentioned Reverend E. A. Macray earlier on. I remember him using an illustration during a communion of Sabbath down the road.
[20:12] And using this very portion of scripture, as I said, which he always used, and using an imaginary apple.
[20:27] And in his own imitable way he could just imagine this apple in his hands, turning it and twisting it and looking at it and admiring its color and its shape and its freshness and its fullness and its firmness.
[20:42] And looking at it and seeing how beautiful it was. But he had no definite proof of what it was like until he bit into it.
[20:55] Until he ate it and tasted it. Then he knew that it was good. And I remember going to a kish in Christ, having gone through the night thinking about this, what it was.
[21:12] But what I had remembered of Mr. Macray's illustration. And I had thought about it all night and I was thinking to myself, I would be good if I could, just if I'm asked to speak to the question, if I could use this as an illustration.
[21:30] I suppose it's taking somebody else's skills and using them for yourself to your advantage. But that's the way we are. We use somebody else's words all the time.
[21:43] And in the usual, when I had to step during the day of questioning, everybody's on edge, wondering what the question's going to be and who's going to be first up and who's going to be last up.
[21:57] Everybody else seems to have said everything you wanted to say. And the elder got up and he gave the question as pissed and seeing that God is good.
[22:12] That was the question. That was the question. And I had my answer. And I was able to speak. As the Lord gave me a trance.
[22:24] Because I remembered what my friend had spoken of with the apple. And I had a trance. And I had a trance. And I had a trance. But the illustration is only a glimmer of what's behind what God intends us to understand.
[22:38] You can't really know what God is like and what Jesus is like and what the Holy Spirit is like until you taste it for yourself.
[22:51] Other people can't tell you how good God is, how good Christ is, how good the Holy Spirit is. But until you taste it for yourself, you can't really say that God is good.
[23:06] The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy and peace.
[23:24] What a little bundle of grace that is. A little bundle of grace. It is a bowl of beautiful fruit.
[23:35] Love, joy and peace in your heart. Within, within, you've got love, joy and peace.
[23:47] They're not normal, maternal things for you. They were given to you. They've grown as fruit in your life. Do you have joy? Do you have love?
[23:58] Do you have joy? Do you have love? Or you might love somebody because you were attracted to them.
[24:09] But the love of God is shown to us not because we were attracted. The love of God is shown to us because God is love. God loved us in spite of ourselves and in spite of what we are.
[24:25] We weren't lovable. We weren't desirable. We were anything but. We were strange sheep on a wilderness journey.
[24:38] And God sent the Good Shepherd to find us and to shepherd us back to the fold.
[24:53] Patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness. The fruit that you show to others. To others. You share this with your fellow believers and non-believers.
[25:09] Don't forget that you're their Bible. Don't forget that you're the open letter that they read when they don't read anything else. They look at you and see how you behave and how I behave.
[25:21] And sadly to say we let them down so often. A paragraph here and a paragraph there that doesn't seem to comply with what we profess.
[25:37] A gentleness, self-control. Some things that we have to control by bringing our causes to God.
[25:54] Things that make us angry and make us fume within. We've got to control it. We've got to think and stop and say, well, how would Christ deal with this?
[26:09] How would God? And it's not to deal with a person who did this to us. And we have to control ourselves and be faithful to the Word of God.
[26:22] Self-control. Self-control. It's a different area to master.
[26:41] Self-control. We have to do it. Whatever we do. Whether we eat or whether we drink or whether we do this or do that. We've got to do it in a controlled way.
[26:53] Whether we speak or whether we argue. We do our argument in a self-controlled manner. The spirit.
[27:06] The spirit. We sometimes feel that the spirit is sort of given a sort of a third party.
[27:23] A place in a lot of preaching. I'm not saying all preaching. Don't get me wrong. But the spirit is so important. The spirit is as important as God and Christ.
[27:37] Because they are one. Though they are three, they are one. There are three persons in the Godhead. Father, Son and Holy Spirit. One God.
[27:49] One God. One God. And we can't begin to understand it. But we know the spirit is of great importance. We know the spirit works on the earth.
[28:01] We know that the spirit awakens the souls that are dead. We know that the spirit covered the Virgin Mary. And he is the son of God. Shows you the equality of the spirit and the father.
[28:24] Walk in the spirit. Put your foot in his footsteps. Walk beside him. Walk with him. Put him before you.
[28:35] So that you are not walking an unknown territory. If the spirit goes on ahead of you, you follow. And when I say you, I mean me particularly.
[28:51] Because I need the guidance. And I need the help of the Holy Spirit as I journey along life's way.
[29:03] I started with an illustration about the church. And when I look at it, and when I see you inside it, and when I see the young people here, it's hard for me to remember all the dust and the rubble and the upheaval and the total case that was in here.
[29:33] And I see everything lit by the light. And the light shining on all corners. And there's nothing hidden. So it is. So it should be with the church.
[29:46] With you and your fellow worshippers here. Nothing hidden. Nothing hidden from each other. Share your burdens. Share your problems.
[29:57] Tell a person if you're in trouble. I'm sure they'll be able to help you. I'm sure they'll be willing to help you. I'm sure they'll bring you to someone who is able to do for you what they can't do themselves.
[30:10] Make it an open plan your life before them. So that you can really be honest with each other. And share not only the word of God, but the problems of humanity together.
[30:28] So let us walk in the spirit and not do the work of the flesh. May God bless our time together.
[30:40] And may God bless you as a congregation. May God bless you. And it gives me great joy to be with you. Even though I am unable to, to utter my heartfelt thoughts about this place.
[31:01] And how it gladdens my heart to see so many of you out here to listen to a manager preaching. But I thank God that you have been able to come and that God will get the glory out of this building.
[31:19] And your faithfulness to his word. Let's close with a word of prayer. Eternal God, we give thanks for this evening, Geraldton. For thy people here and those who are unable to attend.
[31:32] And those who are in the hospital and those who are unwell at this time. For whom the night can be a long time. And the breaking of days so far away as the struggle with the issues of life.
[31:47] Bless those who are near life's journey's end. And when we pray for them, we know not how near that end we are ourselves. And we ask that whatever lies ahead of us, that God would do for us and go before us.
[32:02] Bless us now, a sweet part of one from the other. Help us to sing thy places with joy in our hearts. And forgive us our sins for Jesus' sake. Amen. Always be Tanner. Thank you. Yes, it is so great that we world love that.
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