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David Orendorff         Galatians 5:16-24        August 23, 2009

Please pray with me:  Lord Jesus, make your people ready to you as the Spirit of God.  Lead us to love, joy peace, patience, kindness goodness, trustfulness, gentleness and self-control.  Amen.

Paul is writing to the good souls of the church in Galatia.  It is a church that he has helped found and so he knows well.  The Galatians want to be loving and kind people because they know that such people are happy people, but it is hard to be good.  There seem to be evil powers that possess them and control them. They do, say and think things they don’t want to do, say, or think.

And now preachers of a false Gospel have come among them and some have believed them.  These teachers are saying that the way to peace and joy, to end the war of good and evil within and among us, is by keeping the rules of God. Paul is convinced that keeping the rules, though a good thing, will not end the war of good and evil, but will play directly into the hands of evil.

What Paul knows about the folks of Galatia, we know about ourselves.  We are at war internally.  A war within ourselves that sometimes bleeds into a war among us.  There is a part of us that does hurtful and evil things; and there is a part of us that is at peace and in love, doing good things.

These two sides battle one another over the control of our lives.  We rightly despise the evil side, for by it we feel shame and self-disgust; by it we are miserable, it really is the hell we fear.  We want to be more often like Paul’s second list; to be among those who live the Spirit of God.  Living in the Spirit we find love, peace and joy.  We desire to be and do more of the Spirit side of our lives.

There is an old Cherokee story you have probably heard because it is a favorite preacher story.  An old Cherokee was speaking to his grandson:

“A fight is going on inside me,” he said to the boy. “It is a terrible fight and it is between two wolves. One is evil- he is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego. The other is good — he is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith. This same fight is going on inside you, and inside every other person, too.”

Paul says in his letter to the Christians in Rome, “I do not understand my own actions.  For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.”[1]

The grandson thought about it for a long minute, and then asked his grandfather, “Which wolf will win?”

The old Cherokee simply replied, “The one you feed.”

Our usual first effort is to battle the evil wolf and will ourselves to be good.  We focus on the evil wolf and swear to never do it again.  And in this way we feed the angry wolf.

If I am drinking too much I promise myself that I will drink less and make rules about when I can drink.  My focus is on the drinking.  If I am filled with anger and resentment I swear I won’t be angry, I won’t resent and my focus, my feeding, is on the angry wolf.  We often deal with the dark sides of ourselves by attempting to control ourselves by our own brute will power.  We enter a wrestling match, a battle of wills, with the evil wolf.

Likewise, Paul believed that willing ourselves to keep the law only empowers the evil of our souls and lives.  And our miserable little hell, far from being relieved, is deeper, harder, and uglier.

It is not only the wisdom of the old Cherokee and Paul that tell us this is true, it is also our own experience that the assertion of our will to be better, leads to failure and that the behavior and thoughts we were trying to control eventually control us with a new strength and vengeance.  By our focused resistance we feed the evil wolf.  We cannot live in peace if we feed the angry wolf either with our will or our surrender.

So if we cannot end our inner war by our will, what can we do to enjoy the fruits of the Spirit, to live lives of peace, hope and love?  If we can’t make ourselves good then how can we become the gentle and strong wolf?  For Christians the answer should be obvious.  An old friend loves to tell the joke of the Sunday School Class in which the teacher asks, “What is brown, furry, has four legs and a busy tail, and stores nuts for the winter?”  And young Johnny answers, “I know that the answer is supposed to be Jesus, but it sure sounds like a squirrel.”

The answer to how we might become the loving people we so strongly desire to be is of course Jesus.  It is not our wills that win the war within us; it is Jesus living in us that triumphs.  The answer to all of life is Jesus. Just as Jesus didn’t focus on our failures but our graces, we don’t focus on the sin; we focus on Jesus; we focus on how in Jesus we know that God loves us; we focus on seeing ourselves as God sees us; we focus on loving others as we have been loved.  Paul speaks of the Christian life as “walking by the Spirit” as “Christ living is us” and our “living in Christ.”  At Bear Creek we say, “Worship, study and serve.”

