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let us walk after
the spirit (Galatians 5:25).
     
    The great religious blind spot
     
    One of our biggest blind spots is
we’ve bought into the idea that good things are good for us while bad things
are bad for us. But this good versus evil logic is fruit off the wrong tree. It
gets us keeping score in a game God isn’t playing. The real issue is life
versus death. And if you sow to the flesh you will reap corruption regardless
of what you do.
    “Wait a
second Paul. Are you saying I can do no good walking after the flesh?” You can
do a lot of good walking after the flesh, but it won’t do you much good.
“The flesh profits nothing.” Live like this and you will be functionally
identical to a moral atheist. You will miss opportunities to reveal the kingdom
of God supernaturally. You will be acting like a “mere man” (see 1 Corinthians
3:3).
    Jesus
didn’t suffer and die to make sinners good but to make the dead live. Christ is
your life. When you walk after the flesh you are acting like the dead man you
used to be. You are wasting your life in dead-end pursuits. You can spend all
your days doing good works but none of it will result in praise to your
heavenly Father because they are your works and not his. You may feel like
you’re making a mark but in reality you’re just accumulating fuel for the fire.
    Sadly,
this is exactly how many Christians choose to live. Ask them to define the
works of the flesh and they will recite Paul’s list of manifest examples in
Galatians 5. These are the biggies, if you like. It never occurs to them that
walking after flesh can also bring death to the humdrum activity of everyday
life, as the Bible describes elsewhere (e.g., through worry, serving God out of
a sense of obligation, blaming others when things go wrong, etc.).
    Do you
see the dangers of walking after the flesh? Here’s a simple test to find out:
Which of the following gives you greater concern as a Christian?
     
Doing something bad in a moment of
     rash passion, or
Wasting my life doing my good works in
     the power of the flesh.
     
    I suspect more people are fearful
of doing something bad in a rash moment than they are of wasting their lives
walking after the flesh. But a Christian who, in a momentary loss of sanity,
fools around with sin, may be more likely to come to his senses than one who
has been dulled by years of service done in the flesh. I am certainly not
encouraging you to go out and do bad things. Nor am I trying to discourage you
from doing good things. (Galatians 6:9 exhorts us not to grow weary of doing
good.) What I am trying to do is show you that we can walk after the flesh
regardless of what we do and even if we doing something good. When we walk
after the old way of the flesh, what seems good and right to us now will
eventually lead to death and disappointment.
    It’s
time we discarded the forbidden fruit and got our nourishment from the Tree of
Life which is Christ. Our innate tendency to judge ourselves as good or bad
based on the good or bad things we are doing, is doing nobody any good at all.
     
    A word after
     
    “Paul, let me get this straight.
Are you saying I can spend my life doing good works and have it all count for
nothing? That I can actually do harm by doing good?” That is exactly what I’m
saying. In fact, this is probably the oldest mistake in the book. When Adam and
Eve ate the forbidden fruit, they thought they were doing something good.
    The tree
of knowledge of good and evil was not a bad tree; God doesn’t do bad trees
(Genesis 1:31). Everything in the world was good so the serpent had to tempt
Eve with something that seemed “good and pleasing” to her (Genesis 3:6). It’s
an old trick that still works.
    Most
people think of themselves as good and decent people. Most aren’t tempted to go
out and do bad things but they are quick to do things that seem good at the
time, and this is where the danger lies. The danger is not what they are doing,
but what they