The Story
Chapter 28, 29
What Do You Do After Easter?
Do you REALLY understand the Gospel?
“What actually took place is this: I tried keeping rules and working my head off to please God, and it didn't work. So I quit being a "law man" so that I could be God's man. 20 Christ's life showed me how, and enabled me to do it. I identified myself completely with him. Indeed, I have been crucified with Christ. My ego is no longer central. It is no longer important that I appear righteous before you or have your good opinion, and I am no longer driven to impress God. Christ lives in me. The life you see me living is not "mine," but it is lived by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. 21 I am not going to go back on that.
Is it not clear to you that to go back to that old rule-keeping, peer-pleasing religion would be an abandonment of everything personal and free in my relationship with God? I refuse to do that, to repudiate God's grace. If a living relationship with God could come by rule-keeping, then Christ died unnecessarily. Galatians 2:19-21 (MSG)
I find this paraphrase of Galatians incredibly helpful. I hope you do too.
The apostle Paul had been a legalist who was Chief of Police/Prosecutor who sought to kill Christians because they weren’t doing rules right. He was converted and then “got Grace”. He then traveled from city to city seeking out synagogues where he could preach Jesus. Having returned from Turkey (Galatia), he heard that the new believers in those cities had gone back to rule keeping so he wrote them a letter. That letter, his first, is preserved in the Bible as the “book of” Galatians.
I hope you spend time on today’s passage and ask yourself how much of the Gospel you have actually adopted into your thoughts, attitudes, behaviors, approach to others.
Do you live by Grace or rules?
Prayer
“Lord, I want to belong to You in such a way that I serve you because I know you love me not in order to earn your love. Amen.”
Psalm 40:5-
ReplyDelete"Many O Lord my God, are the wonders you have done. the things you planned for us no one can recount to you; were I to speak and tell of them, they would be too many to declare.
Sacrifice and offerings you did not desire, but my ears you have pierced; burnt offerings and sin offerings you did not require.
Then I said, "Here I am, I have come-
it is written about me in the scroll.
I DESIRE to do your will, O my God; your law is within my heart." (Hebrews 10:16 & Jeremiah 31:33)
This may be wierd, but as a kid walking home from school in the desert heat, I would play this game to pass the time. I would say a simple word like 'cup' over and over until after a little while, I didn't recognize it for what it meant, it became just a sound. It held no meaning anymore. For some strange reason this fascinated me. (easy to entertain ^_^ )
I think of that and apply it to the principle of 'The Law". It was needed to describe to the people right from wrong. But, over time, the Law became a sound that had no meaning.
Boring and ineffectual with "repeating the word", the longing not to say it overcame the reason why to say it. So, then what good was it? The word itself wasn't unmeaningful but how I said it made it that way.
If in our spirit, boring and ineffectual are adjectives that come to mind, my guess is that it just may be b/c we have reduced the miracle of having Christ IN US to something taken for granted.
Living by grace is living by the Spirit, not ignoring the Spirit. Jesus didn't say anything, didn't do anything that He wasn't told by the Father first. Can we be that close to God as well, that we can trust we are doing what He wants us to simply because we are in daily communion with Him?
I think so. Thank you, Jesus, for your mercy, your loving kindness and your willingness to not just call us sister or brother, but friend. Amen