Since Paul is challenging people to not return to the slavery of the law, the obvious question is, how do we live a godly life after we have trusted Jesus? Paul tells us we have the Holy Spirit living in us. When we try to do the right thing on our own, it’s slavery. When we rely on the Holy Spirit, he brings freedom. The fruit of the Spirit is not a list of behaviors, but character traits. The Holy Spirit lives within us, changing our character. When our character changes, we naturally do the things the law required. That doesn’t mean we should purposely do wrong things and wait for our character to change; that would be returning to the slavery of sin. It’s that we willingly submit to letting the Holy Spirit change our character.
Working at being righteous is discouraging. The harder we work at it, the more we think about the very thing that is a temptation to us. Relying on the Holy Spirit isn’t easy either. We like quick and easy fixes to our problems where we can take some credit for it. Paul recommends the slow process of character change and giving God the credit.