Hey my friends, it's Matt. This is a 10-minute Bible Hour podcast, and we're gonna talk about Star Wars a little bit at the beginning, so I gotta do my usual Star Wars disclaimer, which is hey, I know not all of you are into pop culture or sci-fi or silly stories like this. Thank you for bearing with me. I'll try not to take too long, but whether you like Star Wars or not, I think this is gonna make sense. There's a movie that came out about 10 years ago called Rogue One, and it's regained more popularity lately as a Star Wars film because there's a TV show, a streaming show called Andor that just finished up. It's full run. It was only two seasons long. It was made by the guy who did the born identity shows, and my goodness was it excellent. Just masterful. You know how normally I'm like, I don't recommend it. And I just hide like a coward behind my recommendation, not recommendation nonsense. Well, let me do something different here. I full-throatedly and with moral clarity recommend this show. Yes, there will be a couple things that if you watch this with teenage kids, I wouldn't probably go younger than that, that you're gonna have to talk about. But if you look closely at what is being done in Andor, it is a brilliant commentary on how people of all persuasions and political stripes and social alignments, everybody who fought the big evil empire had to give up something. So I love the way you see that sacrifice from across the ideological spectrum, even at times and in ways that might make some of you uncomfortable. So I thought it was just great. It avoids all of the tropes and pitfalls of recent storytelling. Just wonderful. There's my little recommendation. Well, this Andor show, which is two seasons long, there's a movie that goes at the end. And the movie has been out for a long time. It came out in the mid-20 teens, and it is again called Rogue One. This movie has gone down as maybe the most popular, the most respected film in the entire Star Wars universe and the whole Star Wars world. And it was well liked when it came out, but it's just aged very, very well. So I went back and watched that this week. And another thing came to mind from about 10 years ago that I'd forgotten about. There's this one character in Rogue One who is sort of like a space samurai. It sounds ridiculous, but it works in the movie. And he's blind, but yet somehow he sees. He is deeply rooted in this sort of universal religion. I know it's it sounds like heretical and all of that stuff, but you know, it's fantasy. He's deeply rooted in this spirituality, this mystical religion where he trusts in this thing called the force. And at one point in the movie, he's got to endure a very risky situation, even though he can't see, to move through danger to go and do what is right. And he has this mantra that he repeats to himself all the time to remind himself of what his alignment is and who he is and what he is. He always says, I am one with the force, and the force is with me. Again, I fully understand that it's not Christianity that's totally different. Yeah, I get it. But when this first came out, I heard all over the place people latching on to that scene and that character and being like, That's like walking in the spirit. That's what that is. It's like just this way of identifying and orienting your life that you're not doing this by your own power, the power of your body that is going through life and honoring God and living the life of the spirit. No, you trust in the spirit. And I remember rolling my eyes at it a lot and being, oh my goodness, you all just saw Rogue One and you just wanted to talk about Rogue One because you liked it, and now you're shoehorning it into Christian stuff and everybody's doing it. This isn't very inspired, but now I'm doing it. Because dang, it was really helpful watching that scene with that character who has a mystical connection to the force, saying, I can't see, I can't do this by the power of my own body and my own flesh, but I am walking literally in the scene I'm describing. I am walking by the force. Okay, the analogy is pretty clear here, right? We're in Galatians 5, and we're trying to figure out this somewhat difficult to conceive of concept of walking by the Spirit, of living by the Spirit, and how that contrasts with living by our own action, our own power, the power of our body to do things. And I think one of the ambiguities, one of the difficulties of this is that the concept of the flesh, that being doing it on our own, is it's a little bit muddied because that word can mean so many different things. And in the Bible, it does mean so many different things. The flesh can quite literally mean the body, and that's it. Just you have a physical body and it does things, and you know, it's muscle and bone and things like that. At different points in the Bible, the flesh can also mean that which is mortal, that which is perishable. Also, the flesh can mean at different points in the Bible, your own effort. It can mean human willpower alone, human ingenuity alone. Also, at times in the Bible, the flesh can mean the sinful nature, apart from God and apart from the spirit. So it's a little bit, I mean, it's understandable if it's a little bit challenging to understand what is meant in Galatians 5.16 when it says, So I say, live by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh or the desires of the sinful nature. But given what we've looked at over the last week plus and what we're seeing here contextually in Galatians 5, this is where I think that silly rogue one analogy is kind of helpful. You have a situation in that movie where this blind person who would be absolutely helpless if they tried to do this thing by their own power. I mean, you look at the circumstances, I'm trying not to ruin it if you haven't seen the movie, but you look at what he's up against and you're like, that just can't be done, even if the dude could see. He can't do the task that needs to be done. There's far too much peril. But you look at that at this very important moment in the movie and you're like, whoa, well, I hope the force is real because he's gonna need it. And if there's any character who is in this movie who walks by the force and could put