Excellent!
I also liked how you said that I cannot walk in your understanding of God, but that your understanding still profits me as I seek to walk with God myself.
Along these lines I wanted to share a little more from my own small understanding.
I have found that my understanding of walking in the Spirit (which is barely awakened compared to others) is linked to my understanding of my own poverty before God. Consider this well known passage from Romans 7:I had not known sin, but by the law: for I had not known lust, except the law had said, Thou shalt not covet. Notice how Paul referenced the tenth commandment rather then the sixth Thall shalt not commit adultery. This is because before Paul understood the implications of the tenth, he felt he was obeying the 6th by not actually comitting adultery. In other words, he was obeying the law according to his own unregenerate understanding and thus sensed no guilt and no need for forgiveness. This is why we must be careful to not equate walking in the Spirit to obeying the law, else we either underestimate the reach of the tenth commandment into our hearts, or we find ourselves slain by the law with no ressurection.but when the commandment came, sin revived, and I died.
The tenth commandment, even as it was given during the birth of the nation of Israel at MT Sinai, was already anticipating the need for a New Birth. For as Paul observed, when this commandment hit home in his heart, the law left him with no defense. If we don't understand the final execution of self-righteousness that is brought to us in the tenth commandment, then we haven't been confronted yet with our true sin nature. If, in this state of delusion we find we feel no condemnation, it is not because of grace but because of darkness.
Paul understood that the tenth commandment was aimed at his heart and thus prevented him from thinking he was righteous on the basis that he could successfully conform his outer man to the other commandments. In this way, Paul is walking in the understanding Jesus taught: that a man commits adultery or murder in his heart just by the sinful instincts and passions that reside there.
So, walking in the Spirit is not a circular argument for taking us back to the Ten Commandments. Many seem to imply this, and create a conundrum for the awakened conscience. This is why I have a problem for those who say that their own clean conscience is holiness achieved...a conscience that truly has been hit with the tenth commandment never self-recovers, but finds rest only in the objective and real righteousness of Christ. (But this is another, albiet related subject.)
Of course this struggle with the law always raises the question, if we are claiming the right to be lawless. Before I rush into the obligatory answer I would like to offer a surprising answer: Yes, in one way we are to be lawless. Many times young Christians are handed a list of do's and don'ts...well mostly the don'ts...and led to believe that accomplishing this list will be a spiritual accomplishment. Well believe it or not, I actually see a little good in these lists for a short time...but in maturity they will be put away without much compulsion. Why?
The reason is conveyed in Romans 14. 14 I know, and am persuaded by the Lord Jesus, that there is nothing unclean of itself: but to him that esteemeth any thing to be unclean, to him it is unclean.
15 But if thy brother be grieved with thy meat, now walkest thou not charitably. Destroy not him with thy meat, for whom Christ died.
16 Let not then your good be evil spoken of:
17 For the kingdom of God is not meat and drink; but righteousness, and peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost.
In a very real way we have traded one law for another: the law of Love. The latter is much harder to measure success by...but interestlingly enough is free from meausring it's success at all because walking in the Spirit is resting in the measurement of another more perfect metric.
So, for me this Walk in the Spirit, must begin with faith in the finished substitutionary work of Christ and continue in his perfect love afforded by his perfect salvation. We begin the New Birth by dying... being slain in our hearts from the truth and conviction of the perfect law. If we are ressurected from this death on any basis other then the work of Christ we are defeated already, because our flesh is sinful and does not obey in love but in self-preservation. If we do not continue in love for others we indicate that we are not walking in the Spirit with outward conformity to the law remaining our only compulsion.
We are not lawless, but the outward compulsion of the law, which is fear and death, is behind us as we have died and been ressurected with Christ's inward impulses of love.
Like I said, this is only my little bit to add to this important topic.
Blessings,
MC
Of course
