Redeemed to Become Worshipers, John 4:1-42

Shiloh Lutheran Church, State College

12th Sunday After Pentecost, 2014

When I was here last, earlier in the summer, we looked at 1 John 1, focusing on confession and forgiveness. Today I’d like to follow up on that by considering what God is doing when He calls us to Himself and offers us forgiveness. What is God’s purpose in redeeming us from our sins?

I brought along today a print of Rembrandt’s painting, “The Return of the Prodigal Son” (if you’re reading this sermon and aren’t familiar with the painting, this link will lead to a picture of it: http://www.rembrandtpainting.net/rembrandt's_prodigal_son.html). In this painting, the prodigal son is kneeling before his aged father. His clothes are ragged and his shoes are worn out. A few years earlier he had left home in great confidence, with abundant resources to live the kind of life he wanted to live. But then things had fallen apart. His money had run out and he had ended up feeding pigs, barely making enough money to survive. And then he had decided to return. In that faraway place, in the depths of despair, he had remembered his father. Henri Nouwen says “The younger son’s return takes place in the very moment that he reclaims his sonship, even though he has lost all the dignity that belongs to it.... Once he had come again in touch with the truth of his sonship, he could hear – although faintly – the voice calling him the Beloved and feel – although distantly – the touch of blessing. This awareness of and confidence in his father’s love, misty as it may have been, gave him the strength to claim for himself his sonship, even though that claim could not be based on any merit” (The Return of the Prodigal Son, p. 49). He has nothing to offer; there’s no reason why his father should be proud of him. He doesn’t even claim any rights as a son; he returns with a prepared speech, asking to be treated as a hired hand.

He’s wasted his life and all his resources, but he has come to his senses and returned, with empty hands, to his father. When I look at that painting, I see a man who has come to the end of himself. He’s like the tax collector in the temple who won’t even lift his eyes to heaven but beats his breast and cries out, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner.” But the wonderful thing is that his father is leaning over, embracing him. His father is welcoming him home in love. He ignores the son’s request, “treat me as one of your hired servants,” and restores him as one of the family. It’s a powerful painting; I often look at it and think of the wonder of being welcomed by God the Father into His presence.

In chapter 4 of John’s gospel, we see God welcoming a prodigal daughter and turning her into a worshiper. He is seeking true worshipers. His purpose in restoring us and giving us new life is to turn us into people who worship Him in spirit and in truth. There’s an especially strong connection between evangelism and worship in this passage; in fact, Jesus’ conversation with the woman at the well is often used as a model for evangelism. It’s one of the best examples we have for making connections, in conversation, between physical and spiritual realities. And, central to this whole discussion is Jesus’ statement that the Father is seeking worshipers. God’s purpose in giving us new life is not just to give us a ticket to heaven, but to turn us into people who worship Him in spirit and in truth. That’s what we were created for originally. God, in calling us to Himself, wants to restore us as worshipers; He wants to enable us to do what we were created to do.

The first thing to observe in this passage is that to be worshipers our lives need to be going in the right direction. Notice how often the Samaritan woman misunderstands what Jesus is saying. He offers her living water, and she thinks He’s offering her running water and wonders where on earth He’s going to get it. He goes a step further and says: “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” How does she respond to that? She says, “give me some of that water, so I won’t have to walk all the way to this well every day.” She thinks He’s talking about magical water that will keep her from having to drink any more. It will save her the trouble of walking to the well, so she wants it. Then Jesus confronts her with the truth about her life, because she’s not going to see anything clearly as long as she continues in the direction she’s going. Sin blinds us to spiritual realities. So Jesus brings her face to face with her sin.

Her life is a mess. She’s had five husbands and is now living with a man who is not her husband. The reason she comes to the well alone, during the middle of the day, is probably related to her lifestyle. The other women of the town would have come out to the well in a group, in the early evening. But they wouldn’t want her to be with them. She’s an outcaste, the kind of person no one wants to associate with. Her own people don’t want anything to do with her.

There’s a story about a similar woman in John 8. In that story, the Pharisees and teachers of the law bring to Jesus a woman caught in adultery. Their purpose is to trap Him, to force Him into a position where He either undermines the authority of the Law, by showing compassion, or contradicts His own teaching, by ordering them to deal with her harshly. But He doesn’t do either. He begins writing in the dirt, and as they continue to press Him He responds: “If any one of you is without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone at her.” And one by one, they all drift away. Then He speaks to the woman: “Has no one condemned you?” She answers, “no, no one has.” And He responds: “Then neither do I condemn you.... Go now and leave your life of sin.” He doesn’t condemn her, but neither does He say “everything is fine, be forgiven and if at some point you want me to be the Lord of your life, you can repent of your sin.” He calls her to repentance: “go now and leave your life of sin” is a call to repentance, a call to turn around and go in the other direction. He grants her forgiveness, and He tells her to leave her life of sin. But He doesn’t berate her or rub her nose in it. She’s already been humiliated; she already knows her guilt. It’s the same with the Samaritan woman. He confronts her with the truth, but He doesn’t berate her. She needs to see the truth or she’ll never become a true worshiper. But, having seen the truth, she can repent and begin a new life. She doesn’t need to wallow in it. She’s received mercy and grace and is now headed in the right direction.

The second thing to observe in this passage is that to be worshipers we need to know the truth about who God is. What we believe about God will affect our worship of Him. The Samaritans were a mixed race. When the Assyrians deported the ten northern tribes of Israel, they brought other people in to care for the land. These people mixed with the Israelites who had been left behind, and they also mixed the worship of Israel with their own religious practices. They worshiped the God of Israel and they also worshiped idols. I’ve heard that Christianity in Haiti is often mixed with voodoo. In North American Evangelicalism, the Christian gospel is often mixed with the worship of self, the idea that God’s highest priority is to make me feel good. The Samaritans were doing something similar. They claimed to worship the God of Israel, but their understanding of Him was corrupt and distorted. That’s why Jesus says: “You Samaritans worship what you do not know,” or, as it reads in The Message: “You worship guessing in the dark.”

What is the point of Jesus’ words, that “true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth”? The woman had raised a question about the proper place for worship. The Samaritans said Mt. Gerazim was the right place, and the Jews said the right place was Jerusalem. Where is the proper place for worship? I don’t think she’s raising this question as a smokescreen, to avoid having to face the truth about her life. When she sees that Jesus is, at the very least, a prophet, she raises this question which has been bothering her. Jesus responds that God is Spirit. He’s not confined to one place, so we can worship Him anywhere.

If God is only to be worshiped in Jerusalem, the Samaritans are in trouble, because they wouldn’t be accepted in Jerusalem. It’s doubtful that they’d be allowed to even enter the temple area. Jesus is saying that God is not confined to one place. He’s not more available in Jerusalem than He is on Mt. Gerazim. As the psalmist says: “Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths, you are there. If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea, even there your hand will guide me, your right hand will hold me fast” (Psalm 139:7-10). Since God is like that, we can worship Him wherever we are. God is Spirit.

