Chapter 8 A Life in the Flesh and A Life in the Spirit Contrasted

A fresh look at the works of the flesh and the fruit of the Spirit.

Even though now an old-hand I am not immune to the perils that can befall the na ve looking foreigner in this part of Latin America so, it is not until I have fully secured my luggage do I sit sipping my caf au-lait purchased with a smattering of Brazilian Portuguese fraco- monte fraco I repeated with some authority and was duly rewarded by a perfect cup of coffee.   A break from Ted Dekker s spellbinding book Black the first in the trilogy The Circle which if you haven t read you really must. Yes Steve, Craig & Ken I am finally reading the books. [They have been sat on my bookshelf since last September and reading novels feels so decadent] Anyway a brief pause from Dekker made room for me to gather my thoughts as I waited for Pico my dear friend who had been delayed courtesy of the gridlock that is the Sao Paulo rush hour. 

Now the works of the flesh are obvious: fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, rivalries, dissensions, factions, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and things like these. I am warning you, as I warned you before; those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God.

By contrast, the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. There is no law against such things. And those who belong to Christ have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. If we live by the Spirit, let us also be guided by the Spirit. Let us not be conceited, competing against one another, envying one another.

~ Galatians 5:19-26

Paul's lists are probably intended to be representative rather than exhaustive. The fifteen "works" and nine "fruit" are in stark contrast to one another. Fung's grouping of the "works of the flesh" into "sexual sins, religious deviations, disorders and sins of intemperance" is helpful. The author has adopted a similar formula by arranging the lists into clusters which, when diffused from the original source or "nature", provides an intriguing picture of both divine and demonic strategies. The base of work/fruit is presented as the root and what follows from there as their respective "fruit". It will be observed that the contrast between the works of the flesh and the fruit of the Spirit is their initiator:

The Flesh
  I (initiate)
 =
 Works
 
    
The Spirit
  God (initiates)
 =
 Fruit 
 

Whatever is attempted in our own strength constitutes works. In contrast, the Spirit doesn't "work". He bears fruit. In the subject Galatian passage, not all the sins listed are carnal sins but they are all self-centered sins. They underline the fact that sin is egocentricity and the flesh is man's innate tendency towards egocentricity. The works of the flesh are the footprints of bondage, the descent into moral and/or religious disillusionment. By clustering these works, it emerges that a pattern of depravity is triggered and this is sketched out for us by Paul: