The highest condition, of course, would be that we had only to grow, not
to fight. It will come some day that all evil shall drop away, and that
to walk in the Spirit will need no effort, but that time has not come
yet. So in addition to all that we have been saying in this sermon, we
must further say that Paul's exhortation has always to be coupled with
the other to fight the good fight. The highest word for our earthly
lives is not 'victory' but 'contest.' We shall not walk in the Spirit
without many a struggle to keep ourselves within that charmed
atmosphere. The promise of our text is not that we shall not feel, but
that we shall not fulfil, the desires of the flesh.
Now this is very commonplace and threadbare teaching, but it is none the
less important, and is especially needful to be strongly emphasised when
we have been speaking as we have just been doing. It is a historical
fact, illustrated over and over again since Paul wrote, and not without
illustration to-day, that there is constant danger of lax morality
infecting Christian life under pretence of lofty spirituality. So it
must ever be insisted upon that the test of a true walking in the Spirit
is that we are thereby fitted to fight against the desires of the flesh.
When we have the life of the Spirit within us, it will show itself as
Paul has said in another place by the righteousness of the law being
fulfilled in us, and by our 'mortifying the deeds of the body.' The gift
of the Spirit does not take us out of the ranks of the combatants, but
teaches us to fight, and arms us with its own sword for the conflict.
There will be abundant opportunities of courage in attacking the sin
that doth so easily beset us, and in resisting temptations which come to
us by reason of our own imperfect sanctification. But there is all the
difference between fighting at our own hand and fighting with the help
of God's Spirit, and there is all the difference between fighting with
the help of an unseen ally in heaven and fighting with a Spirit within
us who helpeth our infirmities and Himself makes us able to contend, and
sure, if we keep true to Him, to be more than conquerers through Him
that loveth us.
Such a conflict is a gift and a joy. It is hard but it is blessed,
because it is an expression of our truest love; it comes from our
deepest will; it is full of hope and of assured victory. How different
is the painful, often defeated and monotonous attempt to suppress our
nature by main force, and to tread a mill-horse round! The joyous
freedom and buoyant hope taught us in the gospel way of salvation have
been cramped and confined and all their glories veiled as by a mass of
cobwebs spun beneath a golden roof, but our text sweeps away the foul
obstruction. Let us learn the one condition of victorious conflict, the
one means of subduing our natural humanity and its distracting desires,
and let nothing rob us of the conviction that this is God's way of
making men like angels. 'Walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfil the
lusts of the flesh.'