But we also need to worship Him “in truth.” The Samaritans were groping in the dark, because they didn’t know the truth about God. The woman says to Jesus, at one point in the conversation, “When the Messiah comes, he will explain everything to us.” She’s floundering in the dark, but she wants to know the truth, and Jesus responds to her: “I who speak to you am he.” Jesus is the truth. She doesn’t need, any longer, to grope in the dark, wondering what God is like. She’s met, face to face, the One who is the “radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being” (Hebrews 1:3). It doesn’t matter where we are when we turn to God in worship, but it does matter that we know who He is. If our conception of God is false, we’re not worshiping Him; we’re worshiping an idol. We need to know the truth about God, and we need to know Him. We know the truth about God by looking at Jesus, who is the Way, the Truth and the Life. Jesus says, later on in this gospel, “And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.”

The third thing to observe in this passage is that witness grows out of true worship. I often think we’ve been too influenced by American salesmanship in this area of witnessing. We don’t feel like we’ve been faithful witnesses unless we’ve closed the deal and led the person to a commitment. I’ve often heard preachers ask “how many souls have you led to Christ”? How many sales have you made for the gospel? They don’t ask “in what ways are you acting as a witness to others?” They want to know how many times you’ve succeeded in closing the deal. We become so intimidated by that kind of thing that it actually hinders us from acting as witnesses.

Notice what happens in this story. The Samaritan woman has a conversation with Jesus, and in the course of the conversation she finds herself confronted with the reality of her sin and face-to-face with the One they’ve been waiting for. The whole direction of her life is changed. She accepts His words, “I who speak to you am he,” so she runs off to the town and begins telling people what she knows: “Come see a man who told me everything I ever did. Could this be the Christ?” She’s speaking the truth, bearing witness to what she knows. It’s not her job to close the deal. The people come out to see what she’s talking about, and as a result many of them are converted and they also become worshipers, the kind of worshipers the Father is seeking. Jesus tells the disciples, later in the passage, that they are reaping the benefits of others’ labor. These others labored, acting as witnesses, but they didn’t see the fruit of their labor.

We get things backwards when we begin following the techniques of the world in this area. A few years ago I read an interview with an American pastor. One of the questions was, “what is the highest priority for the Church today?” He answered that the highest priority is evangelism; he said we’ll have plenty of time for worship and for growing in the knowledge of God once we get to heaven. Right now, we need to give ourselves primarily to winning others to Christ. I hear this sort of thing all the time, but it’s simply wrong. We don’t have the right to pick and choose in this way. These things are not in competition. Listen to A.W. Tozer: “By direct teaching, by story, by example, by psychological pressure we force our new converts to ‘go to work for the Lord.’ Ignoring the fact that God has redeemed them to make worshipers out of them, we thrust them out into ‘service,’ quite as if the Lord were recruiting laborers for a project instead of seeking to restore moral beings to a condition where they can glorify God and enjoy him forever.... What we are overlooking is that no one can be a worker who is not first a worshiper. Labor that does not spring out of worship is futile and can only be wood, hay and stubble in the day that shall try every man’s works” (Born After Midnight, p. 125).

Jesus didn’t pressure the Samaritan woman to bring people back to Him. He wasn’t recruiting her for a job. When she saw the truth about Him, she became a worshiper, and the natural result was that she began to be a witness. Her witness grew naturally out of a genuine encounter with Jesus Christ. Those who worship God in spirit and in truth become witnesses. They don’t necessarily become soul winners, because that term has taken on too many associations from the world of sales and marketing. They become people who bear witness, in both their lives and their words, to the reality of God’s redeeming and transforming presence.

We need to remind ourselves that God is seeking people who will worship Him in spirit and in truth, people who will put Him at the center of their lives and offer worship from the depths of their being. This involves, 1) repenting of our sinful, self-centered way of life and ordering our lives in ways that are pleasing to Him, because we can’t be true worshipers if our lives are going in the wrong direction; 2) cultivating a relationship with God through His Word, because we need to know the truth about God in order to worship Him, and we need to know Him in a growing relationship, and not just as an object of study. We need to be asking ourselves: “is God a priority in my life? If so, how does this show itself in my commitment to worship?” God, in calling us to Himself, is inviting us to become worshipers. If worship is a low priority, it’s because God is not at the center of our lives.

When the prodigal son returned, the father welcomed him and restored him to a position of sonship. When the Samaritan woman recognized Jesus as the Christ, she was invited into God’s family to become a worshiper in spirit and in truth. Worship is not something we do on Sunday morning as long as there’s nothing more urgent for us to do. It’s not the sort of thing we do once or twice a month, depending on how we feel. Worship is absolutely central to our lives in Christ. It’s the very thing God has redeemed us for. When we turn to God in repentance, He says to us, “You are forgiven .... Go now and leave your life of sin.” He bends over and embraces us as a loving Father, and then He calls us to act like members of His family.

The Proper Use of Freedom, Galatians 5:16-26

Americans talk a lot about freedom. We talk about living in a free society, and we react when we sense that someone is trying to take away, or restrict, our freedom. Freedom is at the very center of what America is about. But with all our talk about freedom, I’ve seldom heard much about what a truly free life looks like. For the most part, freedom is understood simply as a lack of restraint, the liberty to do whatever I want with my life. Supporters of the “right to die” often make their argument along these lines: “it’s my life, and I should be free to end it whenever I choose.” Freedom is negative, nothing more than a lack of restraint. Here are some wise words by Richard John Neuhaus: “Nothing good can be done without freedom, but freedom is not the highest value in itself. Freedom is given to man in order to make possible the free obedience to truth and free gift of oneself in love” (Doing Well and Doing Good, p. 169). Freedom is a gift of God, but it’s not an end in itself. It’s not the main thing. God has given us freedom so that we can live in loving obedience under His lordship.

Paul is concerned, in this letter, about freedom. Following Jesus Christ means being free from the Law. As we’ve seen, the Galatians were in the process of turning away from the gospel of grace and were hoping to please God by obeying the Old Testament Law. He begins the letter, after a brief introduction, with these words: “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). Over and over again throughout this letter, Paul shows the Galatians that by turning to the Law they are defecting from Jesus Christ. Rather than bringing them closer to God, this new direction is leading them away from Him.

Having made all his theological arguments, he says this at the beginning of chapter 5: “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” (5:1). The Galatians had been set free to follow Jesus Christ, and now they were bringing themselves into bondage to the Law. As we saw in the last sermon, Paul wants them to hold firmly to the freedom God has given them in Christ. But that raises a question: what does a free life in Christ look like? Is the freedom we’ve been given a simple lack of restraint, a lack of boundaries so that we can fulfill our dreams by doing whatever we feel like doing? In this passage in the last half of chapter 5, Paul gives us a picture of what the free life in Christ looks like.

