Why Freedom Is Not a License to Sin but to Love
Christian freedom is not a license to sin but a license to love, and the only power to love people who have bitten you is a daily walk with the Spirit in the love God already has for you.
Summary
Galatians 5:13–18 answers the oldest objection to grace: if everything is forgiven, why not live however you like? Preaching at The Grove Church in Port St. Lucie, Florida, David Hancock argues that Paul gives freedom a purpose rather than a limit; the free are called to serve one another through love, becoming a community that glows like a city on a hill. The obstacle is a war inside every Christian between the flesh, which wants to bite and devour the people who fail to love us, and the Spirit, who wants to love through us as Christ loved. The power to win that war is not suppressed desire or harder effort but a daily walk with the Spirit in the love God already has for His children, a love that cannot be stolen no matter how hard anyone bites.
Key Takeaways
- Paul never tells the Galatians to stop being free; he tells them what freedom is for, and the word he chooses for serving one another is the same word for being a slave.
- The flesh is described as a living agent with its own cravings that, given a base of operations inside a Christian’s freedom, turns the people he was called to love into targets.
- The law is good and aims a person in the right direction, but it has no power to hit the target; only the Spirit can make someone who loves like Christ.
- Desire is not the problem, its source is; the Christian is to turn desire up until he sees that what he wanted all along was God’s love, joy, and peace, and then love people who cannot supply it.
Read Galatians 5:13–18 (ESV)
For you were called to freedom, brothers. Only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another. For the whole law is fulfilled in one word: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” But if you bite and devour one another, watch out that you are not consumed by one another. 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, for these are opposed to each other, to keep you from doing the things you want to do. But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law.
Talk about it
1. Someone once asked the pastor whether forgiveness gives Christians permission to live however they want. Where have you seen a forgiven person use freedom well, and where have you seen it used badly?
Called to Freedom: What Does It Mean to Be Called to Freedom?
Paul opens with a reminder: “You were called to freedom.” The Galatians had been slaves and had been set free in Christ, and then, as Paul has argued for four chapters, they had quietly put the chains back on by yoking themselves to the law. The law is good, but it has no feet; it cannot carry anyone to the life of freedom he longs for, and its weight is more than anyone can bear. But then Christ comes alongside and says that His yoke is easy and His burden light. Yoked to Him, the pain, shame, guilt, sorrow, and loss are carried by someone else, and for the first time a person is free to run toward the freedom he was made for.
KEY WORD: YOKE
A yoke was a wooden bar laid across the necks of two oxen so they could pull one load together and reach the same destination. In Scripture it became a picture of whatever a person is bound to and pulling alongside. Paul warns the Galatians in Galatians 5:1 not to submit again to a yoke of slavery, meaning the law as a way of earning God’s favor, while Jesus invites the weary to take His yoke, which is easy, because He does the pulling Himself (Matthew 11:28–30).
What is this freedom? Paul has spent the letter building a montage of it. The Christian is not a slave but a royal son with a cosmic inheritance, the same inheritance God promised Abraham: a land, a people, and a blessing. The land is Eden restored, a place that cannot be lost, the better country every person longs for whether he knows it or not. The blessing is the presence of God Himself, who does not merely have love, joy, and peace but is love, joy, and peace, and who by the Spirit makes His home in the believer. The people is the church: forgiven people who forgive, loved with the very love the Father has for His Son, who will one day come home together into glory. Whatever a person faces in this life, that love, joy, and peace are already in him. That is freedom.
Talk about it
2. Paul says the Christian already has God’s love, joy, and peace living inside him by the Spirit, whatever his circumstances. When you feel unfree, which of the three do you assume is missing, and where do you go looking for it instead of God? What would change if you believed it was already yours?
Slaves to One Another: What Does It Mean to Serve One Another in Love?
What happens to a community of people who know this freedom? Paul says they serve one another through love, and the word he chooses is startling. It is the same word he has used for being a slave to the law. Freed slaves are told to become slaves again, to each other. The church, then, looks like people chained to Christ and chained to one another, and the chain is love, which Paul elsewhere says binds everything together in perfect harmony. Jesus called this community a city on a hill, a heavenly city inside the earthly one, glowing with the light and love of heaven. And He showed what the glow looks like by kneeling to wash His disciples’ feet, the job of the lowest servant in the house.