their trust in this greater thing, again, I know it's all pagan and all of that, but it's just an analogy, it would be that character. So let's see what happens. And he bravely goes out and walks by the force. Well, that seems to be what Paul is driving at on a lot of levels here. The way we used to do things was out of obligation, like I was talking about yesterday, a good obligation, but obligation to a harsh teacher. But you also used to have to do things by your own effort, and your own effort isn't ever going to be good enough. You cannot navigate all the peril of that raging battlefield with the faculties and the tools that you have alone. It's impossible. The only way to truly obey God, to truly love your neighbor, to truly experience sanctification, being made holy, is by the power of the Spirit. It's by the presence of the Spirit. And it's not just a one-time transactional thing, but there is this concept of walking by the Spirit, wading out into all of the peril and the difficulty of the world. Behold, I'm sending you out like sheep among wolves. We're in a strange, foreign, hostile land when we are a Christian. What is being done in our soul and our heart, what God is doing, is contrary to the impulses and the forces of a fallen, sinful physical world. It's a weird spot to be in. So how does navigating that work? Well, if it could be done by the flesh and by the power of our will and determination, it would have been figured out long before Galatians. Everybody would just do it, because who wants to get everything wrong? I mean, willpower would have already won out. But it can't be done. The only way is by walking in the spirit. And what I like about the silly, overused Rogue One illustration is that as weird as it sounds, and I don't know what other word to use here, as weird as it sounds, there is a degree of mystery and mysticism to it. The dude in the movie clearly doesn't understand everything about how the force works. But there is a degree of trust and an understanding that this thing is greater than him. So much more so for the Christian, you might not understand every single detail about how walking by the Spirit works or what living by the Spirit looks like, or the physics or mechanics of it in the invisible unseen realm. But there's this attitude of dependence. Maybe something that ties into the attitude of childlike faith that we see back in the teachings of Jesus so often. This also makes it very hard to pin down when you're trying to explain this part of the Bible or make sense of it for yourself, because it's not as simple as, well, in order to walk by the Spirit, you simply do these five things and you do them regularly. Well, I mean, spiritual disciplines like reading the Bible and prayer and meditation and the participation in the life of the fellowship, the body of Christians, all of that stuff is part of life by the spirit, and all of that stuff informs life by the spirit. And doing things that are contrary to the spirit is going to clutter that up. It's it's difficult to pin down in a very practical do these things in this exact order kind of way, because the very thing that life by the spirit is contrasted to is wading out into the perilous battlefield entirely on your own and by your own effort to navigate something that can only ultimately be navigated by the power of the Spirit. In other words, as we go through the New Testament, as we go through the whole Bible, we're always talking about these right postures before God, right? When Jesus shows up, everybody who recognizes who he is assumes some sort of right posture before the king. People fall at his feet, people physically regard him as being the king, as being authoritative. The people who get it right get that he's a king, even if they don't know every single thing about it, and their actions reflect that. After Jesus is crucified and risen and ascends, and we get into the rest of the New Testament and the Holy Spirit shows up, this right posture that we see carried forward through the rest of the Bible and into even this moment as you and I are talking, is this posture of dependence. It's a posture reminiscent of the one assumed by that character in Rogue One, where we live by the Spirit, we walk by the Spirit, there's trust in the Spirit, there's trust in God, and there's an acknowledgement that the flesh will fail. Willpower is a component. Willpower in the context of obeying God is a gift from God, but the flesh alone, apart from God, will fail 100% of the time. So what do we do? Well, we assume a right posture and we walk by faith. We walk in trust. We try to walk in harmony with the spirit. And as we assume that posture of dependence, living by the Spirit, walking by the Spirit, somehow that thwarts the impulses of the flesh and our own effort and our usual solutions to solving problems. Because when we are living out Christian faith and doing the Christian thing, we're trying to tackle something bigger than what human effort can tackle. Whether you're talking about the front end of it, which is what most of Galatians deals with, which is being made right with God, or whether you're talking about the back end of it, which is the Christian life, once you've been made right with God, either way, we can't do that. The flesh cannot achieve either of those things. It is by the power of God that we are one, made right with God, and that two, we have the capacity to obey God and function within the context of his kingdom as sons, daughters, heirs, ambassadors of that kingdom. And that's the stuff that Paul is tackling here at the end of the book of Galatians. I'm just going to keep rolling in real time here, but I'm going to put in a little bit of a break so that we can continue this conversation into tomorrow. I really care about what we're talking about here, and I'm really trying to make sense of it better than I've ever made sense of it in the past for myself. So yeah, we're lingering on this material a little bit, but I think it's important. We're going to pause right here and just pick up right where we left off, working through this idea more of walking by the spirit, living by the spirit next time around. I'm Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.