Paul wants the Galatians to be living in the freedom of the Spirit. But there’s always a danger in preaching this message. Paul had been accused, over and over again, of lowering the standards of godly living by preaching the message of free grace: “It’s simply perverse to say, ‘If my lies serve to show off God’s truth all the more gloriously, why blame me? I’m doing God a favor.’ Some people are actually trying to put such words in our mouths, claiming that we go around saying, ‘The more evil we do, the more good God does, so let’s just do it!’ That’s pure slander” (Romans 3:8, The Message).

There are two opposite dangers in responding to the gospel of free grace. The first danger, and this is the one Paul is most concerned with in this letter, is legalism. We see the potential for abusing the message, so we try to guard against this danger by introducing stricter standards. Several years ago I read an article by a Mennonite scholar who was unhappy with the direction some Mennonite churches were taking. They had been influenced by the doctrine of free grace, he said, and as a result the centrality of the peace position had been weakened. In his view, a more legalistic approach to the gospel would make it easier to safeguard some of the Anabaptist distinctives which were being lost. Legalism is safer. It enables us to stay in control. The opposite danger is antinomianism, living as if our actions don’t matter, because God is going to forgive us anyway. This is what Paul is concerned about when he says: “do not use your freedom to indulge the sinful nature.” If we’re really worried about morality, we’ll be tempted to some form of legalism. And if we’re especially concerned about freedom, we’ll be tempted by antinomianism.

But what does Paul mean when he talks about freedom? Clearly it’s not the freedom to do whatever we feel like. That’s the way people in our society often use the word, but Paul has something else in mind. When we do whatever we feel like doing, it destroys us, because we’re going against the grain of our nature. We’re not capable of exercising absolute freedom, and when we try it leads only to bondage. Our freedom is defined by our nature as creatures made in God’s image. When Paul says “it is for freedom that Christ has set us free,” he’s saying that we’ve been set free to live in obedience to God by the power of the Holy Spirit. We’re created to be servants. We can’t help it. We can’t escape it. When we refuse to serve God our Creator, we just end up serving something else. True freedom is found in obedience to God our Creator and Lord, not in obedience to our selfish whims.

Here’s how The Message translates vv. 19-21, describing a life seeking freedom from God’s Lordship: “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 homes and divided lives; small-minded and lopsided pursuits; the vicious habit of depersonalizing everyone into a rival; uncontrolled and uncontrollable addictions; ugly parodies of community; I could go on.” When we try to grasp for absolute freedom, the freedom to do whatever we want, whatever we feel like doing, we dehumanize ourselves and we end up living in bondage to our impulses. We set out trying to be free, and we find ourselves enslaved.

Paul only presents us with two options in these verses. Either we are living by the flesh, with the kinds of results he lists in verses 19-21, or we are living by the Spirit. There’s no neutral position between these two. The flesh, or sinful nature, as it reads in the NIV, refers to the whole person in rebellion against God. The NIV uses the term sinful nature because it’s easy to misunderstand Paul’s use of the word flesh. He’s not talking about our bodies. Some of the works of the flesh include things that result from the misuse of our bodies: sexual immorality, impurity, drunkenness, orgies, etc. But the works of the flesh also include spiritual sins: idolatry and witchcraft, hatred, discord, jealousy, selfish ambition, envy. So the flesh doesn’t refer to our bodies, but to the kind of life that results from the Fall, a life lived in the corruption of sin and rebellion. Living in the flesh is living within the limited perspective of a world that is alienated from the life of God. Here’s what one Bible dictionary says: “The man whose horizon is limited by the flesh is by that very fact opposed to God.... The flesh in this sense denotes the whole personality of man as organized in the wrong direction, as directed to earthly pursuits rather than the service of God” (New Bible Dictionary, p. 371). When we become swallowed up by the values of our culture and live for ourselves, grasping for everything we can, we’re living by the flesh. When we’re living according to the flesh, we are at the center, and everything revolves around our own desires. When we’re living this way, our own needs and desires seem to be the only thing that matters, and if we think about God at all it’s only because we’re hoping we can use Him to get the things we want. Living by the Spirit is living under God’s lordship, with Him at the center of our lives, and living by the flesh is living for ourselves.

It’s important to notice Paul’s terminology in verse 22. He speaks, in verse 19, of the works of the flesh. These are the things that are produced naturally from our fallen nature. When we’re living on our own, apart from God, this is the natural result. These are the kinds of things the flesh is capable of producing. He says the same thing in Romans 8: “Those who live according to the sinful nature have their minds set on what that nature desires, but those who live in accordance with the Spirit have their minds set on what the Spirit desires. The mind of sinful man is death, but the mind controlled by the Spirit is life and peace; the sinful mind is hostile to God. It does not submit to God’s law, nor can it do so. Those controlled by the sinful nature cannot please God” (vv. 5-8).

In verse 22, Paul speaks about the fruit of the Spirit. These 9 qualities he lists in verses 22-23 are things that result from the Spirit’s transforming power in our lives. Here’s how it reads in The Message: “But what happens when we live God’s way? He brings gifts into our lives, much the same way that fruit appears in an orchard.” The works of the flesh flow from us, but the fruit of the Spirit comes about through influences outside ourselves. We can’t produce the fruit of the Spirit through determined self-effort. It’s no use writing these things down in your Day-Timer and determining that you’re going to learn to live like this no matter what. We can’t do it, and when we try, we only end up with counterfeits. We can produce qualities that look like the real thing. But the similarities are only on the surface. The real thing can only appear in our lives through the transforming power of the Holy Spirit. The free life in Christ is a life that leads to the kinds of qualities Paul lists in these verses.

So how do we get the fruit of the Spirit in our lives? Do we just wait passively and say, “oh well, there’s nothing I can do about it; I guess if God wants these things to appear in my life it’s up to Him to do the work”? No. It’s true that we can’t produce these things, any more than we can make fruit grow without those things God provides, like sun, water and the right temperatures. But there are things we can do to cultivate the fruit of the Spirit.

The first thing is to ask whether the Spirit is part of our lives. Paul says in Romans 8, “if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he does not belong to Christ” (v. 19). He says, in 2 Corinthians 5:17: “if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!” Is this true of you? Is there evidence in your life of this new creation? The Church easily becomes just a sub-culture. We learn all the rules and say the right things, and as long as we don’t get caught up in certain behaviors, we can assume that everything is fine. But it’s possible to spend a lifetime in the Church without ever becoming a new creature. It’s possible to spend a lifetime in the Church without ever knowing anything of the transforming power of the Spirit in our lives. We can be good moral people, who fit very nicely into the Christian sub-culture, without ever being reconciled to God. We may avoid the more blatant things, like “sexual immorality, impurity and debauchery, idolatry and witchcraft.” But what about “hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions and envy”? Paul is also speaking about these things when he says “those who live like this will not inherit the kingdom of God.” Do you have evidence of the presence of the Spirit in your life? Many people who’ve spent a lifetime in the church will one day hear Jesus say “Depart from me; I never knew you.”