KEY WORD: DOULOS
Doulos is the ordinary Greek word for a slave, a person who belonged to a master and had no standing of his own. Paul uses it in Galatians for the condition of people trying to earn God’s favor by keeping the law. When he writes in Galatians 5:13 that Christians should “through love serve one another,” the verb is the slave word again, douleuō, to serve as a slave. The freedom Christ gives is not freedom from serving but freedom to serve.
In such a place no one is grasping for the top; the only competition is who can serve the most. Words build up rather than tear down, gossip is treated as evil, jealousy is locked away, and people have your back at their own expense. It is rare, which is why it glows. Nietzsche saw this clearly and despised it; he called Christianity a religion of slaves and dreamed of a man who would be his own god. He was right about the slavery and wrong about the weakness. Jesus is God; He has everything and needs nothing, so all He can do is give, and giving is not weakness but overflowing power. To be so full of love, joy, and peace that it bursts out of you like a geyser is the ultimate freedom.
Talk about it
3. Nietzsche called Christianity a religion of slaves, and the sermon agreed, with one correction: the Christian serves because he is full, not because he is weak. When you serve at church or at home, is it more often overflow or obligation? What would it look like this week to outdo the people in this group in love?
Bite and Devour: Why Do Christians Hurt Each Other in Church?
The community Paul describes is rare, and when a person goes looking for it and finds the opposite, the ache stirs something. Paul does not tell the Galatians they may use their freedom as a license to sin; every sin, past, present, and future, is forgiven, but forgiveness is not a permit. He warns them not to give the flesh an opportunity. He speaks of the flesh as though it were a living agent inside a person, with cravings of its own, and when it takes charge, we bite, devour, and consume. We turn from sheep into wolves. Paul’s three verbs run in order, and the last one means total destruction.
KEY WORD: OPPORTUNITY
The word translated opportunity in Galatians 5:13 is aphormē, a military term for a base of operations, the staging ground from which an army launches an attack. Paul is not warning about a momentary slip. He is describing what happens when the flesh is allowed to set up camp inside a Christian’s freedom and turn the people he was called to love into targets. Bite and devour in the next verse are both present tense, describing an ongoing habit, and the word for consume means to be destroyed entirely.
THE SERMON’S ILLUSTRATION
The pastor traced how it usually begins. You long to be loved. Someone says something you hear as a bite, though none was meant, and you bite back. That person wonders in private why you bit, so he bites. You ask why he keeps biting you, and he says it is because you bit him first. The devouring has begun, and unless someone stops it, the love in the community is consumed. This is why most of us carry scars from bites rather than marks of love.
The pastor said plainly that he hates this when it enters a church and intends to be a shepherd who sniffs it out and deals with it head-on. But he also said that he, like every Christian, is capable of becoming a wolf. It is not hard. A little desire for revenge, left alone, becomes a plan.
Talk about it
4. Paul says the flesh sets up a base of operations inside your freedom and turns people you are called to love into targets. Who in your church or family have you quietly reclassified as an enemy? Was the bite that started it real or imagined, and what would it take to stop the cycle?
Walk by the Spirit: What Does It Mean to Walk by the Spirit?
The path to a city on a hill is the one Jesus took the night He was betrayed. He knelt and washed the feet of all twelve, including Judas, knowing what Judas was about to do. Justice mattered to Jesus; He simply understood the posture love requires. From the cross He prayed for the men crucifying Him. That is the aim, and Paul states it: the whole law is fulfilled in one word, love your neighbor as yourself. Paul has not been running down the law for four chapters. The law is good and beautiful; it aims a person in the right direction, but it has no power to hit the target. And the neighbor Paul has in view first is the fellow believer in the room, the covenant community. The love that eventually reaches enemies starts in the church.
KEY PHRASE: “YOU WILL NOT GRATIFY”
When Paul writes in Galatians 5:16, “walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh,” he uses one of the strongest negations available in Greek, a doubled negative that rules something out entirely. The word walk is in the present tense, describing a person’s ordinary, continual, habitual way of life rather than a single decision. Put together, the verse is a promise: a life habitually lived in step with the Spirit cannot at the same time be a life of biting and devouring.
So where does the power to love come from? Paul says to walk by the Spirit, and walking is covenant language for an intimate, ongoing relationship: life lived with God, in His presence, under His direction, dependent on Him. It is friendship with God. A person cannot bite while he is in the middle of enjoying God’s love for him. The key to loving others as Christ loved you, then, is the constant discovery and rediscovery of God’s love for you, which no one can think or force his way into; it is a fresh gift of the Spirit every day.
