The Message of True Freedom, Galatians 5:1-15

Shiloh Lutheran Church, State College PA
June 30, 2019

A few years ago I worked with a man in his 50's who had spent more than half of his life in prison. At one point, he decided that he wanted to go back to jail, so he started doing things to get arrested. Because he had a serious mental illness and was in the mental health system, the process started by him being picked up and considered for an involuntary commitment to the hospital, but because he was still on probation, police officers were sent to take him to jail. I was with him at the emergency room when he got this news, and he reacted like a kid at Christmas. He said to me, "I'm going back to prison, where I belong," and he was visibly excited about this. This kind of thing is not as unusual as we might think prison is a lousy place, but many prisoners learn how to function there; it becomes a place of security for them, and transition to the outside world is extremely difficult: “The first days and weeks of the free life are perilous. Many do not survive them. Recidivism is extremely high among discharged prisoners. They do not know what to do with their freedom. They have been conditioned by another way of life. After a few attempts and failures, they often relapse into old ways and return to the security of the prison” (Eugene Peterson, Traveling Light, p. 137). We want to be free, but we also want security, and often these two things come into conflict. Freedom doesn’t always feel safe, and sometimes we’re willing to sacrifice our freedom for the sake of security and safety.

That’s the appeal of legalism. The Galatians were departing from the freedom of the gospel because the legalistic religion of the Judaizers gave them safe, secure answers. It told them what to do, and as long as they did these things they could be assured that everything was fine. They didn’t have to struggle with what it means to live a free life in Christ. They were bringing themselves into bondage, but bondage felt more secure than freedom. Slavery is what we’re used to. We’re used to living in bondage (although we don’t usually see the reality of our condition). The gospel is a message of freedom, and when we’re first set free by turning to Jesus Christ it’s wonderful. But what do we do then? How do we live with our new freedom? “The first days and weeks of the free life are perilous. Many do not survive them.” Slavery is what we’re used to, and unless we’re careful we’ll very quickly end up living as slaves again, like the Galatians were doing. When Christ sets us free, He calls us to follow Him in learning to live as free people. Disciples are learners, people who are learning to live a free life in Christ. And part of that is resisting the enemy’s attempts to draw us back into the slavery of legalism.

The first step in resisting the enemy’s attempts to lure us back into slavery is in vv. 1-6: be determined to preserve your freedom in Christ. Be jealous in guarding your freedom. Of course, that means that we need to understand the truth, that the gospel is a message of emancipation. If we’re fuzzy about that, we’ll be easy prey to his deception. The gospel is not a message about what style of clothes to wear, or what kind of hairstyle we’re to have, or what kind of music to listen to. There’s a place for discussing some of these kinds of things, but this is not what the gospel is about. The gospel is a message of deliverance. Here’s what Jesus said at the beginning of His public ministry: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor” (Luke 4:18-19). Or Colossians 1:13: “He has rescued us from the power of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved Son.” The gospel is a message of deliverance to people who are in slavery.

We need to understand that faith and law are mutually exclusive. The temptation is to do the sort of thing the Galatians were doing. We present the gospel and get people in the door by faith, then we present them with a list of demands, and as long as they keep within these boundaries we assume everything is fine. But if they step over these boundaries we question their salvation. I’ve sometimes heard American Christians express admiration for C.S. Lewis, but then bemoan the fact that he smoked and drank alcohol; he was also committed to liturgical worship and was at least open to the possibility of purgatory as a time of cleansing and perfection after death. He doesn’t fit into categories that many are comfortable with, and I’ve known some Christians who had real trouble with that. We believe in the necessity of faith to get in the door, but then we often expect people to order their lives in the same way we do (I’m not talking here about sin, but cultural, theological and liturgical differences). If they don’t, we often doubt the genuineness of their faith. Surely if they really believed they’d live and worship like we do.

The law and the gospel are mutually exclusive. The law brings us into bondage, whether it’s the law of the Judaizers or the law of the North American Christian subculture, whichever part of it we identify with. If our position before God is determined by obedience to the law, we’re going to end up in bondage. Listen to verse 4 in The Message: “The person who accepts the ways of circumcision trades all the advantages of the free life in Christ for the obligations of the slave life of the law.” Once we step into the realm of law, we’re in a place where absolute perfection is demanded of us. (That’s one reason why churches are so often guilty of shooting their wounded. We’re living under the law and we expect perfection. We’re not willing to live by the gospel of free grace and mercy, especially mercy toward those who have openly demonstrated their imperfection). The bondage of the law is a bondage of guilt; we’ve broken the law and there’s nothing we can do to make it right. So we determine to do better next time, but nothing we do can erase the condemning power of our guilt. The gospel speaks to us in our guilt. It addresses us as people who’ve been disobedient to the law. It acknowledges the worst about us and then grants us forgiveness. The gospel is a message of freedom from the bondage of guilt before the law. We need to know that and resist all attempts of our enemy to talk us out of it.

