Freedom That Walks

A robed figure with curly hair walks forward along a glowing stone path dividing two landscapes — vibrant wildflowers and sunlit green hills on the left, dark thorns and storm clouds on the right.

The Spirit and the Flesh in Galatians 5:16–26

There is a question pressing underneath everything Paul writes to the Galatians, and it is the same question that surfaces whenever someone first hears that they are saved by grace and not by their own performance: if I am free, what is my freedom for? Paul has already told them, plainly, that the freedom is real. "For freedom, Christ set us free. Stand firm, then, and don't submit again to a yoke of slavery" (Galatians 5:1). But freedom is a dangerous word, because the human heart can hear it as permission. So before he is finished, Paul has to say what gospel freedom is not, and what it actually does in a person, and what it cannot help producing once the Spirit is at work. That is the burden of Galatians 5:16–26.

It is worth letting the passage stand in full before we walk through it:

I say, then, walk by the Spirit and you will certainly not carry out the desire of the flesh. For the flesh desires what is against the Spirit, and the Spirit desires what is against the flesh; these are opposed to each other, so that you don't do what you want. But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law. Now the works of the flesh are obvious: sexual immorality, moral impurity, promiscuity, idolatry, sorcery, hatreds, strife, jealousy, outbursts of anger, selfish ambitions, dissensions, factions, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and anything similar. I am warning you about these things—as I warned you before—that those who practice such things will not inherit the kingdom of God. But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. The law is not against such things. Now those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. If we live by the Spirit, let us also keep in step with the Spirit. Let us not become conceited, provoking one another, envying one another. (Galatians 5:16–26)

The command and the promise

Paul opens not with a rule but with an invitation that carries a promise inside it: "walk by the Spirit and you will certainly not carry out the desire of the flesh" (v. 16). The verb is ordinary and daily—walk. It is not a single heroic decision but a direction of travel, a way of moving through an afternoon. And the promise attached to it is emphatic in the original: not merely that you might resist the flesh, but that walking by the Spirit you will certainly not gratify it. This is the same Spirit Paul spent chapter 3 reminding them of, the Spirit they received "by believing what you heard" (3:2), not by law-keeping. Freedom, then, begins with a Person, not a program. The Spirit who saved you is the Spirit you now walk by.

But notice what Paul does not say. He does not say that walking by the Spirit removes the conflict.

Freedom is not the absence of struggle

"For the flesh desires what is against the Spirit, and the Spirit desires what is against the flesh; these are opposed to each other, so that you don't do what you want" (v. 17). Here "flesh" is not the body and not merely physical appetite; throughout this section it stands for the old self, the corrupt pull that remains in a believer and works against the Spirit's leading. Paul describes two genuine forces in conflict. That word matters. The Christian life in this passage is not passivity. It is not a matter of relaxing and letting nothing happen. It is a war zone, and the believer is in it.

This is honest in a way that pastoral instinct sometimes is not. New believers frequently report that life became harder, not easier, after coming to Christ—that they feel a guilt and an inner resistance they never knew before. Galatians 5:17 explains why. A new front has opened. There is now a Spirit within them that wants what the flesh does not, and the two are pulling against each other. Paul never pretends this away. What he promises is not the end of the struggle but the certainty of the outcome for those who keep walking by the Spirit. The conflict is real; it is also winnable, because the Spirit who fights in you is God's own Spirit.

Not under law, but led

"But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law" (v. 18). This is the line most easily twisted into license, so it is worth slowing down. Paul is not saying the believer is now lawless, free of every constraint, accountable to no one. He has just spent two verses describing a Spirit who actively desires against the flesh and opposes it. To be "led by the Spirit" is itself to be under a constraint—a living, internal, personal one. The contrast Paul draws is not between constraint and no constraint. It is between two ways of being constrained: the external pressure of law that tells a person what to do without supplying the power to do it, and the internal leading of the Spirit who both directs and enables. An old line about the law and the gospel captures the difference exactly: the law commands but gives no power to obey, while the gospel bids us rise and gives us wings. The freedom of Galatians 5 is the freedom of a person who has been given wings.

What freedom does not do: the works of the flesh

Paul then lists the things the flesh produces, and the list is blunt: "sexual immorality, moral impurity, promiscuity, idolatry, sorcery, hatreds, strife, jealousy, outbursts of anger, selfish ambitions, dissensions, factions, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and anything similar" (vv. 19–21). He calls them "obvious," and he ends with "anything similar," which tells us the catalog is a sample, not a complete inventory.

The items cluster naturally. There are sexual sins—immorality, impurity, promiscuity—and impurity in particular reaches past behavior into what a person dwells on, which is why Paul can treat the imagination as a battlefield. There are idolatrous sins—idolatry and sorcery. Idolatry need not mean a carved statue; Paul elsewhere names greed itself as idolatry, "greed, which is idolatry" (Colossians 3:5), because whatever a person wants most fiercely has taken the place of God. Sorcery, and the appetite that fuels it, is finally a grasp for power and control, a refusal to trust the providence of God and a determination to secure one's own future by one's own means. Then there is a long relational cluster—hatreds, strife, jealousy, outbursts of anger, selfish ambitions, dissensions, factions, envy. It is striking how much of the list is the ordinary wreckage of community: not spectacular vice but the slow corrosion of people who cannot get along. And finally the self-indulgent sins—drunkenness, carousing—the casting off of all restraint.