Talk about it
5. The sermon said you cannot bite while you are in the middle of enjoying God’s love for you. Describe your actual daily walk with the Spirit, not the one you intend to have. When did you last discover something new about God’s love for you, and what did it do to the way you treated the next person you saw?
The War Within: Is It Wrong for a Christian to Have Strong Desires?
Paul then names the war: the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh. Two things follow. First, the war is real and it is happening now, in every Christian. Second, desire itself is not the problem; the source of the desire is. A common misconception holds that Christianity asks people to suppress their desires. It is the opposite. The Christian is to turn desire up so high that he finally sees what it was for all along: God’s love, joy, and peace, His kingdom and His people. In practice it looks like this. You are not loved as you hoped, and the flesh wants to bite. Instead you let the longing grow until you admit that these people are as flawed as you are and will never love you the way you long for, and you carry the longing to God, walk with the Spirit, receive His love in Christ, and then love the people who let you down. The irony is that the only way to become a community of love is to stop expecting too much love from the community, expect it all from God, and then find His love arriving through each other.
2 CORINTHIANS 3:17–18
“Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit.”
Freedom and transformation come by the same road: beholding Christ. A person becomes what he looks at, and the one who keeps looking at the glory of God in Christ is slowly filled with a love, joy, and peace so full it has nowhere to go but out.
The cost is exposure; when someone bites you and you love him back, you have made yourself available to be bitten again. But a person whose hunger to be loved is being fed by God carries a love that cannot be stolen, and that is what makes him free. They can bite as hard as they like; they cannot take it. Love is stronger. The Spirit wins. And the reward is a city on a hill, a place you can finally invite your neighbors, because it holds the love they have always been looking for.
THE PRACTICAL TEST
This love begins at home; if a house cannot be a home on a hill, a church will not become a city on one. A husband who cannot love his wife because she does not respect him, especially in public, goes first to the grace of Christ and sees how he has disrespected God; forgiven, he can forgive her and have a calm conversation about the marriage he wants. A wife who cannot love her husband because he does not lead as she wishes looks at every way Christ came to lead her and every way she rebelled, and realizes she is not easy to lead either; now she can say, “I know I am difficult and I am working on it, and here is what I hope to see in you.” Not perfect people, but imperfect people learning to love.
Talk about it
6. The sermon said desire is not the problem; the source is. What do you most want from the people in your life right now, and what happens in you when they fail to give it? Try turning that desire up instead of down: what is it really pointing at?
7. Loving someone who bit you leaves you open to being bitten again. Where are you refusing that risk right now, and what are you protecting? If God’s love for you truly cannot be stolen, what would you do differently with that person this week?
The Heart of It: How Did Jesus Love the People Who Turned on Him?
Christ is the only man who ever loved perfectly. He loved so well that His love became a new commandment: love one another as I have loved you. How did He love? He came to sinners, and they bit Him in return. He stopped for the poor and needy. He washed the feet of His disciples, including the one who would betray Him. God Himself became a slave to us, in love, for us. And He did not stop at washing feet. Love came into the world, and we arrested love, mocked love, slapped love, crowned love with thorns, and whipped love until love bled. We gave love a cross to carry, and love carried it outside the city gates, into exile, and we pierced love to it there. Love was buried. But love is stronger than death and fiercer than the grave; love broke death and rose, because love cannot be destroyed. Then He carried all of us who were outside the city into the city on a hill, taught us how to love, and gave us the power to love by loving us first. That is freedom.
JOHN 13:34
“A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another.”
Jesus spoke these words the same night He washed His disciples’ feet and only hours before His arrest. The commandment is new not because loving one another was unheard of, but because the measure is new: not as you love yourself, but as He has loved you.
Talk about it
8. Jesus washed the feet of the man He knew would betray Him, and from the cross prayed for the men killing Him. Name the person it would cost you most to serve this week. What has Christ carried for you that makes it possible to kneel there anyway?
Questions This Sermon Answers
What does Galatians 5:13 mean by not using freedom as an opportunity for the flesh?
The word translated opportunity is aphormē, a military term for a base of operations, the staging ground from which an army launches an attack. Paul is not warning about a momentary slip; he is describing the flesh setting up camp inside a Christian’s freedom and turning the people he was called to love into targets.
What does it mean to serve one another in love in Galatians 5:13?
