Now the works of the flesh are manifest, which are these; Adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness,
The works of the flesh are open and evident in the life, beginning with sexual immorality, impurity and sensuality in its forms of adultery, fornication, uncleanness and lasciviousness. The same list goes on to include idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, envyings, murders, drunkenness, revellings and everything like them. They stand in direct contrast to the fruit of the Spirit, which is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness and temperance. Those who practice such works will not inherit the kingdom of God, and hatred, envy, wrath, strife and jealousy will as surely shut the guilty out of heaven as adultery, murder and drunkenness. Those who are Christ's have crucified the flesh with its affections and lusts, and victory comes only by walking in the Spirit and through the Spirit putting to death the deeds of the body.
Manifest List Explained
The works of the flesh are manifest, meaning open, evident, and known by what appears in the life. They become visible in selfishness, covetousness, pride, and evil passions that show evil powers control the heart, while divine truth leads instead to good works and a generous, noble character. The wider list is applied to envy, hatred, jealousy, evil surmising, rivalry, strife, and bitterness as fruits of a corrupted spiritual life, and to harmful conduct and feelings that damage relationships and can shape the life of a family.
The verse names four sexual evils as works of the flesh: adultery, fornication, uncleanness, and lasciviousness, meaning sexual immorality, impurity, and sensuality. These belong to the same sinful class as hatred, emulation, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, envy, drunkenness, and murder. Its list continues through the following verses to include idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, envyings, murders, drunkenness, revellings, and everything like them.
Living after the flesh means allowing sensual appetites, lust, and the evil passions of the carnal nature to rule the being. It is bondage to the lower nature and to every appetite and passion and to any hereditary or cultivated habit or tendency to wrong. When such lust and evil passions rule, they damage the moral affections and encourage skepticism about Christian truth, with doubt wrongly treated as a virtue.
The verse belongs to a warning against self-indulgence and defilement opposed to purity of character, with idolatry, drunkenness, and similar conduct given as examples of such fleshly lust. God's people must remain untainted by these corruptions in the last days, keeping the body holy and the spirit pure under the Spirit's control in preparation to receive immortality. Apart from specifying its particular sins, it identifies conduct opposed to Christian character.
Contrast with Spirit's Fruit
The works stand in direct contrast to the fruit of the Spirit, which is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, and temperance, against which there is no law. Kindly words and deeds show the change wrought by grace and fellowship with Christ in place of those works. Idolatry, drunkenness and similar conduct are forms of fleshly lust set against that fruit, including temperance. Against the defiling works stands love that is pure and unadulterated, proceeding from the heart of Christ, not love-sick sentimentalism nor a beastly, defiling element that destroys all that is pure in mind or body and is death to both soul and body.
Those who are Christ's have crucified the flesh with its affections and lusts. The flesh lusts against the Spirit and the Spirit against the flesh, and they are contrary to one another so that people cannot do the things they would. Walking in the Spirit keeps from fulfilling the lust of the flesh, and those led by the Spirit are not under bondage to the law. Those who live in the Spirit must also walk in the Spirit, not seeking vainglory by provoking and envying one another, but restoring one overtaken in fault in meekness and bearing one another's burdens.
The works are known by what appears in the life, revealing whether justice and purity and truth abide in the heart, for membership in the church does not make a person a Christian. Separation from Christ causes division, discord, contention, prejudice of brother against brother, desire for vainglory, provoking one another and envying one another, with continual contradiction and variance with one another and strife, envy and jealousy as ruling elements. Union with Christ is the secret of unity, with believers approaching one another just in proportion as they approach Christ the center. A heart ruled by God's Spirit produces harmony, peace, love, meekness, benevolence, kindness, mercy and unity, for God is benevolence, mercy and love, and a person's fruit reveals which influence is at work, testing professed followers by what they bear.
Fanaticism is a work of the flesh, produced when Satan's power is brought to bear upon the carnal mind. It seeks to clothe itself to resemble truth and righteousness, but it falls infinitely short of counterfeiting the work of God, which the work of high heaven he cannot imitate. When carried out and ripened into bitterness, its terrible fruit stands in contrast to the fruit of the work and Spirit of God, as wide as Beelzebub with Christ and perdition with terror and blackness of despair with the glories of the kingdom of God. The road of the flesh leads to death and lies in the opposite direction from the road to life, not side by side with it, and the two must not be mixed as if both came from heaven, nor must the pure work of God be called Satan's work because fanaticism has appeared beside it.
