NOT FULFILL
Galatians 5:16 This I say then, walk in the Spirit, and you will not fulfill the lust of the flesh.
We don’t have to fulfil the lusts of our flesh. We all have lusts because our flesh did not get born again, so we will have lusts to deal with until the day of its transformation. But the good news is that those lusts no longer have to have dominion over us. We don’t have to be controlled by those lusts.
There are no lusts that you can’t overcome, so you don’t have to be a carnal Christian. How do you do it? You walk in the spirit. How do you walk in the spirit? Jesus said, “My Words are Spirit, and they are life” (John 6:63). You walk in the Word. You don’t just hear it, you do it, you walk in it. The Word of God becomes your life. John the Revelator said he was in the spirit on the Lord’s Day. What does that mean? I have heard it explained this way, and it seems very good. John was just more aware of spiritual things than natural things.
You can walk in the spirit all day, every day. If you couldn’t walk in the spirit all the time, that means that God must be ok with you sometimes walking in and living by the impulses of your flesh, and, therefore, God would be ok with you living in and practicing sin. We know that is not the case because sin leads to death, and God is not now, or will He ever be, ok with death. I think, sometimes, people get confused about walking in the spirit versus responding to the Spirit or yielding to the Spirit. When the Spirit of God is in manifestation during a service, you have a choice to yield to Him or not. When someone is used in the gifts, or in the manifestations of the Spirit, it’s because they have yielded to the Holy Ghost.
Walking in the spirit is something you can do all day long, but yielding to the Spirit is something that’s only done occasionally when the Holy Ghost is in manifestation. Sometimes, we can understand more about what something is by talking about what it is not. Walking in the spirit should be done all day, every day, and then while we are at church or perhaps somewhere else, the Lord will use us to minister to people as we yield to the Holy Spirit. I like this verse because it tells us what we can do, by the power of God, to be free from the lusts of our flesh. It is not willpower, but by the power of the Holy Ghost that we walk in every day that gets rid of the works of our flesh and the carnal desires we have in our flesh.