The Christians Conflict

Paul began the fifth chapter of Galatians with the command to stand firm in the liberty Christ gave us. We stand on God’s grace, and we depend on His strength, not ours. The liberty and the freedom of the Gospel was under attack. The false teachers were saying that to live a life of grace you would be doing what ever you wanted to do. To live that way would produce all kinds of law breaking. As we looked at last week, Paul argues that to live in liberty it’s not a license to do whatever you want to do. Instead a Gospel grounded, grace driven life will produce a type of life that seeks to obey God, not because we are trying to merit God’s love or favor, but we have been called to a new way of living and we aren’t abandoning the law instead we fulfill the the law by serving one another through love. As Christians, we are free, but we should use this freedom to reflect God’s love. Our text this morning Paul is going to show us that one of the things we encounter when we try to live for God is a conflict. It’s a conflict within. It’s a conflict between the flesh and the Spirit.