It means voluntarily becoming a slave to other Christians. Doulos is the ordinary Greek word for a slave, and Paul uses it in Galatians for people trying to earn God’s favor by keeping the law. When he says “through love serve one another,” the verb is the slave word again. Freedom in Christ is freedom to choose whom you serve.
What does it mean to walk by the Spirit?
Walking by the Spirit means an ordinary, continual, habitual life lived with God, in His presence and under His direction; it is friendship with God rather than a mystical feeling. The word walk is present tense, a lifestyle rather than a decision, and Galatians 5:16 promises with the strongest Greek negation that such a person will not gratify the flesh.
What is a yoke in the Bible, and why does Paul use it in Galatians?
A yoke was a wooden bar laid across the necks of two oxen so they could pull one load together; in Scripture it pictures whatever a person is bound to. Paul warns in Galatians 5:1 against a yoke of slavery, the law as a way of earning God’s favor, while Jesus offers a yoke that is easy because He does the pulling.
Why do Christians hurt each other in church?
Because the longing to be loved, when it goes unmet, stirs up the flesh. Christians not loved as they hoped bite those who failed them; biting becomes devouring, and a sheep becomes a wolf. Bite and devour are present tense in Greek, describing a habit, and consume means total destruction. The cycle usually starts with a bite that was never meant.
Does Christianity require suppressing your desires?
No. Paul says the desires of the flesh and the Spirit are at war, but desire itself is not the problem; its source is. Rather than turning desire down, the Christian turns it up until he sees that what he wanted all along was God’s love, joy, and peace, and then loves people who could never supply it.
Vision for the Christian Life
The Christian life this passage envisions is not a lone believer guarding his rights but a city on a hill: a forgiven community chained to Christ and to one another by love, glowing in the middle of an ordinary town. It is a life that knows a war is going on inside and fights it not by suppressing desire but by carrying every longing to the God who is love, joy, and peace, and walking with His Spirit until that love overflows onto people who do not deserve it, which is exactly how it arrived. Such people still get bitten. They simply cannot be robbed. Use your freedom to build a city of love and light on a hill, and offer hope to a world starving for love.
Discussion Questions for Small Groups: Galatians 5
- Someone once asked the pastor whether forgiveness gives Christians permission to live however they want. Where have you seen a forgiven person use freedom well, and where have you seen it used badly?
- Paul says the Christian already has God’s love, joy, and peace living inside him by the Spirit, whatever his circumstances. When you feel unfree, which of the three do you assume is missing, and where do you go looking for it instead of God? What would change if you believed it was already yours?
- Nietzsche called Christianity a religion of slaves, and the sermon agreed, with one correction: the Christian serves because he is full, not because he is weak. When you serve at church or at home, is it more often overflow or obligation? What would it look like this week to outdo the people in this group in love?
- Paul says the flesh sets up a base of operations inside your freedom and turns people you are called to love into targets. Who in your church or family have you quietly reclassified as an enemy? Was the bite that started it real or imagined, and what would it take to stop the cycle?
- The sermon said you cannot bite while you are in the middle of enjoying God’s love for you. Describe your actual daily walk with the Spirit, not the one you intend to have. When did you last discover something new about God’s love for you, and what did it do to the way you treated the next person you saw?
- The sermon said desire is not the problem; the source is. What do you most want from the people in your life right now, and what happens in you when they fail to give it? Try turning that desire up instead of down: what is it really pointing at?
- Loving someone who bit you leaves you open to being bitten again. Where are you refusing that risk right now, and what are you protecting? If God’s love for you truly cannot be stolen, what would you do differently with that person this week?
- Jesus washed the feet of the man He knew would betray Him, and from the cross prayed for the men killing Him. Name the person it would cost you most to serve this week. What has Christ carried for you that makes it possible to kneel there anyway?
Related Messages in This Series
- Just a Little Leaven: How One Small Addition to Christ Can Quietly Cost You Everything
- Unmistakably Free: How to Find the Only Yoke That Sets You Free
- From Slaves to Sons: How Rule Breakers and Rule Followers Are Both Slaves
Watch or listen anywhere: YouTube | Apple Podcasts | SoundCloud
Pastor David Hancock is the Lead Pastor of The Grove Church in Port St. Lucie, FL, a church where believers and skeptics wrestle honestly with faith and doubt.
