“Freedom in Christ” – Galatians 5:1-6, 13-15

Freedom.

Say that to most Americans and a sense of national pride wells up. We celebrate our liberties and our rights that go into making our freedoms. We celebrate the Declaration of Independence that spoke of our inalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. We admire and respect our Constitution that enumerates our rights in black and white, and we celebrate the men and women who made the ultimate sacrifice to preserve these same rights and freedoms.

But, as we now well know, these rights are fragile. They can be taken from us in a whim unless we remain constantly vigilant. Freedoms are precious things that must not be taken for granted.

For Christians, freedom has a different meaning and a different effect on our lives. Unlike political freedom, freedom in Christ is eternal, sealed by the Holy Spirit, given to us not by the will of men but by the grace of God.

Unlike the rights we find in our national documents, the freedoms we find in Christ call us away from standing on our rights and lead us to become a follower of the One who gave His life that we might be have eternal freedom.

Background

Almost from the beginning of the Christian faith, that have been those who failed to grasp the simple truth of salvation by grace, insisting instead that we have to somehow earn God’s acceptance and love.

The most prevalent heresy that arose was that of the Judaizers. This idea maintained that salvation does come from Christ, but full salvation is found only in the acceptance of Christ and adherence to the Laws God gave to Moses in the first five books of the Bible. They maintained that Christ came to fulfill the Laws and the Prophets, and because He came to fulfill them, we almost must live by these same laws. Rather than seeing Christ setting us free from the law and works, this school of thought sought to tie Jesus to the very laws and enslave us once again.

Paul emphasized the gospel as faith, hope and love. He taught that Christ was sent by God to die for our sins, that Christ arose to give us eternal life, and that eternal life meant fellowship with the Father and the Son through the Holy Spirit. He taught that God had done all the work to bring us into a right relationship with Him through reconciliation. He taught that this reconciliation was and is always a free gift from God, a demonstration of God’s eternal mercy and grace. We accept this gift by our faith in His message that was revealed through the living Word, Jesus Christ. Our faith is in the message and our hope is in the promised rewards that will be ours when we stand face-to-face with Christ when He returns.

Our relationship with God is built upon the love He had for us and the love we have for Him. This love for God is demonstrated in the love we have for our fellow human beings, and that that love is expressed through the living out of the Golden Rule.

For Paul, there was faith, hope and love. There was never a question of works to earn God’s favor, but works carried out because of God’s grace and love, and our works were a demonstration of our faith, our hope and our love.

In this letter, Paul is addressing the false religion of the Judaizers. In most of Paul’s letters, there are words expressing the apostle’s appreciation for the recipients of the letter, praising them for a specific quality or characteristic. Not so with the Galatians. Having given his typical greeting, Paul launches into, “I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the One who called you by the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel—which is really no gospel at all” (Galatians 1:6-7a).

Paul uses an illustration from the life of Abraham to demonstrate the difference between the false gospel of the Judaizers and the true gospel of Christ. He refers to Ishmael and Isaac. Paul writes that Ishmael was born to a slave woman in the ordinary sense, but that Isaac was born as a result of a promise to a free woman. Paul states that Ishmael represents the slavery of the old law, but Isaac represents the freedom found in Christ and the promise of eternal life found in Him. Paul concludes his analogy with, “Therefore, brothers, we are not children of the slave women, but of the free woman” (Galatians 4:31).

So what does freedom mean to Paul? He tells us in today’s passage.

Central Truth: Freedom in Christ is true freedom.

Freedom in Christ:

1. We need to stand firm (1)

“It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery.”

When the Soviet Union came to an end last century, there was a great hope that true democracy and freedom would come to Russia and the other nations that made up the old USSR.

Those hopes were dashed as freedoms gave way to various forms of dictatorship in many of the former Soviet states. Today, Russia is in the same state that it was in under the Communist Party.

One of the reason for this is because the people of the former Soviet Union had little or no awareness of what it meant to build an economy and a nation with the freedoms and rights we take for granted here. As a result, the people and the governments reverted back to the way they had always known. They may not have liked it, but it was all they really knew and felt comfortable in.

One of the reasons the Galatians were so easily swayed to the Judaizers was because most of us are used to having to earn God’s favor. Paul tells us, though, that Jesus sets us free in order that we can enjoy and embrace the full meaning of freedom. “It is for freedom that Christ has set us free.” Having thrown of the shackles of slavery, we need to be aware of how easily it is to fall back into those habits.

The way we maintain our freedom is to stand firm in our freedom. We stand firm by learning God’s ways and the truths that are found only in Christ. To the Ephesians, Paul wrote, “And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with Him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus, in order that in the coming ages He might show the incomparable riches of His grace, expressed in His kindness to us in Christ Jesus. For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—not by works so that no one can boast” (Ephesians 2:6-9).

We stand firm in the promises and the teachings of Christ as expressed in the Gospels and the other books of the New Testament. We reject the idea that we can earn God’s grace, even though we can easily find ourselves slipping into this pattern.