The second step in resisting the enemy’s attempts to lure us back into slavery is in vv. 7-12: refuse to listen to false teachers. Too many people fall under the influence of false teachings because they think, “I’ll just listen awhile and see what he has to say.” I’ve had friends who came under the influence of false teaching for awhile, friends I thought should have known better; many of these teachers are very deceptive and manipulative, and it’s easy to get caught. If you’re not adequately prepared, it’s easy to get in over your head. It’s not that these teachers have the truth; it’s that they’re able to present their ideas in a very persuasive way. It sounds good when you’re listening to them. So Paul wants the Galatians to stop listening. We don’t owe everyone a fair hearing.

Paul says three things about these false teachers in vv. 8-10. 1) Their teaching is not from God: “That kind of persuasion does not come from the one who calls you” (v. 8). Paul spent considerable effort, in the early part of this letter, establishing that he had received the gospel directly from Jesus Christ. The teachers who’ve been leading the Galatians astray got their ideas from another source, and the church needs to stop listening to them. 2) This false teaching will increasingly permeate the life of the church if they don’t get rid of it: “A little yeast works through the whole batch of dough” (v. 9). The harmfulness of the teaching will increase over time. It will work its way through the teachings of the church and bring corruption into every area. And it will do harm to more and more people over time. They can’t afford to let it remain in their midst. 3) Those who are spreading this false message–who are undermining God’s message of liberty–are going to face a penalty: “The one who is throwing you into confusion will pay the penalty, whoever he may be” (v. 10). False teachers are going to be judged; if the Galatians don’t want to fall under the same condemnation they need to stop listening and following these people.

The third step in resisting the enemy’s attempts to lure us back into slavery is in vv. 13-15: Resist the temptation to misuse your freedom. Here’s v. 13 in The Message: “Just make sure that you don’t use this freedom as an excuse to do whatever you want to do and destroy your freedom.” When we misuse our freedom, we end up destroying it in the end. We celebrate our freedom from the bondage to the law by doing whatever we want. But then we find that we’re in bondage to our own desires. We’re not free at all; we’re just in a different kind of bondage.

The freedom Paul is talking about in Galatians is not the freedom to do whatever we want. It’s the freedom to live as God created us to live. We weren’t created to live without boundaries. God created us to live in obedience to His sovereign lordship. When we refuse to submit to His lordship, we put ourselves into bondage to something less than God. That’s the point of Bob Dylan’s song, “You’re Gonna Have to Serve Somebody:” “It may be the devil, or it may be the Lord, but you’re gonna have to serve somebody.” The gospel sets us free to be human, to be the kind of people God created us to be.

Paul is especially concerned about the way they’re acting toward one another. When we abuse our freedom, when we try to live by doing whatever we want, whatever we feel like doing, we end up cultivating selfishness, which brings us into conflict with one another. The churches in Galatia may be experiencing two different extremes. One the one hand, there are those who live as strict moralists. They think they’re keeping the law, but there’s a hard edge to their spirituality. They’re self-righteous and look down on those who are less strict in their behavior. They can’t tolerate such people in their midst. On the other hand, there are those who recognize that legalism is contrary to the gospel, but they go to the opposite extreme and say: “in Christ we’re free to do whatever we want.” So they freely indulge their desires. Both of these extremes lead to disunity. Those who think they’re obeying the law need to hear this word: “The entire law is summed up in a single command: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’” And those at the opposite extreme need to hear these words in verse 13: “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.” And then, in verse 15, Paul points to what is actually going on in their midst: “If you keep on biting and devouring each other, watch out or you will be destroyed by each other.” Both extremes, legalism and unrestrained libertinism, result the destruction of community. The freedom they’ve been given in the gospel is the freedom to “serve one another in love.”

The gospel is a message of freedom. Paul made that clear back in chapter 1: “Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, who gave himself for our sins to set us free from the present evil age” (1:3-4). In Christ we’ve been set free, by sheer grace, to live the kind of life we were intended to live. Charles Swindoll says “I know of nothing that has the power to change us from within like the freedom that comes through grace” (The Grace Awakening, p. 5). And because the message of freedom through grace is so wonderful and transforming, Satan will do everything he can to undermine it. Let’s determine that we will, with His help, stand firm in the freedom Christ bought for us, that we’ll refuse to listen to those who come to us with different “gospels,” and that we’ll resist the temptation to misuse the freedom God has given us.