Shut Out from Kingdom
Those who practice the manifest works of the flesh will not inherit the kingdom of God. Those works are open and evident, beginning with adultery, fornication, uncleanness and lasciviousness, and continuing with idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, envyings, murders, drunkenness, revellings and everything like them. Persisting in them and keeping on indulging them bars the doer from the kingdom, so the warning calls for waking up and for honest self-examination with no excuses about whether one is approaching any such sin.
Hatred, emulation, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies and envyings are as truly works of the flesh as lasciviousness, adultery, drunkenness and murder. Trying to correct the faults of others by indulging hatred and contention commits sins equally great. Each of these will as surely shut the guilty out of heaven and close its gate against them.
Jealousy of one another is a manifest work of the flesh, and those who hold it will never reach heaven, for nothing of that kind will be there. In its place there must be the likeness of Christ in the heart right at home, a little heaven on earth now, with tenderness for one another and love that is not crushed when hearing of another's errors. The works of the flesh are untruthfulness, impurity and unrighteousness, an evil nature that cannot inherit the kingdom of God and cannot enter heaven, though a great price has been paid for redemption from that condition. Every person must make Christ a personal Saviour and become true and pure and holy, for if sin is not destroyed in the sinner the sinner himself must be destroyed, because sin left remaining will destroy the sinner just as designed.
Hatred Division and Corruption
Trying to correct the faults of others by indulging hatred and contention commits sins equally great as lasciviousness, adultery, drunkenness and murder, for hatred, emulation, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies and envyings are as truly works of the flesh, and they will as surely shut the guilty out of heaven. Envy, strife, jealousy, variance, hatred, rivalry, evil surmising, emulation and bitterness are the unholy fruit of a heart not in harmony with Christ, the work of Satan seen among his children and acts of obedience to Satan rather than Christ. They grow from a divided heart open to his suggestions as he sows dissension to ruin souls and bodies, break up families, and produce sedition and murder, and they stand opposite to the harmony, peace, love, meekness, benevolence, kindness, mercy and unity produced when God's Spirit rules the heart. Bearing that fruit means cherishing evil and being separated from God, going astray and standing guilty, forsaking the Fountain of living waters for broken cisterns that can hold no water and corrupting the way before God, so that those who bear it will not heed corrective testimony nor see their perverse ways and be converted to be healed. Pride, vanity, frivolity, worldliness, greed, unkindness and faultfinding likewise reveal companionship with an evil spirit.
Fanaticism also is a work of the flesh produced when Satan's power bears upon the carnal mind, clothed to resemble truth and righteousness yet falling infinitely short of counterfeiting God's work, which high heaven's work he cannot imitate. When carried out and ripened into bitterness its terrible fruit contrasts with the fruit of God's work and Spirit as widely as Beelzebub with Christ and perdition with terror and blackness of despair with the glories of the kingdom, for the road of the flesh leads to death in the opposite direction from the road to life, not side by side with it, and the two must not be mixed as if both came from heaven. Hatred, emulation, jealousy and deadly strife mark the ungodly even when they look united, for their oneness is only in opposition to God's will and truth, a deceptive harmony that only partly hides a perpetual discord dividing them on every other point. Division and variance among believers are not fruits of righteousness but come from the evil one, and selfishness that prevents fellowship likewise obstructs the progress of the church.
The warning applies to widespread lawlessness, corruption and lust in society and within professedly Christian families, where unhappy jealousies and differences are the greatest detriment to the churches, bringing them into weakness and disfavor with God. Satan intrudes into every household, every city street, the churches, the national councils and the courts of justice to perplex, deceive, seduce, ruin the souls and bodies of men, women and children and break up families, sowing hatred, emulation, strife, sedition and murder, evils not appointed by God to exist and be accepted though ignorance of his devices leads the Christian world to regard them so. The same manifest works appear as selfishness, rivalry and separation of interests that break harmony and create disunion, Satan's studied plan imbued into humanity under pretense of necessity when it is not needful, dimming perception by worldly policy so it cannot be discerned as a hateful, poisonous root springing up to defile the whole man. That selfishness displeases God, corrupts the experience of every soul admitting it, shows the human ruling actions far more than the divine, brings in principles God hates, and has corrupted principal institutions including every publishing establishment.