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Read the full sermon manuscript
A few years ago, a woman in a philosophy group I was part of said to me, “I’m struggling to understand Christianity. It seems like the forgiveness that Christianity offers means you can just live any way you want, with no consequences. Doesn’t that make people more inclined to not care how they live or treat people? I said, “A Christian truly forgiven and free person doesn’t use their freedom as a license to sin, but to love, and bring some goodness into the world.”
We are in our series called Christian Freedom in Paul’s letter to the Galatians, and my mission today is to send you out as people who have been set free into the internal war of becoming people who love. You have been free into a battle. A battle to bring love into this world.
“For you were called to freedom, brothers. Only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another. For the whole law is fulfilled in one word: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” But if you bite and devour one another, watch out that you are not consumed by one another. 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, for these are opposed to each other, to keep you from doing the things you want to do. But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law.” (Galatians 5:13–18, ESV)
Paul begins by telling the Galatians, “You were called to freedom.” The Galatians were once spiritual slaves but have been set free in Christ. But they enslaved themselves again to invisible chains. As Paul put it a few weeks ago, they were slaves set free, who have become slaves again by yoking themselves to the law.
A yoke is wooden bar placed on two oxen so they could share the load and reach the destination.
Paul says, look beside you, you have wooden bar over your back and are yoked to the law. You are relying on following the rules, being good, to get to the life of freedom you long for.
The law can’t help you get there; it has no feet and it’s weight is to much to bear
Then Christ comes along and says my yoke is easy my burden is light. Yoke yourself to me, I’ll carry your pain, shame, guilt, suffering, sorrow, and loss.
Finally, for the first time, you are free to start running in freedom toward the ultimate freedom you are made for.
What is this freedom we all long for?
Paul, for four chapters, has taken us through a montage of Christian freedom.
The image starts with you as a royal son of God. Not a slave but a son with a royal cosmic inheritance.
Paul points us back to the ancient inheritance God promised Abraham: a land, a people, and a blessing. The Land is Eden but better, a place, that can’t be lost, the land every one of us longs for weather we realize it or not. Hebrews “As it is they desire a better country that is a heavenly one.”
The blessing is the very presence of God. The God who isn’t just the ultimate expression of love, joy, and peace, but is love, joy, and peace. And by faith, our inheritance is to receive the Spirit of the Son. The triune God, who is full of love, joy, and peace, makes His Home in us. No matter what you face in this life, you have access to the love, joy, and peace of God already in you. That’s freedom
The people is the church. It’s a picture of you not just alone in all of this, but a community of people united to God and each other, forgiven and who forgive, who are loved with the same love that the Father has for His one and only Son, and who will one day stand as the golden gates of Heaven open and the heavens roar in celebration as we together, the sons and daughters of God come home into glory.
What happens to a community of people who know this freedom?
Paul says they serve one another in love.
The word serve here is shocking; it is the same word he used to describe being a slave, doulos, to the law. In other words, through love, become a slave to one another. This type of slavery is a voluntary slavery.
The church looks like people who are chained to Christ and chained to one another. The chain looks like love.
Paul in another letter says “love binds everything together in perfect harmony.” Love looks like a bright golden chain running from you to God to others.
In His famous Sermon on the Mount, Jesus calls this community a city on a hill. A light shining of the glory of God’s light and love to the world around.
A heavenly city, within the earthly city, glowing with the light and love of heaven.
Jesus would later kickstart this revolution of love by washing his disciples’ feet.
An act that was for the lowest servant in the house. Yet, Jesus says, this is the way of the Christian.
Instead of grasping for glory, the picture of the light of the glory of God is bowing to serve.
No one is trying to grasp their way to the top, but trying to outdo one another in love. Love is the competition. Who can serve the most.
Words aren’t for tearing down but building up. Gossip is seen as evil, jealousy is locked away, and people have your back, encourage you, lift you up at their own sacrifice. This is rare, and that is why it’s a glowing city; it sticks out.
And every one of us longs for this place. If you don’t, you have suppressed it as Nietzsche did. He denied the existence of God and dreamed of the Übermensch. The man who created his own values, who was his own God. He saw Christianity is a religion of slaves. And he is exactly right. We have concluded we are all slaves to something, but we have found the only God, the true God, who rules by becoming a slave and serving. And we have made ourselves like Him.
While to Nietzsche this looked like weakness, I’d like to help you see what he didn’t.
Christianity is the ultimate display of power and freedom.
