Unearthing Your Values: Galatians 5:16-23
Ordinary Time
"Great Choice" series on discernment
September 2026
I say be guided by the Spirit and you won’t carry out
your selfish desires. 17 A person’s selfish desires
are set against the Spirit, and the Spirit is set against one’s selfish
desires. They are opposed to each other, so you shouldn’t do whatever you want
to do. 18 But if you are being led by the Spirit,
you aren’t under the Law. 19 The actions that are
produced by selfish motives are obvious, since they include sexual immorality,
moral corruption, doing whatever feels good, 20 idolatry,
drug use and casting spells, hate, fighting, obsession, losing your temper,
competitive opposition, conflict, selfishness, group rivalry, 21 jealousy,
drunkenness, partying, and other things like that. I warn you as I have already
warned you, that those who do these kinds of things won’t inherit God’s
kingdom.
22 But the fruit of the
Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, 23 gentleness,
and self-control. There is no law against things like this. (CEB)
When
I was in middle school, my father and his wife were deeply involved in their
local church—a Church of the Nazarene church.
The Church of the Nazarene is a Wesleyan denomination like The United
Methodist Church in that we share lineage from John and Charles Wesley, the
brothers credited with the founding of the movement. Unlike The United Methodist Church, the
Church of the Nazarene came out of the Holiness movement in the late 19th
century, a movement grounded in the idea that the Methodists and Quakers and
Anabaptists of the time had gotten too loose in their understanding of God’s
mercy and they should rededicate their lives to living as purely as possible,
avoiding all sin and becoming holy, hence the name.
So
in the pursuit of holiness thrust upon me, I spent alternate Sunday mornings at
a church that told me I should never swear, never drink, definitely never be
gay, never celebrate Halloween, avoid listening to secular music, read the Left
Behind series in its entirety, and since I was still cosplaying being a
girl at the time, never wear shorts to church.
The
church wasn’t air-conditioned and I sure as heck wasn’t wearing a skirt, so
trousers it was, which is miserable in central Indiana in August. I was torn because I loved the idea of God
but the church seemed to completely suck.
I hated going, hated the cattiness of the girls in Sunday school and the
judgment of the preacher sweating through his tie as he lectured us on the
waiting fires of Hell. The saving grace,
hilariously, was a woman named Waymuth.
I
have no idea why Waymuth was connected to that church, but there she was—always
in the back row, her walker leaning against the pew’s arm. She was morbidly obese with all sorts of knee
problems, so moving around was difficult for her—but she was there as often as
she could be. I would escape the front
row where my father and stepmother sat as music leader and congregational care
lay minister in their image of holy perfection and sit in the back with deeply
imperfect Waymuth—who taught me to add “in bed” to the titles in the hymnal
when Pastor Richard’s sermons ran long and I started to fidget.
(There
are some hymns I still can’t sing with a straight face, which is unfortunate in
my line of work.)
Paul’s
letter to the Galatians is fairly short—only six chapters—but the entirety of
it is anger, sorrow, and hope for the church in Galatia that had decided the
best way to be anchored in this new faith was to make sure they followed the
law so perfectly that God couldn’t help but accept them. Paul, whose entire ministry is grounded in
the notion that it is one’s heart rather than one’s actions that prove
salvation, was tearing his hair out at this group who was forcing Gentile
converts to be circumcised in order to be welcomed, telling Jewish converts
they had to follow strict observances or their faith didn’t count, and
generally making everyone miserable trying to be the holiest version of
holiness they knew because that, surely, was the kind of freedom from sin they
wanted.
“I
say be so guided by the Spirit,” Paul writes. He argues, essentially, that can try all you
want to be perfect and do the perfect things, but if your guiding light is
wrong, it doesn’t matter. Freedom from
sin by chaining oneself to rules isn’t free; freedom from the selfishness that
draws us to that which is sinful is.
Paul goes on to list a whole bunch of things that stem from selfishness;
some of them don’t quite translate to 21st century realities, which
is less the point than that there’s a list to begin with because then Paul
offers a different list: the fruit of the Spirit. With these things, Paul says, there is
freedom—because with these things, there is community, there is connection,
there is relationship.
Brad
Braxton writes, “The works…[listed] destroy unity and community, while the
fruit of the Spirit promote corporate well-being. The Spirit empowers believers to seek what is
right both in their relationships with God and in their relationships with
people…Paul teaches that ethics entail social, and not just individual,
realities.”[1] Striving to be perfect is all well and good,
but if it’s actively hurting the people
around you? Not holy. “The actions that are produced by selfish
motives are obvious,” writes Paul, and many things on the list do indeed seem
obvious like hate, fighting, and obsession.
But what’s wrong with a little partying, or doing things that feel good? That’s fine, right?
If it’s
grounded in the fruits of the Spirit, yes.
If the partying takes into account the wellbeing of the people involved
and the partiers are gentle, self-controlled, and kind, go for it. If doing what feels good is loving and
faithful and kind to others, awesome.