For example, how many times have we thought to ourselves, “I need to read the Bible and pray so that God will be happy with me. I need to go to church so that God won’t be mad at me.” While it’s true we should be actively involved in the disciplines of Bible study and prayer, and that we should come together in worship and fellowship, the reason we do so is not so that we can get on God’s good side, but we do it because we love Him and want to grow closer to Him as we fellowship with Him and His children. It isn’t the doing that matters, it’s the reason we do what we do that makes the difference.

Because we are the recipients of God’s wondrous grace, we are free to worship Him with a purity of faith and hope and love. We no longer try to earn His favor; instead, we bask in His favor and want to please Him precisely because we love Him and know that He loves us.

Stand firm, and be aware not just of what we do and don’t do, but why we do and don’t do these things. It is for freedom that Christ has set us free.

2. We are free from sin and works (2-6)

“Mark my words! I, Paul, tell you that if you let yourselves be circumcised, Christ will be of no value to you at all. Again I declare to every man who lets himself be circumcised that he is obligated to obey the whole law. You who are trying to be justified by law have been alienated from Christ; you have fallen away from grace. But by faith we eagerly await through the Spirit the righteousness for which we hope. For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision has any value. The only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love.”

There have been times that I’ve gone to a restaurant and not been all that hungry. I want to eat something, but not the full plate. When that happens, I go to the a la carte menu. I can order one enchilada and some beans, and that will be enough. It usually costs less and meets my needs.

Unfortunately, God doesn’t give us an option for a la carte faith. In other words, we can’t pick and choose which verses of the Bible we will accept and which we will ignore. More specifically, as both Paul and James write, if we want to obey one of the laws, we have to obey all of the laws. As James wrote it, “For whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles at just one point is guilty of breaking all of it. For He who said, ‘Do not commit adultery,’ also said, ‘Do not commit murder.’ If you do not commit adultery but do commit murder, you have become a lawbreaker” (James 2:10-11).

Here, Paul expands on his statement in v. 6 about being burdened again by the law. His specific example is the idea of being circumcised to become aligned with the law. Such an act of obedience to the Law is a danger in two ways. The first is that such a faith requires obedience to all the laws, a thing that is all but impossible. That’s why God had to atonement and sin offerings. The second danger is that it alienates us from Christ. More specifically, Paul lets us know that adherence to the law is to fall away from grace.

Paul isn’t saying such a person can lose his or her salvation. He is saying that embracing the law as a means of gaining God’s grace is to turn our backs on the very essence of grace. Grace is a gift of love that is from God to us; grace is not a wage earned by our good works.

Instead, Paul says to turn away from the law and embrace the grace that is found in Christ by the faith and hope we have in Him and the promises that are made through Christ. By placing our faith in Christ and not in deeds, we are expressing our faith in love.

Faith in love can be seen in two ways. One, is that our faith is in the Godly attribute of love. God is love, and our faith is in His love as demonstrated most significantly in the sending of Jesus into our world to bring salvation. That is one aspect of faith in love. The other is that our faith is an act of love from ourselves. We believe God because we love God and trust Him and His word. Our love for God results in our willing to follow Him and His will.

We express our faith in love and in hope, and the result is that we are free from the slavery of the law, sin and works.

3. We are free to serve (13-15)

“You, my brothers, were called to be free. But do not use your freedom to indulge the sinful nature; rather, serve one another in love. The entire law is summed up in a single command: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ If you keep on biting and devouring each other, watch out or you will be destroyed by each other.”

The art of judo is to use the opponent’s strengths against him or her. If an attacker is coming at us, we use the momentum of the attack to redirect the momentum and through the attacker off. That’s how judo flips are done.

Paul is using a “judo” technique in this passage. He has been attacking the fallacy of the Judaizers regarding the misinformation about the need for the law. Now, Paul says, in essence, that if the Galatians want to embrace the law, there is only one law they need to focus on: Love your neighbor as yourself.

The danger that comes from freedom is that it can lead to errors in judgment. Teenagers are most likely to do foolish things when they move out of their parents’ house for the first time. No longer under Mom and Dad’s rules and steady gaze, the teenager is eager to stretch his wings, explore her world in different ways. Paul warns us that freedom is not a license to live as we choose. If we listen to ourselves, we will embrace the sinful nature and not the Spirit.

The sinful nature asks, “What’s in it for me?” That must not be the disciple’s worldview. Instead, we who follow Christ ask, “How can I serve?” Instead of thinking we are free to live life as we see fit, we use our freedom to become slaves to Christ. As Paul wrote earlier, “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me” (Galatians 2:20).

It is this attitude that truly sets us free. We know that we are no longer a slave to sin and to the sinful nature; instead, we are now pledged to Christ and the Spirit’s leadership. We are in a right relationship, because we know the Father and the Son, and we express our love for them in the way we live out our lives. We live a life of service and love expressed to others, because in doing so, we are expressing our love for God by showing love to others.

Conclusion

Freedom is a wonderful thing. We are grateful to be a part of “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” Freedoms are to be protected and embraced.

No greater freedom exists than the freedom that God gives through His Son and the Spirit. Without that freedom, we are still slaves to sin. God sets us free, and we use that freedom for His glory and His praise.