Reflection on Galatians 5:19-23: Living in Step with God’s Spirit

Commentary

Paul is fairly unflinching in his description of the consequence of a world turning its own way, turning its back on God. He says, verse 19, the acts of the flesh are obvious. Sexual immorality, impurity, and debauchery, idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, discourse, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions and envy, drunkenness, orgies and the like.

Now, much of that is obvious, but I’d just like to pick up on a few of the less obvious ones of those. Take envy, for example. I feel like so much of our world, so much of what we aspire to in life, in fact, so much of our economy is actually based on envy. Is a desire to keep up with what others have, of wanting more and more and never really being satisfied with what you have.

And that can very easily become a destructive pattern of never having enough, of over consumption, of waste, of never being satisfied and of being jealous of other people. Or another example, take factions. Factions is very specifically allowing ourselves to be polarized, to be divided and tricked into hating others for someone else’s, probably political gain. Or rage, fits of rage. I sometimes worry that the force which dominates our politics in the Western world is a barely suppressed rage and anger that eats us up and alienates us from each other. It is toxic and addictive. These things are destructive. Somebody once said, we are what we repeatedly do.

And if these are the things which mark our lives, these are the people that we become.