GALATIANS (Letter 48, Larry Crabb’s 66 Love Letters)

Do Not Misunderstand Freedom; Your Friutfulness Depends On It!

Martin Luther considered this God’s best letter. Luther said living the Christian life is like a drunk riding a horse. We keep falling off one side or the other, either into legalism, which chokes the freedom to love, or into license, which perverts freedom into guilt-free selfishness.

G. K. Chesterton once quipped, we’re all seasick together. We’re all looking for relief from a strange unnamed misery that God doesn’t relieve. We want to feel alive. It’s hard to see that as wrong.

Key points:

• We have trusted His Son to forgive us and give us life. If so, we are Christians.
• As we live the Christian life, free from condemnation for past, present and future sins and free at any moment and in any circumstance to love, we become aware of deep longings in our hearts that remain unsatisfied despite our best efforts at faith and obedience.
• The pain of those unmet longings become within us a void, an empty space, a lonely feeling of incompleteness. The desire for relief from that pain seems more compelling than our desire to love. And the disappointments we’ve suffered in our relationships have created wounds that beg so strongly for relief that nothing seems more necessary to our well-being.
• Consistent with the message of our culture, our resolve shifts from loving others to healing our wounds, to feeling complete as a loved and significant person. The corruption lying dormant within us since conception, the spirit of entitlement, now roars into death-dealing life.
• We become convinced that our wounds must be healed, our void must be filled, before we can love. That conviction is the devil’s lie disguised as His Spirit’s empathic tenderness.
• With that conviction ruling within us, we live our life in the flesh, in the corruption of demanding satisfaction, and we become addicted to the experience of satisfaction, whether through food, sex, ministry, close relationships, worship times, meaningful work, or happy family life.
• We resonate with the message of false teachers who insist that we should be able to feel now what we want to feel, who lay out a plan to get on better terms with Him that His Son has already provided, terms that they tell us will provide the sense of completion we so long to enjoy.
• We then fall off one side of the horse into a modern form of the Galatian heresy, one that teaches that we can do something to get on better terms with Him, that His Son’s death and resurrection was a good foundation for stronger efforts to do everything right. That’s legalism. It’s living by the old way of the written code [Romans 7:6]. If living well brings a pleasant experience and enjoyable blessings, we feel a self-satisfaction that we mistake for worship. And the more self-satisfied we become with His apparent response to our desire for the good life, the more superficial and less sacrificial our love becomes.
• Now hear Him well. He saved us so that we could believe in Him even when He seems absent and unresponsive (faith); to wait in confidence that His plan is on course for an unimaginably happy ending (hope); and to relate to Him in humble, nondemanding worship and to others with a wise and priority concern for their well-being (love). When we fail to nourish our soul with faith, hope, and love, when instead we live for the feeling of completeness we desire, we become obsessed with the empty loneliness within us that He doesn’t quickly relieve.
• And now we fall off the other side of the horse. We exchange legalism for license. The void within us (which His Spirit longs to transform into the hope of glory) degenerates into a powerful force that tempts us to do whatever relieves our pain, heals our wounds, and restores the experience of completion that we can’t stop wanting. We now live by the flesh and lose our freedom to resist its demands.
• The inevitable result is a deeper suffering than unmet longings.

We now suffer from the inability to love. Our freedom to live for our own experience of completeness destroys our freedom to love, to care about anyone more than ourself.

John Owen, the Puritan pastor who, like Luther, understood that true freedom develops in fierce battle, who heard what was written in Galatians, that ‘doing things for God is the opposite of entering into what God does for you’ (2:11 MSG). Owen knew that God saved us from self-centeredness and freed us to love. The battle is on. The Christian may be like a ship tossed in a storm. Nobody on board may be aware that the ship is making any headway at all. Yet it is sailing on at great speed. Great winds and storms help fruit-bearing trees. So also do corruptions and temptations help the fruitfulness of grace and holiness … corruptions and temptation develop the fruit of humility, self-abasement and mourning in a deeper search for the grace by which holiness grows strong. But only later will there be visible fruits of increased holiness.

Gospel freedom means to neither indulge our whims nor keep His rules. Whim-indulgers and rule-keepers are slaves to the corruption within them that demands a kind of satisfaction His Son will not provide for us in this life. His Son has set us free to love, to believe He is good and that His story is unfolding under His control. Faith in Him and hope for tomorrow frees us to love today. And loving with divine power releases a kind of joy into our soul that nothing else can bring.

We’re not free to do everything right – we can’t. And we’re not free to do whatever makes us feel complete – that’s wrong. But we are free to love. And exercising that freedom releases joy that provides power to resist the appeal of lesser but still strongly appealing satisfactions.

GALATIANS: From Ray Stedman

Click here for entire Bible Summary from Ray Stedman

to be completed

GALATIANS – David Jeremiah (Understanding the 66 Books of the Bible)

Key thought: since we are justified by faith alone and not by keeping the law, Christianity is a living relationship with Christ, not a religion or a ritual.

Key Verse: We have believed in Christ Jesus, that we might be justified by faith in Christ and not by the work of the law. Galatians 2:16

Key Action: Walk in the Spirit, and you shall not fulfill the rest of the flesh. Galatians 5:16