But, having become new creatures in Christ, knowing the power of the Spirit in our lives, the fruit of the Spirit still doesn’t appear automatically. Paul says, in verse 24: “Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the sinful nature with its passions and desires.” It’s easy to confuse this with what he says chapter 2: “I have been crucified with Christ.” He’s talking in chapter 2 about something that has been done to him, but in chapter 5 he’s speaking about something we have done in coming to Christ. John Stott does a good job of explaining this verse: “What does it mean? Paul borrows the image of crucifixion, of course, from Christ Himself who said: ‘If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me’ (Mk. 8:34). To ‘take up the cross’ was our Lord’s vivid figure of speech for self-denial. Every follower of Christ is to behave like a condemned criminal and carry his cross to the place of execution. Now Paul takes the metaphor to its logical conclusion. We must not only take up our cross and walk with it, but actually see that the execution takes place. We are actually to take the flesh, our wilful and wayward self, and (metaphorically speaking) nail it to the cross. This is Paul’s graphic description of repentance, of turning our back on the old life of selfishness and sin, repudiating it finally and utterly” (Only One Way: The Message of Galatians, p. 150). Remember this definition I quoted earlier: “the flesh denotes the whole personality... organized in the wrong direction.” Repentance is turning around and going the other way.

What he’s describing has often been referred to as the mortification of sin, putting to death those old habits that lead us into sin. It’s what Jesus was talking about when He said: “If your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell” (Matthew 5:29). When our sinful, self-centered tendencies begin to assert themselves, we refuse to submit. It may even help to visualize our old selves on the cross, having died to our old way of life. John Stott goes on to say this: “The first great secret of holiness lies in the degree and the decisiveness of our repentance. If besetting sins persistently plague us, it is either because we have never truly repented, or because, having repented, we have not maintained our repentance. It is as if, having nailed our old nature to the cross, we keep wistfully returning to the scene of its execution. We begin to fondle it, to caress it, to long for its release, even to try to take it down again from the cross. We need to learn to leave it there. When some jealous, or proud, or malicious, or impure thought invades our mind we must kick it out at once. It is fatal to begin to examine it and consider whether we are going to give in or not. We have declared war on it; we are not going to resume negotiations. We have settled the issue for good; we are not going to re-open it. We have crucified the flesh; we are never going to draw the nails” (pp. 151-52). “Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the sinful nature with its passions and desires.” Crucify the sinful nature, and then leave it there on the cross.

But that’s only the first step. We deny ourselves–we say “no” to our old, selfish way of life–and then we go on to walk with the Spirit: “Since we live by the Spirit, let us keep in step with the Spirit.” We walk in the Spirit by looking to Him, inviting Him into every area of our lives and seeking to live under His Lordship. Here’s John Stott once more: “This will be seen in our whole way of life–in the leisure occupations we pursue, the books we read, the friendships we make. Above all in what older authors called ‘a diligent use of the means of grace’, that is, in a disciplined practice of prayer and Scripture meditation, in fellowship with believers who provoke us to love and good works, in keeping the Lord’s day as the Lord’s day, and in attending public worship and the Lord’s Supper. In all these ways we occupy ourselves in spiritual things. It is not enough to yield passively to the Spirit’s control; we must also walk actively in the Spirit’s way. Only so will the fruit of the Spirit appear” (p. 154). We cultivate the fruit of the Spirit by refusing to allow the weeds of the flesh to grow in our lives and by seeking to walk daily in active obedience to God’s Word, trusting in His power to transform us into the image of His Son.

Here's a good description of what freedom means in the way Paul understands it in Galatians: “Christian spirituality forces a primary question: Is growth of the person totally open, as if we were clay to be formed? [In other words, is freedom in Christ open-ended, nothing more than a lack of restraint enabling us to do what we want?] Christianity firmly insists that the answer is no. The apt analogy is the relationship of acorn to oak. If an acorn were given ‘freedom,’ it could not become a maple. Instead, the options would be to become a healthy oak or a contorted self-contradiction. So with humans, for the ‘image of God’ is so structured within each person that the options are (1) to love God with all our hearts, souls, strength, and minds, or (2) to become twisted, tortured, and frustrated creatures” (W. Paul Jones, The Art of Spiritual Direction, p. 31). So these are the choices: “to become twisted, tortured, and frustrated creatures,” the kind of people described in the works of the flesh. Both legalism and antinomianism lead in this direction. The other choice is “to love God with all our hearts, souls, strength, and minds,” to become the kind of people God created us to be, the kind of people who increasingly bear the fruit of the Spirit. The message of free grace sets us free to be truly human.

The Freedom of the Gospel, Galatians 5:1-15

I was in the Navy from mid 1974 to late 1976. The first several months I was in training in San Diego and San Francisco. Then I spent the remainder of my time on a ship, the USS Piedmont. But all that time, in all the different jobs I did, I lived in anticipation of getting out. During my last 3 months or so, I had a calendar that I used to check off each day, and I regularly showed that calendar to some of the lifers in my department to make sure they knew I was getting out soon (lifers are people who make a career out of the Navy). I was living in anticipation of getting out, being free of the Navy.

On the day when I was discharged, I went around to say goodbye to my friends on the ship, and one of the lifers I’d worked with said to me, “you’ll be back in 6 months, Rinard; it’s really bad out there.” For him, the Navy was a secure place, a place where he didn’t have to worry about finding a job or making ends meet. The thought of life on the outside was terrifying to him. He even told me some stories about people who had gotten out and then reenlisted a few months later because things were so bad on the outside. One commentator points out that this even happens with people who’ve spent a lot of time in prison. Prison is a lousy place, but they learn how to function there; it becomes a place f 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, then He calls us to follow Him in learning to live as free people. 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. American evangelicals admire C.S. Lewis, but I’m not sure most evangelical churches would be comfortable having him around: he smoked, drank alcohol; he was 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 we’re comfortable with, and I’ve known some evangelicals who had real trouble with that. We believe in the necessity of faith to get in the door, but then we expect people to order their lives in ways that we’re comfortable with (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. Faith gets us in the door, but then we need to live by the laws of our evangelical subculture to remain in good standing with God.

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 evangelical subculture. 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). 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 false teaching for awhile; 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 the Bob Dylan song I quoted earlier in this series: “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 a person like C.S. Lewis 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.