Think about it like this. The claim is Jesus is God; he has everything. There is nothing we can give him that he doesn’t already, so because he needs nothing, all he can do is give. Giving isn’t a sign of weakness but abundance of power.
This is ultimate freedom. To be so full of life, love, joy, and peace that nothing can be added, so like a geyser, you burst out with love, joy, and peace, and it looks like giving others what you already have because you need nothing.
That’s freedom and power.
While we long for this kind of community, it’s rare. We seek a community of love but often find the opposite.
When this happens, Paul says don’t use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh.
1st, he means to say, don’t use your freedom as a license to sin.
In other words, you are forgiven no matter what: past, present, and future sins.
But Paul says, don’t use that freedom as an opportunity for the flesh.
It’s interesting; Paul personifies the flesh. This isn’t just a passive desire in you, but a living internal agent with its own cravings. It’s a bit terrifying.
And when it takes over the Christian, they use their freedom to turn on people.
When we aren’t loved as promised in the church, the ache, the pain, stirs up the flesh, and we bit those who didn’t love us like we wanted. Biting grows into devouring. Now we have become predators in the church. A sheep who becomes a wolf.
Can you see a little bit of it in you? It’s in all of us.
That little bit of desire for revenge in you will lead to planning it. Be careful.
The word opportunity is a military term for a base of operations or staging ground for an attack. You have turned those you are called to love into an enemy that you are planning to bite.
“Bite and Devour” are both present tense, which means it’s ongoing, habitual.
And the word for consuming here means total destruction. The flesh in all of us will turn our church from a city on a hill shining God’s love and light into a dysfunctional dystopia.
Unfortunately, I’ve heard too many stories of this in the church today.
I want you to know I hate this. I hate this when it enters the church.
And I’m seeking to be a good shepherd who sniffs this out and deals with it head-on.
I have your back.
But I also want you to know that you and I are both capable of becoming wolves.
It’s not hard.
The personified flesh in you that wants to bite, devour, and consume.
It’s in me. I’m prone, like all of you, when I’m not loved like I long to be, to bite.
Let me show you how it can play out.
You long to be loved, you misunderstand something someone says to you as a bite, though it wasn’t, and you bite back. That person wonders in secret why you bit them, so they bite. You say Why do you keep biting me and they say Because you bit me, and so the devouring begins until the love in the Christian community is consumed.
This is easy to fall into to that’s why these cities on hills are rare. There’s a reason why there are encouragement coaches where you pay people to encourage you, because finding people to build you up is rare. Most of us as covered in scars from bites not marks of love.
What’s the path to becoming a city on a hill? Jesus shows us. He was with His disciples, and he knelt down and washed his disciples’ feet. All of them, even Judas. At this point Jesus knew Judas would betray him, yet he washed his feet anyway. It’s not that justice isn’t important to Jesus. It is, but he understands the posture of love that is required to build a city on a hill.
Even from the cross, he prays for those crucifying him, “Father, forgive them; they don’t know what they are doing.”
That’s our aim. Paul says it.
“Don’t use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another, for the whole law is fulfilled in one word: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”
Now this is fascinating. Paul, it would seem, was talking bad about the law for 4 chapters. But he wasn’t. As we’ve said, the law is good and beautiful, but it doesn’t have the power to shape you into the kind of person who is so full of love, joy, and peace, that you can express them out to the empty world.
The law aims you in the right direction but isn’t your power to hit the target.
What is the target Paul is pointing at?
When Paul says love your neighbor, the immediate context lands on the Christian who is part of your covenant community, part of this church specifically.
This love travels outside the Christian community into the harder work of loving your enemies.
But the love that goes out begins in this room.
So how do we get the power to love like Christ?
Paul says walk by the Spirit.
What does it mean to walk by the Spirit?
The word walk, like biting and devouring, is a present verb. It means your ordinary, continual, habitual conduct. It’s not a single choice but a lifestyle.
“You will not gratify” is one of the strongest negations in the Greek.
It means if you walk by the Spirit, there is no way you will which are to bite and devour.
To walk describes an intimate, ongoing covenantal relationship. Not a mystical feeling, but life lived with God, in his presence, under his direction, completely dependent on Him.
It’s friendship with God. That’s why you can’t bite, because you are in the middle of enjoying God’s love for you.
So, the key to loving others like Christ loved you is the constant discovery and rediscovery of God’s great love for you.
