Bobby Bosler: Welcome to the Thee Generation Podcast. I’m Bobby Bosler and I’m speaking to you today from Menominee Falls, Wisconsin. Well, the school year here at Baptist College of Ministry has commenced, and I have to say God has been on the move. Because of coronavirus and the delay of our graduation, we found ourselves in an unusual circumstance where we had our entire student body here early, and we believed that the Lord was leading us to have three days of revival down in Camp Joy.

And we ended up down there, and we ended up doing a separate track for the guys separate track for the girls and young people, I want you to know that God met with us in a very, very special way. I won’t go on to the details of what we talked about, but we went after sin, we went after selfishness, and God showed up and many young people were brought to brokenness over their sin and brokenness over self or selfishness manifested in their lives.

While we were down there, you know, it’s easy to think the preachers have it all figured out That’s not true. While we were down there in the midst of preaching, I was preaching, Dr. Jim was preaching, there were a number of others that were preaching. God was teaching me, and he was teaching me in an even deeper way what it means to walk in the Spirit. You know the promise. In Galatians chapter 5 and verse 16, walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfill the lust of the flesh.

And we recognize that there is some kind of an amazing promise contained in that verse that if we walk in the Spirit, we won’t do what our flesh wants us to do. and we’ve all been in times in our lives where it seemed as if the flesh was too powerful to overcome and when we look at this promise we see a glimmer of hope and I want to help explain this glimmer of hope to you here today you know we look at this verse and we recognize there’s an amazing promise contained in it but I think we all find ourselves asking the question what does it mean to walk in the spirit right well I think to understand this we need to understand what it means to walk to walk is simply to take a series of steps right walking is not leaping walking is taking subsequent steps and whatever this walking is it’s done in the spirit and young people i want you to understand that walking in the spirit is simply yielding it’s surrendering moment by moment to the will and leadership of the Holy Spirit.

In fact, if you look down in verse 18, he says, but if ye be led of the Spirit, you’re not under the law. In other words, walking in the Spirit is synonymous with being led of the Spirit. In other words, every day of my life, not just in my morning devotion time, but throughout the day, my job is to yield to, to surrender to what the Holy Spirit wants me to be doing every moment of the day. One of the things that God worked in my heart about here this last week was how quick I am to resort to my phone, to check the stats of thegeneration.org perhaps, or to double check my news feeds, or maybe social media feeds, or to check on Twitter if, you know, what’s happening in politics, or in the riots, or what are the latest coronavirus numbers, And it’s so easy to shift into autopilot and to resort back to whatever it is that I wanted to get to on my phone.

And one of the things God smote me in my heart about is as long as I am resorting to what I want to do, I’m not walking in the Spirit. I’m not doing the will of the Holy Spirit. I’m doing what I want to do. And you might say, preacher, that kind of sounds a little bit, I don’t know, a little bit extreme. And I want you to know it is, but I believe walking in the Spirit is something that’s extreme.

You see, what God was teaching me is, you know, we spend all day doing what we want to do. It may not be sinful things. Listen, young people, I’m not getting into pornography on my phone. You might be, but maybe you’re not. but you’re still doing what you want to do all day long. It may not be wrong things. It may not be sinful things, but you’re just going on autopilot throughout your day, just kind of making decisions of selfishness, taking the easy route, just kind of thinking, what do I want to do with my break in between classes?

What do I want to do here before I go to bed as I’m winding down? Instead of asking the Holy Spirit, what do you want me to do? How do you want me to spend this time? We just default to doing our will our way. And that is not walking in the Spirit. Walking in the Spirit is even in the downtime, even when there isn’t a crisis, listening to the Holy Spirit, seeking His will and direction, and doing what He wants you to do.

You see, walking, if you’re going to get from one side of your house to the other, you’re going to have to walk. You don’t jump from one side of your house all the way to the other. You take step after step after step after step. Each step takes maybe a second each, maybe less if you’re running. And in the same way, at the same frequency throughout your day as you take steps, you need to surrender to the Holy Spirit. Say, preacher, it doesn’t sound like it’s that big of a deal.

If you look at the next verse, you’ll see that it is a big deal. It says, for the flesh lusteth against the spirit and the spirit against the flesh. In other words, these, they desire, they want control, okay? He says, and these are contrary, the one to the other. In other words, each one, your flesh and your spirit, yourself, you and what you want is at constant odds. It’s a completely opposite platform, if you will, than that of the Holy Spirit.

Their purposes have no overlap whatsoever. and the end result of it is that you cannot do the things that you would. In other words, young people, if you yield to your flesh, to the desires of you, you won’t be able to do the things that God wants you to do because you’re too busy doing what you want to do. But if I can flip it around the other way, and this was something that God struck me with this past week, you can also flip it around the other way, and if you yield to the Holy Spirit, If you do what he wants because his platform, his desires, his purposes are opposite of your flesh, you won’t be able to do what you want to do.

And by that I mean the things that your flesh wants to do. In other words, it’s all about who you’re yielding to. This passage, verse 16, 17, and 18, it’s all about not which one’s stronger, not about which dog is fed more. It’s all about who you are surrendering to on a day-by-day, moment-by-moment basis. young people, if you surrender to the Holy Spirit right now, you won’t be able to do what your flesh wants you to do. If you surrender to your flesh next time you get a chance to spend some downtime, you won’t be able to do what the Holy Spirit wants you to do.

Young people, that’s why the stakes are so high, because we have a world that needs to be reached, and we’re wasting our days and our minutes and our hours frittering away our lives on stupid, profitless, pointless pursuits that are actually in opposition to the will of God for you. Young people, I think if we really understood the biblical mandate for total surrender and total dependence, we would be shocked at how extreme it actually is. Young people, if you surrender to the Holy Spirit, you will bear the fruit of the Spirit.

You will bear love and joy and peace and so on in your lives. But if you’re just busy doing what you want to do, you will instead manifest the works of the flesh. That’s verses 19 through 21. Adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, envyings, murders, drunkenness, revelings, and stuff like it. Again, young people, when I’m not yielded to the Holy Spirit, I can be pretty nasty. And so can you. So young people, I want to challenge you.

Assess your day. Assess your days and your minutes and your hours and ask yourself a very serious question. am I surrendering to the Holy Spirit or am I living on autopilot young people there’s a glimmer of hope if you’ll surrender to the Spirit of God and depend on his power you won’t fulfill the lusts of your flesh instead you’ll turn the world upside down for Jesus Christ and I think that’s what you want and I know that’s what I want so would you follow me young people in surrendering to Jesus because he wants to use us to turn the world upside down