Children of the Promise, Galatians 4:12-31

In 1976, when I was stationed on a ship in Norfolk, Virginia, some friends and I were talking about getting an apartment together onshore. We were all Christians, and one of the things we discussed was seeking to live as a Christian community, with mandatory times of corporate prayer each day. One of the guys in that discussion became very angry at the suggestion that anything should be considered mandatory. He didn’t object to the idea of praying together, but he strenuously objected to the idea that people would be required to meet together for prayer. He bristled at the thought that he might be deprived of his freedom in this area. He stated his concern in terms of Christian liberty; he said this kind of requirement was legalistic and contrary to the freedom of the gospel. But I suspect his objections had more to do with his being a contemporary American. Freedom is very important to us in America, and freedom in our contemporary society has increasingly been defined as the ability to do whatever I want whenever I want to do it. And we bristle at the thought that someone might want to deprive us of this freedom.

In the early 1980's, Bob Dylan recorded a song called “You’re Gonna Have to Serve Somebody.” He was saying to contemporary Americans, “You’re not really as free as you think you are.” We’re not created with the ability to exercise complete freedom. And when we try to live in that way we end up being enslaved. Dylan said, “It may be the devil or it may be the Lord, but you’re gonna have to serve somebody.” He was making an observation about the way we’re made, as creatures in the image of God. We may object to the whole idea, and we may try to fight against it, but in the end we’ll still be servants. We can’t escape our nature. If we won’t acknowledge God’s lordship, we’ll serve something less than God.

It’s also true that as humans we have to trust in something or someone. We don’t have complete knowledge about anything, so no matter which direction we go we have to act in faith. This is how Eugene Peterson describes the message of the false teachers in Galatia: “The religious product being promoted by Judaizing interpolators was more self-control, more self-determination. If we engage in particular rituals and keep certain rules, we always know where we stand. If we know what we can do that will make us more acceptable in God’s eyes than a person who doesn’t do them, we, by doing them, can advance our status. Such a religion puts us in control. We no longer have to live by faith, trusting to God to accept us in mercy. We no longer have to live in love toward our neighbor, trusting, often against all appearances, that that neighbor is God’s child. What we are being offered is a security system in which we do not have to live by faith, will not have to trust in God, but can trust instead in ourselves” (Traveling Light, p. 128). In the past, the Galatians have trusted in the gospel of grace, and now they’re beginning to trust in themselves. They’re beginning to rely on their own ability to do things that will make them acceptable in God’s sight.

We might ask, “does this really make such a big difference?” Of course, we know Paul was pretty worked up about it, but, after all, he was a Pharisee; all his training in the law had caused him to be obsessed with theological questions. What difference can these ideas possibly make in our daily lives? Paul shows here that this basic shift in the Galatians’ allegiance is having a major effect on their daily lives. We’re made in such a way that we have to trust in someone or something, and the object of our trust will affect the way we live.

Paul shows, first, that the Galatians have become suspicious and distrustful of the wrong people. In verses 12-16, he contrasts their current attitude toward him with the way they treated him when he was there. It seems that his intention was not to minister in Galatia, at least initially. He says, “As you know, it was because of an illness that I first preached the gospel to you.” We don’t know exactly what this illness was, but it was something that detained him and kept him from going where he intended. It forced him to spend time in Galatia, and while he was there he preached the gospel and founded a church. Some commentators have suggested that Paul caught malaria while he was on the coast of Pamphylia and sought relief on the mountainous plateau of Galatia (see John Stott, Only One Way: The Message of Galatians, pp. 113-14). In any case, it was because of an illness that Paul ended up in their region.

Paul also makes it clear that this illness was a trial for them. It made him repulsive to them. The great apostle Paul didn’t come to them in full control of his faculties, taking charge and impressing them with his ability. He came to them in weakness, needing their hospitality. And they gave it to him: “And don’t you remember that even though taking in a sick guest was most troublesome for you, you chose to treat me as well as you would have treated an angel of God – as well as you would have treated Jesus himself if he had visited you?” (The Message). He goes on to say “There were some of you then who, if possible, would have given your very eyes to me – that is how deeply you cared!” (The Message).

That’s how they responded to Paul in the past. But now their attitude toward him has changed: “What has happened to the satisfaction you felt at that time?” (The Message); or “What has happened to all your joy?” (NIV). Something has happened to them; their whole attitude toward life has changed. They were able to joyfully serve Paul when he was there and in need, because they were living out of a foundation of trust in God. Now that they’ve begun trusting in themselves, they’ve changed their attitude toward Paul. Now he’s become their enemy, because he’s been speaking the truth to them. They’ve become suspicious and distrustful of the wrong person.

That leads to the next point, which is that they’ve begun trusting in people who shouldn’t be trusted. In verses 17-20, Paul contrasts his own motives with those of the false teachers in Galatia. Several years ago, Annie and I went into a furniture store looking to buy something. As we were looking, a salesman came over, sat down on one of the couches, and started talking to us. He was warm and friendly and interested in our lives. He wanted to help us find what we needed. He seemed like a great guy. A few days later I went back to ask him a question and this same man was rude and cold. He could see he wasn’t going to make another commission from me, so he turned off the act. The first time we met, he had been warm and friendly and interested in our lives because he was trying to get something from us. Paul is saying that the false teachers in Galatia are like that: “Those heretical teachers go to great lengths to flatter you, but their motives are rotten. They want to shut you out of the free world of God’s grace so that you will always depend on them for approval and direction, making them feel important” (The Message). The Galatians are being manipulated by people who want something from them.

Paul’s motives are just the opposite. His concern is to see Christ formed in them: “Do you know how I feel right now, and will feel until Christ’s life becomes visible in your lives? Like a mother in the pain of childbirth. Oh, I keep wishing that I was with you. Then I wouldn’t be reduced to this blunt, letter-writing language out of sheer frustration” (The Message). The false teachers are trying to gain a following for themselves; Paul wants them to follow Jesus Christ. The false teachers are serving themselves; Paul is serving Jesus Christ. This is a good test to apply to a Christian leader: ask yourself whether that leader is seeking to direct you to Jesus Christ, or to himself. Is that leader truly concerned about your spiritual welfare (even when it won’t benefit him personally), or is he seeking to gain a following? The Galatians should be distrustful and suspicious of the new teachers among them; but, for the moment, they’ve gotten everything backwards. They’re distrustful of Paul, who’s seeking their spiritual good, and they’re trusting these flatterers who are out for their own benefit.

Because of all this, because they’re trusting the wrong people, the Galatians are being deceived, they’re being conned into giving up their priceless inheritance for the privilege of returning to slavery. In verses 21-31, Paul draws another contrast: he compares the children of slavery with the children of the promise, then, at the end of the passage, he says “Therefore, brothers, we are not children of the slave woman, but of the free woman.