Then comes the warning, and this is where care is needed: "I am warning you about these things—as I warned you before—that those who practice such things will not inherit the kingdom of God" (v. 21). The verb "practice" describes a settled pattern of life, not a single failure. Paul is not measuring whether a believer ever stumbles; he is describing a direction—a life characterized, habitually, by the works of the flesh. His point is sober and unqualified: a life that simply is the works of the flesh, with no Spirit and no fruit, does not inherit the kingdom of God. Paul says the same elsewhere: a list of such practices, and then, "And some of you used to be like this. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God" (1 Corinthians 6:11). The expectation is transformation. The warning is left exactly where Paul leaves it—as a warning, addressed to the church, meant to be heeded—and the remedy he gives is the same as his opening command: walk by the Spirit.

What freedom cannot help producing: the fruit of the Spirit

Against that catalog Paul sets a single word. The works of the flesh are works, plural—things manufactured. But "the fruit of the Spirit" (v. 22) is singular, and it is fruit. Fruit is not manufactured; it is grown. It appears on a living thing as the natural outcome of its life. This is the heart of the passage. The Spirit does not merely restrain a person from evil; the Spirit grows something out of the person. Jesus uses the same picture: "I am the vine; you are the branches. The one who remains in me and I in him produces much fruit, because you can do nothing without me" (John 15:5).

And the fruit is named: "love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control" (vv. 22–23). It is worth lingering on the first three.

Love heads the list because it is the shape of God's own action toward us, and because Paul has already said that the whole law is fulfilled in one statement: "love your neighbor as yourself" (5:14). The love that the Spirit grows is not sentiment; it is the same self-giving that put Christ on the cross.

Joy stands over against the sourness that legalism produces. A life spent measuring itself by the law swings between pride and shame, and neither of those is joy. The Spirit gives joy because joy comes from being received, not from being adequate.

Peace is the broadest of the three. It is first peace with God—"since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ" (Romans 5:1). It is also peace between people, the tearing down of walls that once divided them: "For he is our peace, who made both groups one and tore down the dividing wall of hostility" (Ephesians 2:14). And it reaches into the believer's own interior as steadiness—"the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus" (Philippians 4:7).

Then Paul adds a quiet but stunning line: "The law is not against such things" (v. 23). The point is more than "these are permitted." Where the Spirit has produced love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control, the law has nothing to accuse. There is no statute against goodness. The very thing the law could command but never create, the Spirit grows. This is why gospel freedom is not lawlessness: it produces, from the inside, exactly the character the law always aimed at and could never compel.

The fact underneath it all

Paul then states the ground of the whole thing in a single sentence: "Now those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires" (v. 24). The decisive verb is in the past tense—have crucified. This is not something the believer is striving to achieve; it is something that has already happened to those who belong to Christ. Paul has said it about himself earlier in the same letter: "I have been crucified with Christ, and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me" (Galatians 2:20). The flesh has been put to death in principle at the cross; the daily walk by the Spirit is the working out of a death that has already occurred.

What it asks of us

Paul closes with the application, and it is gentle and pointed at once. "If we live by the Spirit, let us also keep in step with the Spirit" (v. 25). The logic is that the source of our life should set the pace of our walking. We did not give ourselves life; the Spirit did. So we fall in step behind the Spirit rather than running ahead or lagging behind. And then, almost as a final reading of the spiritual temperature: "Let us not become conceited, provoking one another, envying one another" (v. 26). It is telling that Paul ends not with some dramatic sin but with conceit, provocation, and envy—the small, communal, corrosive things. A church can confess all the right doctrine and still be quietly eaten alive by these. The fruit of the Spirit, by contrast, is humble, generous, and at peace.

Holding the whole counsel together

One last thing should be said, because it troubles many readers. Paul insists that we are justified by grace through faith, apart from works of the law—the entire argument of Galatians depends on it. Yet here in chapter 5, and even more sharply in James, the demand for fruit is relentless: "faith without works is dead" (James 2:26). These are not in competition. James and Paul are answering different questions. Paul is asking what brings a person into right standing with God, and the answer is Christ, received by faith. James is asking what a living faith looks like once it is there, and the answer is that it works, it bears fruit, it shows. Galatians 5 sits exactly at the seam: the same faith that lays hold of Christ for nothing also receives the Spirit, and the Spirit grows fruit. Jesus himself made fruit the test: "You'll recognize them by their fruit" (Matthew 7:16). And Paul made the harvest the warning and the hope at once: "the one who sows to his flesh will reap destruction from the flesh, but the one who sows to the Spirit will reap eternal life from the Spirit" (Galatians 6:8).

So gospel freedom turns out to be neither the law's heavy yoke nor the flesh's empty license. It is the freedom of a person crucified with Christ and made alive by the Spirit—free from having to earn what Christ has already secured, and free for a life that grows, on its own and from the inside, into the very character of God. That is the freedom that walks.

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