The works become visible as selfishness, covetousness, pride and evil passions, revealing that evil powers control the heart, whereas divine truth leads to good works and a generous, noble character. Selfishness is a sin held as a natural family besetment that is rebuked but not confessed, and the natural ways and habits of the flesh are made manifest in alienation between relatives, which must be changed by grace so that God's Spirit rules the heart. They are openly manifest also in laboring for the esteem and applause of men, in vainglory, in dissatisfaction at not standing first in every calling and work, in envy and jealousy, in demeriting the one envied, in magnifying any fault in him, and in seeking to injure his reputation by picking at others. These are crowded into the heart by Satan to steal away humility and meekness, love and patience, they prove a person is exercised by another spirit than that of meekness and love, and they are hateful in the sight of a holy God but pleasing to the devil. The works spread when people are taught they need not obey God and when divine precepts are set aside, so that sin no longer appears sinful and righteousness no longer seems desirable, producing lust and other vice alongside envy, hypocrisy, strife and betrayal of sacred trusts, damaging family and social life and bringing lawlessness and licentiousness of the kind that brought judgment on the heathen.
Call to Victory Living
Christ has bought the souls, minds, and bodies of all His creatures, and He is dishonored when any precious soul corrupts the mind or the body by these manifest works. Souls enfeebled by selfish degrading passions can be remedied only by the life-giving power of the gospel, the aid of God as Great Physician, and the quickening power of the Holy Spirit to restore the moral image of God in man. Victory over every inherited or cultivated tendency to wrong is not gained by battling evil in finite human strength but through power God imparts to rule every appetite and passion.
The warning calls for honest self-examination with no excuses to see if one is approaching the committing of any such sin. Membership in the church does not make a person a Christian, but whether justice and purity and truth abide in the heart is revealed by fruit, and professed followers are tested by what fruit they bear. The works become visible in the life, including selfishness, covetousness, pride, evil passions, variance, envy, strife, and jealousy, which show what spirit is at work as opposed to the harmony, love, and unity created when God's Spirit rules the heart.
The verse warns to wake up and instead walk in the Spirit and through the Spirit mortify the deeds of the body so the lust of the flesh is not fulfilled, purifying the mind by obedience to truth. God's people must keep the body holy and the spirit pure under the Spirit's control as they prepare to receive immortality, remaining untainted by the defilement and corruption opposed to purity of character. Becoming thorough students of the Bible and doers of the Word through obedience to all requirements lays a sure foundation. Every person must make Christ a personal Saviour to become true and pure and holy.
The change wrought by grace and fellowship with Christ is shown in kindly words and deeds. The natural ways and habits that produce alienation, especially between relatives, must be changed by grace so the Spirit rules the heart. In place of jealousy there must be the similitude of Christ in the heart right at home, a little heaven on earth now, with tenderness for one another and love that is not crushed when hearing of another's errors.
The works of the flesh are open and evident in the life, beginning with sexual immorality, impurity and sensuality in its forms of adultery, fornication, uncleanness and lasciviousness. The same list goes on to include idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, envyings, murders, drunkenness, revellings and everything like them. They stand in direct contrast to the fruit of the Spirit, which is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness and temperance. Those who practice such works will not inherit the kingdom of God, and hatred, envy, wrath, strife and jealousy will as surely shut the guilty out of heaven as adultery, murder and drunkenness. Those who are Christ's have crucified the flesh with its affections and lusts, and victory comes only by walking in the Spirit and through the Spirit putting to death the deeds of the body.
Manifest List Explained
The works of the flesh are manifest, meaning open, evident, and known by what appears in the life. They become visible in selfishness, covetousness, pride, and evil passions that show evil powers control the heart, while divine truth leads instead to good works and a generous, noble character. The wider list is applied to envy, hatred, jealousy, evil surmising, rivalry, strife, and bitterness as fruits of a corrupted spiritual life, and to harmful conduct and feelings that damage relationships and can shape the life of a family.
The verse names four sexual evils as works of the flesh: adultery, fornication, uncleanness, and lasciviousness, meaning sexual immorality, impurity, and sensuality. These belong to the same sinful class as hatred, emulation, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, envy, drunkenness, and murder. Its list continues through the following verses to include idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, envyings, murders, drunkenness, revellings, and everything like them.
Living after the flesh means allowing sensual appetites, lust, and the evil passions of the carnal nature to rule the being. It is bondage to the lower nature and to every appetite and passion and to any hereditary or cultivated habit or tendency to wrong. When such lust and evil passions rule, they damage the moral affections and encourage skepticism about Christian truth, with doubt wrongly treated as a virtue.
The verse belongs to a warning against self-indulgence and defilement opposed to purity of character, with idolatry, drunkenness, and similar conduct given as examples of such fleshly lust. God's people must remain untainted by these corruptions in the last days, keeping the body holy and the spirit pure under the Spirit's control in preparation to receive immortality. Apart from specifying its particular sins, it identifies conduct opposed to Christian character.
