Flesh and Spirit

Boquete Flower Festival, Panama

A man reaps what he sows. Whoever sows to please their flesh, from the flesh will reap destruction; whoever sows to please the Spirit, from the Spirit will reap eternal life. 

(Galatians 6: 7 & 8, NIV)

If you’re like me, Paul’s ubiquitous reference to Christian life as a war between flesh and spirit can be a puzzler. Flesh, to me, has always had connotations of meat; like a raw tenderloin of pork or a carcass of beef hanging in a butcher’s cooler. Or in the human body, flesh wound as opposed to a broken bone. Muscle, in other words, comes to mind. 

The Greek word Paul was using, sàrks,can denote flesh but also connotes the person before Christian regeneration. The person as physically born. In effect, then, Paul would be saying in verse 7, “If you persist in thinking and living like you did before you heard and accepted the good news, you are sowing daily the seeds of your own disappointment.” 

Parsing spirit isn’t easy either. Typically, Christian faith has assigned the Spirit the attributes of a person, but with a ghost-like presence that is like the wind without being windy, sort of. We may well scratch our heads over whether to use the pronoun he or it (probably never she) when we speak of spirit.

For me, this analogy helps: A school can be just a building where you go for a few hours a day to sit and learn, but it can also meld into a community with an almost-family-like atmosphere, with loyalties to fellow students and staff, with team names and cheer leaders and rah-rah-rah, with a sense of belonging and teamwork. We call it school spirit, the spirit that makes for a joyful, satisfying atmosphere. 

But no school can garner 100% buy-in; even the best schools will have vandals and bullies and smokers-in-the-furnace-room. They choose to live on the dark side, outside the spirit: rebellious, misbehaving, avoiding participation, rejecting the community’s invitation to be a part of it all . . . and thereby jeopardizing their own education. Sowing seeds to their own destruction, as Paul would put it. 

Is it like this? Choosing to live in the spirit of the gospel, being buoyed up by the atmosphere of common purpose in the community we call church. Celebrating together the goodness of creation in joyful song, dance and feasting. A Holy Spirit. It’s no coincidence that “they were all together in one place” when at Pentecost, the spirit came upon the assembly with the power of a mighty, rushing wind. 

On the other hand, it’s not necessary to be in church to feel that euphoria, that feeling of wholeness. It can come upon you unexpectedly—if not like a mighty rushing wind, at least like a subtle breeze—when while walking in solitude, for instance, you hear the the songs of the birds, the murmur of poplar leaves spinning under a summer sun and the world so right, so absolutely wonderful. There’s no place where the spirit, even in its holiest form, will not show up. But there I go, anthropomorphizing the Spirit as my Sunday School teachers taught me way back when.

We make it too complicated. Whether you’re a creationist or an evolutionist, a mystic or a rationalist makes no difference to what Paul’s talking about. You’ve only one life; don’t crap it away by walking stubbornly on the dark side, by assuming that being flesh is all there is and never catching the spirit that Jesus so eloquently offered when he said to the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s Well, “God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.”

If the above feels too “liberal” for you, you could check out and read a more-orthodox sermon by John Piper at https://www.desiringgod.org/messages/the-war-within-flesh-versus-spirit. There is, after all, only one God, one Spirit and hopefully, someday, one universal church with all of us rejoicing in the one and only spirit.