God had promised Abraham that his descendants would inherit the land, and that all families of the earth would be blessed through him. And Abraham believed God. But then nothing had happened. Year after year had passed by, and Abraham and Sarah had grown old without ever having children. So they decided to take things into their own hands, since God obviously wasn’t doing what He’d promised to do. Sarah gave her servant girl, Hagar, to be Abraham’s wife, to provide an heir for him. Ishmael had been born through Hagar, but then, several years later, Sarah had conceived and given birth to Isaac. This is the story Paul is referring to: “one son was born because God had promised, the other son was born because Abraham and Sarah doubted. Ishmael was a product of human impatience, the human trying to do God’s work for him; Isaac was the result of God doing his own work in his own time.... The great disaster of Abraham’s life was that he used Hagar to get what he thought God wanted for him; the great achievement of his life was what God did for him apart from any programs or plans that he put into action. The lesson of that old piece of history is clear enough: the moment we begin manipulating our lives in order to get control of circumstances, we become enslaved in our own plans, tangled up in our own red tape.... The life of freedom is a life of receiving, of believing, of accepting, of hoping. Because God freely keeps his promises, we are free to trust” (Peterson, pp. 131-32). If ever there was a time when it looked like God wasn’t going to come through with His promises, it was when Abraham grew old without a son. But God freely keeps His promises, even when things look impossible. Because of that, we are free to trust in Him.

The choice is not between trusting and not trusting. The choice is between freedom and slavery. If we choose not to trust God, we’ll end up trusting someone, or something, other than God, which will lead us into slavery in one way or another. The Galatians were being taught to trust in themselves, in their own ability to do things that would make them pleasing to God. Paul is saying that what they’re doing is aligning themselves with Abraham in his misguided attempt to do God’s work for Him.

We’re going to end up trusting in something, or in someone. We can’t help it; it’s the way we were made. So the choice is between freedom and slavery. We either trust in God, which leads us into freedom, or we turn ourselves over to a life of slavery. And, of course, those who are in slavery will resent our freedom. That’s the point Paul makes in verses 28-31: “Isn’t it clear, friends, that you, like Isaac, are children of promise? In the days of Hagar and Sarah, the child who came from faithless connivance (Ishmael) harassed the child who came – empowered by the Spirit – from the faithful promise (Isaac). Isn’t it clear that the harassment you are now experiencing from the Jerusalem heretics follows that old pattern?” (The Message). The false teachers who’ve been trying to win them over are jealous of the freedom of the gospel. They themselves are living in slavery and they want to enslave the Galatians also.

Outwardly, people trusting in themselves and people trusting in God do pretty-much the same things. But they do it all in a different spirit. Those who are trusting in their own ability to live in a way that pleases God are in slavery. They’re fulfilling their duty, but there’s no joy in it. They’re suspicious and cynical; there’s a hard edge to their spirituality. They’re closed in on themselves, trying with all their might to do something they’re incapable of doing. “The life of freedom is a life of receiving, of believing, of accepting, of hoping. Because God freely keeps his promises, we are free to trust.” When God is at the center, we can relax and trust in Him to continue His work. It doesn’t depend on us. We’re not children of slavery; we’re children of the promise. The most important thing about our lives is not what we’re doing, but who we’re trusting.

Forgive Us Our Debts as We Forgive Our Debtors, Matthew 6:12

Fifth Sunday in Lent, 2014
Good Shepherd Lutheran Church

Eldridge Cleaver was a major leader in the Black Panthers in the 1960’s and 70’s. He became notorious for advocating rape as a political act, admitting that he had at first raped black women for practice but then focused on white women. He saw this as an act of insurrection against an unjust, racist political system. In the late 60’s he fled the United States after provoking a shootout with police in Oakland, CA. He had a falling out with Huey Newton, another leader in the movement, because Newton thought violence was harming their cause and Cleaver believed in the necessity of armed conflict. He was a brutal, violent man, a criminal and a self-confessed rapist, a person who victimized vulnerable human beings.

But in 1975 he returned to the States claiming to be a born-again Christian. He confessed his sins and renounced the things he had said and done in the past. Shortly after his conversion to Christ became public, I was talking to someone who said, “well, why should he be forgiven?” Why should he be able to get away with all the things he had done and then receive forgiveness from God (and, by implication, from God’s people)? He was a despicable human being; aren’t we, by accepting him as a believer, saying that what he did was OK? For this person who was talking to me there was something scandalous, even immoral, about God forgiving such a man. Maybe it’s OK for God for forgive people who are guilty of gossip, or backbiting, or hating their neighbors, normal, socially-acceptable sins, but certainly not hardened criminals like Eldridge Cleaver. It’s one thing to forgive people for the kinds of “little sins” that we’re comfortable excusing, but it’s quite another to offer forgiveness to someone who’s committed real crimes, who’s done inexcusable, reprehensible things. And yet, in the words we’re looking at this morning, Jesus puts forgiveness of sins at the very center of our relationship with God. We may not appreciate it when God forgives a notorious criminal any more than Jonah appreciated God’s mercy toward the Ninevites, but the fact remains that forgiveness of sin is at the very heart of the Christian message.

The first thing I want to point out is that this phrase in the Lord’s Prayer says something about us: it says that we are all constantly in need of forgiveness. Not just notorious sinners, but all of us. This follows immediately after “give us, this day, our daily bread,” which suggests that it’s something we need to be praying every day, just as we pray every day for the provision of food to meet our physical needs. Much of Eastern Orthodox spirituality is based on the Jesus Prayer: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” This prayer recognizes that everything we receive from God comes to us through his mercy, that we are not worthy to claim anything from Him and need to be constantly crying out to Him for mercy and grace.

In the denomination where I pastored, there were some who were influenced by the doctrine of entire sanctification, a form of perfectionism loosely connected with John Wesley but having little to do with his actual teaching. People who bought into this teaching believed that if they acquired the right experience they would be lifted out of the realm of struggle, that they’d become people who no longer sinned, who no longer felt pulled in the direction of sin. Their sin nature had been eradicated. I knew a number of people who grew up under this teaching, and it tended to result in two different tendencies. Some were able to convince themselves that they’d received the experience and had been delivered from the realm of sin. I’ve heard stories, although not very convincing ones, about people who claimed to have this experience. Smith Wigglesworth was a Pentecostal evangelist in the early 20th Century. One of my college professors told a story about Wigglesworth preaching against this doctrine. After the service, a woman stormed to the front of the church and informed him that he was wrong, that she herself had received the experience of full sanctification and was no longer tempted to sin. He had a glass of water in the pulpit with him, so as she was talking he picked up the glass and threw the water in her face; her response was a graphic demonstration that her sinful nature had not been entirely eradicated, which is why he did it. Those who persuade themselves that they have this experience end up embracing a counterfeit (and usually not a very impressive or convincing one at that).