Contrast with Spirit's Fruit
The works stand in direct contrast to the fruit of the Spirit, which is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, and temperance, against which there is no law. Kindly words and deeds show the change wrought by grace and fellowship with Christ in place of those works. Idolatry, drunkenness and similar conduct are forms of fleshly lust set against that fruit, including temperance. Against the defiling works stands love that is pure and unadulterated, proceeding from the heart of Christ, not love-sick sentimentalism nor a beastly, defiling element that destroys all that is pure in mind or body and is death to both soul and body.
Those who are Christ's have crucified the flesh with its affections and lusts. The flesh lusts against the Spirit and the Spirit against the flesh, and they are contrary to one another so that people cannot do the things they would. Walking in the Spirit keeps from fulfilling the lust of the flesh, and those led by the Spirit are not under bondage to the law. Those who live in the Spirit must also walk in the Spirit, not seeking vainglory by provoking and envying one another, but restoring one overtaken in fault in meekness and bearing one another's burdens.
The works are known by what appears in the life, revealing whether justice and purity and truth abide in the heart, for membership in the church does not make a person a Christian. Separation from Christ causes division, discord, contention, prejudice of brother against brother, desire for vainglory, provoking one another and envying one another, with continual contradiction and variance with one another and strife, envy and jealousy as ruling elements. Union with Christ is the secret of unity, with believers approaching one another just in proportion as they approach Christ the center. A heart ruled by God's Spirit produces harmony, peace, love, meekness, benevolence, kindness, mercy and unity, for God is benevolence, mercy and love, and a person's fruit reveals which influence is at work, testing professed followers by what they bear.
Fanaticism is a work of the flesh, produced when Satan's power is brought to bear upon the carnal mind. It seeks to clothe itself to resemble truth and righteousness, but it falls infinitely short of counterfeiting the work of God, which the work of high heaven he cannot imitate. When carried out and ripened into bitterness, its terrible fruit stands in contrast to the fruit of the work and Spirit of God, as wide as Beelzebub with Christ and perdition with terror and blackness of despair with the glories of the kingdom of God. The road of the flesh leads to death and lies in the opposite direction from the road to life, not side by side with it, and the two must not be mixed as if both came from heaven, nor must the pure work of God be called Satan's work because fanaticism has appeared beside it.
Shut Out from Kingdom
Those who practice the manifest works of the flesh will not inherit the kingdom of God. Those works are open and evident, beginning with adultery, fornication, uncleanness and lasciviousness, and continuing with idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, envyings, murders, drunkenness, revellings and everything like them. Persisting in them and keeping on indulging them bars the doer from the kingdom, so the warning calls for waking up and for honest self-examination with no excuses about whether one is approaching any such sin.
Hatred, emulation, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies and envyings are as truly works of the flesh as lasciviousness, adultery, drunkenness and murder. Trying to correct the faults of others by indulging hatred and contention commits sins equally great. Each of these will as surely shut the guilty out of heaven and close its gate against them.
Jealousy of one another is a manifest work of the flesh, and those who hold it will never reach heaven, for nothing of that kind will be there. In its place there must be the likeness of Christ in the heart right at home, a little heaven on earth now, with tenderness for one another and love that is not crushed when hearing of another's errors. The works of the flesh are untruthfulness, impurity and unrighteousness, an evil nature that cannot inherit the kingdom of God and cannot enter heaven, though a great price has been paid for redemption from that condition. Every person must make Christ a personal Saviour and become true and pure and holy, for if sin is not destroyed in the sinner the sinner himself must be destroyed, because sin left remaining will destroy the sinner just as designed.
Hatred Division and Corruption
Trying to correct the faults of others by indulging hatred and contention commits sins equally great as lasciviousness, adultery, drunkenness and murder, for hatred, emulation, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies and envyings are as truly works of the flesh, and they will as surely shut the guilty out of heaven. Envy, strife, jealousy, variance, hatred, rivalry, evil surmising, emulation and bitterness are the unholy fruit of a heart not in harmony with Christ, the work of Satan seen among his children and acts of obedience to Satan rather than Christ. They grow from a divided heart open to his suggestions as he sows dissension to ruin souls and bodies, break up families, and produce sedition and murder, and they stand opposite to the harmony, peace, love, meekness, benevolence, kindness, mercy and unity produced when God's Spirit rules the heart. Bearing that fruit means cherishing evil and being separated from God, going astray and standing guilty, forsaking the Fountain of living waters for broken cisterns that can hold no water and corrupting the way before God, so that those who bear it will not heed corrective testimony nor see their perverse ways and be converted to be healed. Pride, vanity, frivolity, worldliness, greed, unkindness and faultfinding likewise reveal companionship with an evil spirit.
