7/22 Thoughts from Galatians
Recently, in our own private quiet readings, Daniel and I have been going through the New Testament book of Galatians but with ‘The Message’, a transliteration by Eugene Peterson. There were so many verses that applied to our topic of ‘From Slave to Sonship’ that I decided to add them to my ‘Sunday Cuppa with Susanne’ section for our Christian Foundations blog.
In the Introduction, Eugene Peterson makes the observation: “When men and women get their hands on religion, one of the first things they often do is to turn it into an instrument for controlling others – either putting them or keeping them in their place. Through Jesus, Paul learned that God was not an impartial force to be used to make people behave in certain prescribed ways, but a personal Saviour who set us free to live a free life. God did not coerce us from without but set us free from within.”
The church at Galatia had turned back into the corral of religious rules and regulations. He was furious with the Christians for caving in to the intimidation and with the old guard for aiding in with their strong arm tactics. I encourage you to go back and read the whole book of Galatians for yourself. See if you can spot the ‘slavery mentality’ you may still be caught believing. True, hopefully none of us has returned to the Old Testament law but there are many and varied forms of ‘laws and legalism’ in our church world today.
We pick up his letter with the following comments from Chapter 2 (page 464) onwards:
“We know very well that we are not set right with God by rule keeping, but only through personal faith in Jesus Christ. …. We tried it – and we had the best system of rules the world has ever seen! Convinced that no human being can please God by self-improvement, we believed in Jesus as the Messiah so that we might be sigh right before God by trusting in the Messiah, not be trying to be good.
“What actually took place was 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’ and became God’s man. Christ’s life showed me how and enabled me to do it. I identified myself completely with Him. 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.
“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? If a living relationship with God could come by rule keeping, then Christ died unnecessarily.
“How did your new life begin? Was it by working your heads off to please God? … or was it by responding to God’s 
message to you? For only crazy people would think they could complete by their own efforts what was begin by God.
“Does God who lavishly provides your with His own presence, His Holy Spirit, working things in your lives because of your strenuous moral striving or because you trust Him to do them in you?
“The person who lives in right relationship with God does it by embracing what God arranges for him. Doing thing for God is the opposite of entering into what God does for you. Rule keeping does not naturally evolve into living by faith buy only perpetuates itself in more and more rule keeping. …. to show us the futility of devising some religious system for getting by our own efforts what we can only get by waiting in faith for God to complete His purpose. Christ redeemed us from that self-defeating, cursed life by absorbing it completely into Himself.
“Earlier, before you knew God personally, you were enslaved to so-called gods that had noting of the divine about them …. but now that you know the real God, how can you possibly subject yourselves again to those paper tigers? …..for that is exactly what you do when you are intimidated into scrupulously observing all the traditions, taboos and superstitions.
“I suspect you would never intended this but this is what happens. When you attempt to live by your own religious plans and projects, you are cut off from Christ and you fall out of His grace.
“It is absolutely clear that God has called you to a free life. Just make sure that you don’t use this freedom as an excuse to do whatever you want to do and destroy your freedom. Rather use you freedom to serve one another in love; that’s how freedom grows. For everything we know about God’s Word is summed up in a single sentence: Love others as you love yourself. That’s an act of true freedom. Then you won’t feed the compulsiveness of selfishness.
“It is obvious what kind of life develops out of trying to get your own way all the time: repetitive, loveless, cheap sex, a stinking accumulation of mental and emotional garbage, frenzied and joyless grabs for happiness, trinket gods, magic-show religion, paranoid loneliness, cutthroat competition, all consuming-yet-never-satisfied wants, a brutal temper, an impotence to love or be loved, divided home and divided lives, small minded and lopsided pursuits and uncontrollable addictions, ugly parodies of community …. and I could go on.
“Legalism is helpless in bringing (God’s way) about; it only gets in the way. Since this is the king of life we have chose, the life in the Spirit, let us make sure that we do not just hold it as an idea in our heads or a sentiment in our hearts, but work out its implication in every detail or our life. That means we will not compare ourselves with each other as if one of us were better or another worse.”
Remember the main thing is to keep the main thing, the main thing. A Jesus-inspired, Holy Spirit path rather than trying to please God and others by out good behaviour. I trust this helps clarify some of the things we have discussed and will continue to think about as we journey into the next stage of our growth – being the Steward of God.
Susanne Fengler, Blog Author
www.christianfoundations.jesus-treeoflife.info
Tags: Galatians
Filed under: From Slave to Sonship, Sunday Cuppa' with Susanne
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