The second group is more honest; these people recognize that they still struggle with sin; they’re deeply aware of their imperfection. They know that they still struggle with temptation and fall into sin. And it tortures them, because they think there’s something within them that’s blocking the experience. One deacon I knew had grown up in a church with this emphasis. He was a good man, a committed follower of Jesus Christ who went out of his way to help people in need. But he wasn’t perfect, and he knew it. He couldn’t live with his imperfection, because he had been taught that perfection is the normal state for Christians. It became so bad at times that he had to be hospitalized. I visited him in the hospital where he was being treated for depression; but his depression wasn’t the result of a congenital mental illness; it was the result of bad theology. He had been taught, in his early life, to expect something that God has not promised. In fact, Jesus has told us implicitly not to expect perfection in this life by instructing us to pray every day, “give us, this day, our daily bread, and forgive us our debts as we have forgiven our debtors.” People whose sinful nature has been eradicated don’t need to pray in this way. It’s a good and healthy thing that we begin our worship with confession and crying out for mercy.

When we pray as Jesus instructs us here, we’re confessing that we are “debtors.” In the traditional form of this prayer in English, we say “forgive us our trespasses,” which is a mistranslation popularized by the Anglican Book of Common Prayer. There’s nothing wrong with using this form, but it’s not the right translation of this passage in Matthew. The word here is the common word for debts, and the parallel passage in Luke uses the common word for sins. Our sins have placed us in debt, have put us in a position where we owe more than we can possibly pay, even if we had all of eternity to do so. We are “debtors;” we are finite people with an infinite weight of debt.

The second thing to notice about this phrase is what it says about God: He is a God of mercy who is eager to forgive. Last year, Iron Men read a book by A.W. Tozer, but unfortunately it wasn’t one of his better ones. Tozer, at his best, had a great gift for teaching Christians how to grow spiritually. Here’s something he said about the danger of thinking that God is just waiting for an opportunity to pounce on us for our sins: “Nothing twists and deforms the soul more than a low or unworthy conception of God.” He was especially concerned about our tendency to lose sight of God’s goodness. He goes on a little later: “Much Christianity since the days of Christ’s flesh has... been grim and severe. And the cause has always been the same–an unworthy or an inadequate view of God. Instinctively we try to be like our God, and if He is conceived to be stern and exacting, so will we ourselves be” (“God is Easy to Live With,” in The Root of the Righteous, p. 14). God isn’t waiting eagerly to punish us for our sins. John says “My little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous” (1 John 2:1). God’s desire is that we stop sinning, that we not continue acquiring debt. But he has not only paid the penalty for our past debts, He has also provided for our future debts. Our debt of sin has been marked PAID IN FULL, and the payment is more than adequate for all of our debt, past, present and future.

The third thing is that this part of the Lord’s Prayer says something about how we, having received mercy, ought to respond to others who are in need of mercy. The great danger is to internalize our faith and not allow it to impact the way we live our lives. Joseph Valachi was a Mafia hit man who became a government informant. He told of being ordered by a mob boss to eliminate an enemy. He and another hit man had been unsuccessful, and when they reported to the boss what had happened, he said, “that’s OK, we’ll get him later, Then he asked them, "'Did you boys go to Mass today?' (It was Sunday." Why, no, said Valachi. They had been too busy trying to assassinate Bugs Rafferty (and, besides, Valachi had no use for religion). The old man shook his head. 'Rubbing out Bugs is important for business,' he said, 'but going to Mass on Sunday is important for your soul'" (reported by Thomas Day in Why Catholics Can’t Sing, p. 115). Responding to the Gospel of Jesus Christ is connected with every part of our lives. A few years ago I was meeting with a bishop in the ELCA; he had read two of my sermons and commented, “well, you know we Lutherans get nervous when people talk about discipleship because we’re concerned that it will lead to works righteousness, that it will undermine the doctrine of justification by faith alone.” I have to admit that he and I never did warm up to each other. But it’s important to point out that this way of thinking doesn’t do justice to the Lutheran Confessions, which speak at length and repeatedly about the necessity of good works. They just make it clear that good works flow from saving faith and are not the foundation of our acceptance before God.

Receiving and giving forgiveness are directly connected. But we need to be careful about this. First of all, forgiveness is not minimizing a person’s guilt, saying “oh well, it’s not such a big deal; let’s just forget about it.” The first step toward forgiving someone is acknowledging that what the person did was wrong. God doesn’t minimize our guilt. Our sins cost Him the death of His only Son. If we want to know what God thinks of our sins, the place to look is Jesus on the cross, crying “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?”

The second thing to keep in mind is that forgiving others is often a process, and if someone has deeply wronged us we probably won’t be able to forgive all at once. If we try to offer forgiveness too quickly and lightly, we may end up deceiving ourselves and accepting a counterfeit. The question is how to get from where we are to where we know we should be. And this begins with a recognition of the truth about ourselves. If we’re angry and bitter, if we just can’t let go of the wrong, we need to begin by admitting this in God’s presence. The Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann suggests that making use of the Vengeance Psalms, these Psalms that Christians often struggle with because of their anger and violence, can, surprisingly, be the first step toward learning forgiveness: “The articulation of vengeance leads us to a new awareness about ourselves.… John Calvin describes the Psalms as ‘An Anatomy of all Parts of the Soul.' And so they are. They tell us about us. The Psalms provide space for full linguistic freedom in which nothing is censored or precluded” (Walter Brueggemann, Praying the Psalms, p. 58).

Praying the Psalms, including those psalms where the authors are crying out for vengeance, provides a context for facing the truth about what is in our hearts. As much as we want to be like Jesus in asking forgiveness for those who hate us, we can't get there without acknowledging what we really feel. Eugene Peterson, the author of The Message, says the same thing; praying these difficult Psalms can actually point us in the direction of forgiveness: “For those who are troubled about the psalms of vengeance, there is a way beyond them. But that way is not easy or ‘natural.’ It is not the way of careless religious goodwill. It is not the way of moral indifference or flippancy. It is, rather, the way of crucifixion, of accepting the rage and grief and terror of evil in ourselves in order to be liberated for compassion toward others.... My hunch is that there is a way beyond the psalms of vengeance, but it is a way through them and not around them. And that is so because of what in fact goes on with us. Willy nilly, we are vengeful creatures. Thus these harsh psalms must be fully embraced as our own. Our rage and indignation must be fully owned and fully expressed. Then (and only then) can our rage and indignation be yielded to the mercy of God. In taking this route through the Psalms, we take the route God has gone. We are not permitted a cheaper, easier, more ‘enlightened’ way” (Answering God: The Psalms as Tools for Prayer, p. 68).

