“Let me ask you only this: Did you receive the Spirit by works of the law or by hearing with faith? Are you so foolish? Having begun by the Spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh?” (Gal. 3:2–3).

From first to last, the Christian life is a life of faith. At no point can fleshly works do anything to move the soul one inch closer to God. Do you believe this? I am not sure that all of us do. I think that instinctively, we all believe that while we are saved by faith alone, we are sanctified by the dint of our own hard work, grit, and gumption.

Do we not see this in our often-failed attempts to white-knuckle our way through temptation, digging deep to resist the flesh and trying harder to be holy? Such efforts, however, have more in common with a CrossFit gym or a twelve-step program than they do with the truth Paul preached. Paul’s gospel never recommends mere self-effort, it never leaves a sinner simply to his own devices, and it has nothing to do with reaching into some hidden tank of self-determination for the strength to meet the needs of the hour. Rather, it is about reaching out of ourselves and up to the Lord Christ. It’s about laying hold of the risen and exalted Lord Jesus, and by faith, pulling down His resurrection power in the hour of need. This is Paul’s argument at the start of Galatians 3. Let’s work through it together.

Paul asks the Galatians how they began the Christian life. Was it by doing something? No, it was by hearing something and by believing what they had heard. This is an amazing statement. Paul could not be more emphatic in his description of the passivity of faith. At the level of justification, faith isn’t acting on a message; it is simply receiving this good news with a childlike posture of trust. And by means of that faith, we receive not only salvation but also the Holy Spirit of God Himself.

This has astounding implications for living the Christian life, for when you have the Spirit of God, you have all the fullness of the Godhead in Him. In his letter to the Ephesians, Paul describes the experience like this: The Holy Spirit strengthens us with power in the inner man (Eph. 3:16). He does this so that Christ might dwell in our hearts through faith and not through works (Eph. 3:17). I believe the Spirit’s principal role here is to strengthen our faith through the Word of Christ (Rom. 10:17), and then through that faith in the Word, Jesus enters the believer’s soul (John 15:7). As Christ floods the Christian’s heart, He roots and grounds their spiritual experience in an ever-growing enjoyment of the love of God (Eph. 3:17–20). The end of all this is to leave us filled with all the fullness of God the Father Himself (Eph. 3:19). If this blows your mind, and it should, don’t worry: God’s capacity to act isn’t limited by our capacity to think or even to imagine (Eph. 3:20–21).

This has important ramifications for our growth in holiness and our experience of the Spirit, the driving force in sanctification (Rom. 8:1–39; Gal. 5:16). At no point can we simply “flesh” our way to God. Fleshly works are of no value whatsoever. How could they be? Nothing good dwells in the flesh, and nothing good can be done by it either (Rom. 7:18). The flesh, a prisoner to the law of sin, knows only how to resist God and wage war against His law (Rom. 7:23). By the law of sin, Paul describes the commanding and authoritative voice of the sin nature: “Don’t read your Bible. Don’t spend time in prayer. Give in to distracting thoughts at church during the sermon. If your lust is itching, scratch it!” To all these and many more such evil thoughts, the flesh simply responds with delight, “Oh, yes!” In the flesh, therefore, Paul says, “I am wretched; I cannot help myself” (Rom. 7:24, paraphrase). He feels himself strapped to a dying, decaying body. He longs for freedom.

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