But if it is “I’m here to make sure I’m taken care of and everyone else
can shuffle off”? Opt out. We are not made to list ourselves up alone.
“Galatians
5:13 gives us a clue,” writes Carolyn Osiek.
“Paul understands freedom not as the opportunity to pursue one’s own
interests but to be even more at the service of others…It is important to note
in the following verse 24 and elsewhere in Paul that what he means by ‘flesh’
[translated here in the Common English Bible as “selfish desires”] is not the
human body or materiality. A quick
perusal of the ‘works of the flesh’ in verses 19-21 makes that obvious, for
many of them originate in the mind. What
Paul means by ‘flesh’ is the human ability to put self in place of God, to
resist God’s Spirit….What Paul asks is discernment.”[2]
We’ve
started a series here at New City based around discernment. How do you choose what to do as a person of
faith? Many of us were handed a rulebook
at some point, like my Church of the Nazarene, which had all the “thou shalt
nots” and usually some vibe of “if it makes you happy, don’t.” It can be hard to discern anything when
there’s so much noise around what we shouldn’t do and who we shouldn’t be. But who do we want to be? What do we think is important in how we walk
through the world? Is it being
perfect—or is it being kind, loving, gentle, patient? What are the values you hold close to your
chest when you think about who you are as a person? How do you show up in the community as part
of it, connected to it, shaped by it?
Waymuth
taught me so much about church—not just the hymnal thing, which she really
should not have taught a 12-year-old.
She taught me that humor was also allowed in church, that love could be
quiet, that appearances are not the important part, that shared misery can be
made a little more joyful with kindness.
Indirectly, she taught me about disability and the way people are
perceived in able-bodied spaces; she taught me that holiness is something
formed over time and in conversation; she taught me that learning to laugh at
myself was a life skill. She taught me
to value listening, putting aside the assumptions I’d made or others had given
me and seeing the person in front of me as a full and beloved creation.
I forgot a
lot of those lessons for a long time, not least because teenagedom is a lot of
selfishness and many of the things on Paul’s “don’t” list. But in adulthood, it has been a blessing to
reach back and think about how I didn’t really learn Christianity from the
preacher in the front—I learned it from Waymuth in the back row.
“We are
freed,” writes Sarah Henrich, “to participate in a law, an instruction from God
that is entirely contained in the great command from Leviticus 19:18 (LXX): You
shall love your neighbor as yourself. That would be a ‘you singular’, each of
you, each one of you. Love your particular neighbor. There is the law in this
sense: it is God’s way of being and God’s instruction or even description for a
human way of being.”[3]
“The
actions that are produced by selfish motives are obvious, since they include”
sexual exploitation, moral cowardice, enriching oneself at the expense of
others, worshipping the things that look and sound only like you, drowning your
God-given senses in things that destroy your body, hate, fighting, obsession, hoarding
wealth and resources while others starve for it, anger intended to frighten
another, combativeness for its own sake, war, selfishness, nationalism, greed,
and other things like that. “[T]hose who
do these kinds of things won’t inherit God’s kingdom” not because God is
interested in being Heaven’s bouncer but because they will not want to be in
the Kingdom, anyway. It is a place of
justice, of mercy, of diversity, of hope, of patience and love and kindness and
selflessness, a place where the lost are found and the least are exalted. There are no billionaires in heaven who make
their money off of the suffering of others, no war hawks who dismiss thousands
dead as the price of doing business, no racists who deny the goodness of God’s full
creation or homophobes who willfully misread Scripture to make God smaller
and easier to use as a weapon.
Instead,
there is the fruit of the Spirit—there is life-giving nourishment that
encourages us to love one another as God has loved us because we are
entwined with each other, bound together in the long journey of holiness that
seeks to put the world back together, not tear it apart. Whatever other values you hold, whatever other
processes you use to discern the next steps you take, may they be grounded in
this: love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and body; love
your neighbor as yourself.
“Love” is a
vast and somewhat amorphous thing, which is where the other values, the other
fruits come into play. What does love
look like? Paul says it looks like
freedom: freedom to be kind, gentle, patient, self-controlled, joyful,
faithful, peaceful. I add it looks a
little like an outcast older woman who took an angry pre-teen under her
wing. What do you bring? What values look like love to you? What freedom allows you to be in community
with others, to know that we are building the Kingdom together and that is a
holy and beautiful thing? The forces of
selfishness in this world are sinful, and their sin has a far-reaching grip. And the Spirit is at work in the
world, at work in us, at work in you; be guided by Her, for the wholeness and
holiness of all that we are. Amen.
[1]
Braxton, “Galatians,” in True to Our Native Land: An African American New
Testament Commentary 2nd ed (Fortress Press: Minneapolis, 2024),
365.
[2]
Osiek, “Galatians,” in Women’s Bible Commentary 20th Anniversary
Edition (Westminster John Knox Press, 2012), 574.
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