So how do we keep our eyes upon Jesus?  The first thing Jesus does is to be honest about brokenness.  If we are the woman at the well who has no husband but goes from man to man, then that is the first thing we hear.  If we are a man who has compensated for our short stature by being a big tax collector, then Jesus says, “I see you hiding in the tree, Zacchaeus, come down and I will dine with you.”

Jesus calls us to admit that the demons which possess us have gotten out of hand.  Whatever the evil of our lives Jesus calls us to be honest about what makes us miserable. On a silence retreat I became aware of how powerful the demon named “Worry” or “Anxiety” was in my life.  I tried my best to quit worrying.  It didn’t work.  I began to worry about my worrying.  Finally, not so much in faith as frustration, I prayed to God, “I can’t quit thinking about this, I am worried about what is going to happen and it is making me sick.  I am powerless over this worry.  You have got to help me.”  It was then, at my admission of my powerlessness over anxiety that the healing began.  The first step is to take the name of whatever demon is ours and say, “I admit that I am powerless over _______ - that my life has become unmanageable because of __________.”

The second step is to believe that there is a power greater than me and greater than my demon that forgives me and will save me.  If there is no such greater power for my life, then by my own behavior I am doomed to hell.  I can’t stop my dark side and so if I am to “live in the Spirit” there must be a God that can help me.  I believe there is such a God because I have seen mercy in Jesus and the followers of Jesus by which lives are transformed from Paul’s first list to his second.  Paul is a case in point, being transformed by God from a vengeful persecutor of Christians to a missionary of love and compassion.  But most significantly for me, I believe there is a God who cares for me because I am being transformed and getting a little better day by day.

Acknowledging my need for healing and believing there is a God who heals leads to the third step which is to surrender my will and my life to the care of God as we know God in Jesus.  We pray in the Lord’s Prayer, “Thy will be done.” It is a radical prayer (too often simply mouthed) that asks God to move our will, what we want, to the side and to place at the very center of our being, personal and corporate, the will of God’s Holy Spirit as revealed in Christ Jesus.

You know I speak truth when I say that this surrender of our will is not easy.  One moment we plead with God, turning our lives to God’s care and will.  And the next moment, when things show a little improvement, we again grab hold of our destiny as if we had made the better ourselves, as if we never really let go. Surrendering our will to God’s will is a hard thing and the work of a life time.  But surrender we must or we feed the evil wolf and starve the good.

Where do we begin our surrender?  A friend of mine was once challenged by an alcoholic who was tired of his disease but had steadily refused to submit his will to God’s will.  The drunk, in sarcasm and frustration, said to my friend, “I would ask God for help but I don’t know the prayer.”  And my friend, inspired by the God who desires all the children be filled with peace and joy, and perhaps some frustration with an old drunk, grabbed the drunks lips and said, “It is easy.  Just say, ‘Jesus, help me.’

For some it will hardly seem possible that we are forgiven before we ask.  And it will hardly seem enough that all we have to do is ask and the healing begins.  But it is true!  We need only say, “Thy will be done” and God in infinite mercy begins the work of changing our lives and through us our world.  The Christian way of healing, of being made holier, cleaner, more loving, peaceful and joyful, is to simply pray for help and then watch God’s love work a mystery in us.

And to deepen this miracle of new birth God chooses to make us partners in ministry, to make us the very living body of Christ. As the mystery unfolds in us we are given opportunities to cooperate with God’s grace through doing all the good we can; through the spiritual disciples of prayer, study, worship, fasting, and spiritual conferencing; and through minimizing our harm to others and all the creation.

There is a war raging in our souls.  And as it rages in our souls it inevitably rages in our families, our churches, our nation and our world. It is a war between good and evil.  It is a war in which our hope is in God alone.  And so we focus not upon our failures, but upon what God can and is doing within and among us. We honestly name our sin and the moving on, ask for help.  In trust, we surrender our will to God’s will.  God, who sees beyond our failures, tells us that we are not our sins, but that we are love and that we are meant to love.  Healing comes and good triumphs over evil.

“Which wolf will win,” our grandchildren ask?

“The one we feed,” we say.  And by God’s infinite grace we become who we are made to be; love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, trustfulness, gentleness and self-control.

Shalom and Amen.