Fanaticism also is a work of the flesh produced when Satan's power bears upon the carnal mind, clothed to resemble truth and righteousness yet falling infinitely short of counterfeiting God's work, which high heaven's work he cannot imitate. When carried out and ripened into bitterness its terrible fruit contrasts with the fruit of God's work and Spirit as widely as Beelzebub with Christ and perdition with terror and blackness of despair with the glories of the kingdom, for the road of the flesh leads to death in the opposite direction from the road to life, not side by side with it, and the two must not be mixed as if both came from heaven. Hatred, emulation, jealousy and deadly strife mark the ungodly even when they look united, for their oneness is only in opposition to God's will and truth, a deceptive harmony that only partly hides a perpetual discord dividing them on every other point. Division and variance among believers are not fruits of righteousness but come from the evil one, and selfishness that prevents fellowship likewise obstructs the progress of the church.
The warning applies to widespread lawlessness, corruption and lust in society and within professedly Christian families, where unhappy jealousies and differences are the greatest detriment to the churches, bringing them into weakness and disfavor with God. Satan intrudes into every household, every city street, the churches, the national councils and the courts of justice to perplex, deceive, seduce, ruin the souls and bodies of men, women and children and break up families, sowing hatred, emulation, strife, sedition and murder, evils not appointed by God to exist and be accepted though ignorance of his devices leads the Christian world to regard them so. The same manifest works appear as selfishness, rivalry and separation of interests that break harmony and create disunion, Satan's studied plan imbued into humanity under pretense of necessity when it is not needful, dimming perception by worldly policy so it cannot be discerned as a hateful, poisonous root springing up to defile the whole man. That selfishness displeases God, corrupts the experience of every soul admitting it, shows the human ruling actions far more than the divine, brings in principles God hates, and has corrupted principal institutions including every publishing establishment.
The works become visible as selfishness, covetousness, pride and evil passions, revealing that evil powers control the heart, whereas divine truth leads to good works and a generous, noble character. Selfishness is a sin held as a natural family besetment that is rebuked but not confessed, and the natural ways and habits of the flesh are made manifest in alienation between relatives, which must be changed by grace so that God's Spirit rules the heart. They are openly manifest also in laboring for the esteem and applause of men, in vainglory, in dissatisfaction at not standing first in every calling and work, in envy and jealousy, in demeriting the one envied, in magnifying any fault in him, and in seeking to injure his reputation by picking at others. These are crowded into the heart by Satan to steal away humility and meekness, love and patience, they prove a person is exercised by another spirit than that of meekness and love, and they are hateful in the sight of a holy God but pleasing to the devil. The works spread when people are taught they need not obey God and when divine precepts are set aside, so that sin no longer appears sinful and righteousness no longer seems desirable, producing lust and other vice alongside envy, hypocrisy, strife and betrayal of sacred trusts, damaging family and social life and bringing lawlessness and licentiousness of the kind that brought judgment on the heathen.
Call to Victory Living
Christ has bought the souls, minds, and bodies of all His creatures, and He is dishonored when any precious soul corrupts the mind or the body by these manifest works. Souls enfeebled by selfish degrading passions can be remedied only by the life-giving power of the gospel, the aid of God as Great Physician, and the quickening power of the Holy Spirit to restore the moral image of God in man. Victory over every inherited or cultivated tendency to wrong is not gained by battling evil in finite human strength but through power God imparts to rule every appetite and passion.
The warning calls for honest self-examination with no excuses to see if one is approaching the committing of any such sin. Membership in the church does not make a person a Christian, but whether justice and purity and truth abide in the heart is revealed by fruit, and professed followers are tested by what fruit they bear. The works become visible in the life, including selfishness, covetousness, pride, evil passions, variance, envy, strife, and jealousy, which show what spirit is at work as opposed to the harmony, love, and unity created when God's Spirit rules the heart.
The verse warns to wake up and instead walk in the Spirit and through the Spirit mortify the deeds of the body so the lust of the flesh is not fulfilled, purifying the mind by obedience to truth. God's people must keep the body holy and the spirit pure under the Spirit's control as they prepare to receive immortality, remaining untainted by the defilement and corruption opposed to purity of character. Becoming thorough students of the Bible and doers of the Word through obedience to all requirements lays a sure foundation. Every person must make Christ a personal Saviour to become true and pure and holy.
The change wrought by grace and fellowship with Christ is shown in kindly words and deeds. The natural ways and habits that produce alienation, especially between relatives, must be changed by grace so the Spirit rules the heart. In place of jealousy there must be the similitude of Christ in the heart right at home, a little heaven on earth now, with tenderness for one another and love that is not crushed when hearing of another's errors.