By The Spirit

Cultivating a Christ-Formed Life

I finished up a sermon series called Christ-Formed from Galatians this past Sunday. As I mentioned in each sermon, Paul writes, “My dear children, for whom I am again in the pains of childbirth until Christ is formed in you” (Gal 4:19).¹ Christians, as people justified by faith and baptized into Christ, are adopted into a new life shaped by Jesus Christ's life.

Learning to live as Christ-formed people is a matter of discipleship, sometimes called spiritual formation. I actually prefer the phrase life formation because this formation is a claim upon our entire life. This is also why the Holy Spirit matters to our lives as Christians.

If we ask the question of how we are formed in Christ, the simple answer is probably to hear Paul saying, “Since we live by the Spirit, let us keep in step with the Spirit” (Gal 5:25). We can trust that living by the Spirit will result in our formation in Christ because God’s Holy Spirit is never going to lead us in any other life than that revealed to us in Jesus Christ.

This means that over time, as we live by the Spirit, our lives should reflect the life that Jesus Christ lived, with all of the values that characterize the life of Jesus Christ. In particular, this includes the logic of the cross that Christ embraced. So like Christ, we learn to serve and even suffer for the sake of others, extending God’s gracious hospitality to everyone just like Christ. Now if only it was that simple. But it’s not, so we need to start with an understanding of our freedom in Christ.²

According to Paul, “It is for freedom that Christ has set us free” (Gal 5:1). Paul is responding to those Jewish believers who insist that living in a right relationship with God (justification) requires adherence to the Law of Moses. If the question is whether people must be circumcized to live in a right relationship with God, then Paul’s response is a “No!” Christians are not obligated by the requirements of the Law anymore. By extension, Christians are not bound by legalistic expressions of Christianity either. There is always a temptation to reduce the Christian Faith to a set of rules, even proof-texting the Bible as necessary, in order to say what Christians can and cannot do and then use that legalistic reduction to judge the faith of other Christians. Then anyone who doesn’t understand and practice the Christian faith according to the reduction appears guilty of turning to another gospel.³ The irony is that it’s this sort of sectarian legalism that Paul has declared as another gospel.

I don’t want to leave the impression that Christian doctrine is unimportant and doesn’t matter. What matters is remembering that we are free from the trapping of sectarian legalism in Christ. However, our freedom is not a license to indulge whatever desires we have. In fact, the idea of freedom in Christ is not our individual right to determine for ourselves what is right and wrong, and therefore live however we like. I know our society thinks of freedom as the right to self-determination, but that’s actually a form of slavery because God never created us to live as our own governors. In fact, going back to Genesis 3, we see that what Adam and Eve sought was the ability to gain knowledge of what’s good and evil for themselves. Instead of trusting God to determine what is good and evil, they sought that power for themselves—to their own peril. So it is a mistake to think we are free to rule ourselves. The gospel Jesus proclaimed was the good news of God’s kingdom at hand. In proclaiming the kingdom of God, Jesus has called us to follow him in living under God’s governance again rather than our own rule.

The way that God’s governance works is that God gives us his Holy Spirit to walk by. That’s why Paul writes, “Walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of your flesh” (Gal 5:16) The language of walking by the Spirit is about letting the Spirit determine how we live our lives.⁴ However, in order to walk by the Spirit, we have to give our attention to the Spirit.

The word for Spirit in Hebrew is ru’ach, which also means “wind”. So if we think about the Holy Spirit as a wind that’s blowing, the image of sailing might help us think about how we give our attention to the Spirit. think with me for a moment about wind and sailing. Sailing requires putting the sails into the wind to catch the wind so the boat will sail. So it is in walking by the Spirit. That is, we have to put our sails, so to speak, into the Spirit and catch the Spirit. If we’ll position ourselves to catch the Spirit, our lives will reflect Christ and produce the fruit of the Spirit (Gal 5:22-23).

The choice we are faced with is whether we want a Christ-formed life or not. Assuming we do, we must ask what kind of spirit we position our lives to catch. If we want to position our lives to catch the Holy Spirit, then we have to attend to the work of the Holy Spirit, which means disciplining ourselves to spend time in prayer, taking time to read and dwell upon scripture, and giving ourselves time for reflection on our lives. It’s in such times that we are able to discern those aspects of our lives that still need to be transformed by the Spirit into Christ-likeness.

So I close with one question: How are we attending to the work of the Holy Spirit?

1. Unless otherwise noted, all scripture quotations are from The Holy Bible, New International Version, NIV. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

2. James D.G. Dunn, The Epistle to the Galatians, Black’s New Testament Commentaries, Peabody: Hendrickson Publishers, 1993, 286-287, notes that the point Paul “wished to bring out was that the call to freedom was a call not merely from the older enslavement, but also a call to a new responsibility.”

3. For example, see Alisa Childers, Another Gospel?: A Lifelong Christian Seeks Truth in Response to Progressive Christianity, Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale, 2020. I share some of the same concerns the author has for some of the teaching coming from so-called progressive/liberal Christianity, but the author’s rigid dogma that reflects the traditional evangelical/conservative Christianity has problems too. Perhaps it would be better for all Christians, including progressives and evangelicals, to hold their doctrine with both humility and a charitable disposition. For the moment we make our understanding of biblical doctrine a de facto requirement to being a true Christian, then we are adding to the gospel and then indeed proclaiming another gospel.

4. F.F. Bruce, The Epistle to the Galatians, The New International Greek Testament Commentary, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1982, 243.