You can’t think your way to it; you can’t force your way to see it. It’s a new gift from the Spirit every day to see, know, and understand God’s love for you with depth and awe.
It’s not a one-time thing, but a daily walking with the Spirit, in God’s love for you that manifests as love for those in this church.
But Paul says there is an internal war going on in you. He says, “The desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh.”
1st you must know there is a war within you ragging right now between the Spirit and the flesh.
2nd this is important. Desire is not the problem. The source of the desire is the problem.
A misconception about Christianity is that we are supposed to suppress our desires.
It’s the opposite. We are to turn up our desires so high that we realize our desire is ultimately for God’s love, joy, and peace. His kingdom and His people.
This is how winning the fight looks in everyday life.
When you aren’t loved, your flesh wants to bite, instead you turn your desires to be loved up so high that you will finally realize, what am I doing, these people are like me, they are flawed, they will never love me like I long for, so you turn to your hope of love to God and you walk with the Spirit and experience God’s love for you in Christ and then you love the people in the church.
The irony is, the only way for us to become a community of love is to stop expecting too much love from the community and expect it all to come from God; then we will experience God’s love through each other in the community.
That’s the fight. To love when you aren’t loved.
The flesh wants to bite, devour, and consume through you. The Spirit wants to love like Christ through you.
The cost is that when someone bites you and you love them in return, you make yourself vulnerable to be bitten again and devoured.
But if you are receiving satisfaction of your desire to be loved by God by walking in the Spirit, then you have in you a love that can’t be stolen; that makes you free. They can’t take your love no matter how hard they bite.
That means they can’t devour you or consume you. Love is stronger. The Spirit wins.
The reward, if you can win the fight and walk with the Spirit, is that a city on a hill is formed and strengthened.
You will finally have a place you can invite your neighbors because you will have a city on a hill where they can find the love they’ve always longed for.
That’s where we aim our freedom, a city of love, an alternative city.
The Christian doesn’t have a license to sin, but a license to love.
How do you grow in this desire to want to freely love?
2 Cor. 3:17 says, “Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.”
The very next verse says that in that freedom we behold the glory of the lord and are transformed from one degree of glory to another.
This means the path to us becoming a city on a hill is all of us doing our part by beholding the glory of God in Christ, walking with the Spirit and experiencing the glory of his love, that transforms each of us into people who are filled with a love, joy, and peace that is so full it has no where else to go but out in service to others.
This love in the church first starts in your home. Let me get super practical and point this love to your spouse. If your home can’t be a home on a hill than we can’t become a city on a hill. Now if you don’t have a spouse one and want one, this is the path from biting in the home to loving in a home. of biting into love.
Let’s say you are struggling to love your wife because she isn’t showing you respect, especially in public. You are angry, so every conversation leads to a fight, and then you experience more disrespect.
What do you do? You go and encounter the grace and forgiveness that come from Christ, and you see how you have disrespected God in your sin. His love for you teaches you how to love your wife through that. You have forgiven her; now you can have a calm conversation about your desire for a healthy marriage.
You are struggling to love your husband because he isn’t leading as you want. What do you do? You look at all the ways Christ came to lead you and all the ways you rebelled, yet He loved you still. You came to realize you aren’t easy to lead. You are married to a man who is hard-headed, but so are you. Now you can say to him, “Hey, I realize I’m difficult, I’m working on it, but this is what I’d like to see true of you as my husband.”
This is what life not under the law but in freedom looks like.
Not perfect people, but imperfect people learning to love.
Christ is the only man who loved perfectly.
He loved so well that His love became a new commandment.
He said I give you a new commandment, love one another as I have loved you.
How did he love?
He came and loved sinners and they bit him in return.
He stopped and listened to poor and needy.
He washed his disciples’ feet. He served even the one who betrayed Him.
God himself became a slave to us in love for us.
And He didn’t end with washing feet.
The God of love came into the world, loved us, and we arrested love, mocked love, slapped love, crowned love with a crown of thorns, whipped love until love bled.
We gave love a cross to carry; love carried that cross outside the city gates, in exile.
We pierced love to the cross outside the city.
And love was buried in death.
But love is stronger than death and fiercer than the grave.
His love broke death and He rose because love can’t be destroyed.
And then he carried all of us who were outside the city on a hill, into the city on a hill, and taught us how to love and gave us the power to love by loving us.
That’s freedom. Let’s together use that freedom to build a city of love and light on a Hill to offer hope to a world starving for love.