But we need to ask one more question. When we pray “forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors,” does this imply that God only forgives us to the extent that we forgive others? We really don’t know fully what is in our hearts. We may think that we’ve forgiven someone, only to find anger and resentment welling up that we didn’t know was there. If we say that we are forgiven only to the extent that we fully and completely forgive others, we’re essentially saying that we can’t be forgiven; we’re setting an impossible standard. In this case, we’re not justified by faith through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ; we’re forgiven by exercising forgiveness. Our forgiveness of others becomes the primary thing, the condition upon which God forgives us. But really the movement goes in the opposite direction. God forgives us fully and freely, and then we are called to forgive others in the same way. If we refuse to forgive we’re showing that we haven’t truly understood what it means for God to forgive our sins.

But struggling, and often failing, to forgive those who have wronged us is not the same thing as refusing to forgive. We’re called to cultivate forgiveness, to cry out to God for grace to forgive, to take steps in the direction of forgiving those who’ve wronged us; but our forgiveness at its best is an imperfect imitation of the forgiveness that God has granted us. Here’s how Paul says it in Colossians: “Bear with one another and, if anyone has a complaint against another, forgive each other, just as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive” (3:13). The Gospel of Jesus Christ first brings healing to our relationship with God, but then it also begins healing our relationships with one another. And this begins when we show others mercy because God has shown us mercy.

The truth about us, as fallen human beings, is that we are debtors and can never, even if we had all eternity to do it, pay off our debt. Paul says that by nature we have “no hope and [are] without God in the world” (Ephesians 2:12). Our condition, as fallen human beings, is absolutely hopeless; but Paul continues after this with one of his great phrases: “But now….” This was once true of you, but now everything has changed because of God’s mercy and grace. “But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ” (Ephesians 2:13). We can pray these words from the Lord’s Prayer in confidence because Jesus has paid in full the debt for our sins, a debt that we were incapable of ever paying. The Christian music group, Glad, has a wonderful song about this: “Be ye glad, oh, be ye glad, every debt that you ever had has been paid up in full by the grace of the Lord, be ye glad be ye glad be ye glad.” Every debt has been paid up in full by the grace of the Lord. Surely this is a reason for gladness. John Newton, that notorious slave trader who experienced God’s mercy, said near the end of his life, “Although my memory’s fading, I remember two things very clearly: I am a great sinner and Christ is a great Savior.”

Children of God, Galatians 3:26-4:11

When I was a pastor in Collegeville, while I was sitting in my office trying to come up with an idea for how to begin this sermon, a man stopped by the church and said he wanted to talk to me. So I walked into the sanctuary with him (that was where he wanted to talk), and within a few minutes he started asking me what I thought about particular Bible verses that had to do with healing. When he first showed up, I thought he had something urgent to talk about, but as it turned out, he was only interested in converting me to his theological position. He wanted me to believe that sickness is always contrary to God’s will, and that it is always God’s will to heal us if we simply ask in faith. After a few minutes, I told him that I was familiar with this teaching and really wasn’t very interested in discussing it, but that if he wanted to make an appointment I’d be willing to talk to him when I had more time (and then I briefly told him why I thought his ideas were foolish and unbiblical and misleading).

There are false teachers everywhere, and most of the time they seek to defend their teachings by appealing to Scripture. This man quoted one Bible verse after another. But all of his verses were taken out of context, without any attempt to look at them in the light of the general teaching of Scripture. And when I pointed that out to him, he showed no interest; he just quoted a few more verses. He wasn’t interested in discussion. He only wanted to convert me (or make himself feel good by trying to convert me). He even tried to intimidate me by informing me that he’d read the New Testament 20 times and the Old about 10 times or so, and then asking me: “and how many times have you read the Bible?” When I said that I’d read through the Bible at least 20 times (although I'd read the New Testament and Psalms far more than that, since the Bible reading plan I follow goes through them twice a year), he was taken aback and didn’t know what to say.

When people come to us with novel teachings like this, they’ll use all kinds of tactics to persuade us to follow them: intimidation, endless quotations from Scripture, bullying, trying to make our position look foolish. Probably the teachers at Galatia were doing all these things, and the Galatians were being overwhelmed.

Remember that the teachers who’d come to Galatia were telling the churches there that if they wanted to be saved they needed to receive circumcision and begin following the Law of Moses. They were telling the churches that their primary relationship with God is through the Law. This letter is Paul’s response. The Galatians think they’re supplementing the gospel, that they’re following a teaching which will raise them to a higher level spiritually, and Paul responds that this teaching actually amounts to a defection from the message of grace. If they follow this teaching they’ll be departing from Jesus Christ.

The Galatians, in listening to the false teachers, have forgotten who they are. They’ve gotten disoriented; maybe these teachers have bullied and intimidated them. But, in any case, they’ve forgotten who they are in Jesus Christ; otherwise they wouldn’t have taken this new teaching seriously. So Paul reminds them that their relationship with God is not primarily defined by the law; if it were, they would still be in a condition of slavery. That’s what their situation used to be, before they responded to the gospel of Jesus Christ. Now that they’ve responded to the gospel of grace, they are children, part of God’s family. They’ve been redeemed from slavery and adopted as God’s own children. This truth that we are adopted as God’s children, as part of His family, says something about our personal identity, about who we are; it says something about our corporate identity, about where we belong; and it says something about our future, what we have to look forward to.

First, our personal identity. In the story of the prodigal son, the thing that I most often think about is the phrase in verse 17: “When he came to his senses....” (Luke 15:17). Henri Nouwen has a wonderful book about this story (and a painting Rembrandt did of it). Nouwen points out that it’s a realization of his sonship that first causes the prodigal son to return to his senses: “The younger son’s return takes place in the very moment that he reclaims his sonship, even though he has lost all the dignity that belongs to it. In fact, it was the loss of everything that brought him to the bottom line of his identity. He hit the bedrock of his sonship. In retrospect, it seems that the prodigal had to lose everything to come into touch with the ground of his being. When he found himself desiring to be treated as one of the pigs, he realized that he was not a pig but a human being, a son of his father” (The Return of the Prodigal Son, p. 49). When the prodigal son went away and wasted his inheritance, part of what was happening was that he had forgotten his identity; he didn’t remember who he was (whether he was intentionally walking away from his identity or whether he was just caught in the fog of his own desires).

Paul wants the Galatians to know that they are children of God. That hasn’t always been true of them. “Formerly, when you did not know God, you were slaves to those who by nature are not gods.” We saw in the last sermon that the law was a custodian (something like a protective escort) to lead them to Christ. But as long as they were under the care of this custodian, they were essentially in bondage. The law is incapable of freeing us from sin; all it does is reveal our failure. So Paul has been telling them that when they were under the law they were in constant bondage to a system of demands which they were incapable of fulfilling. “As long as the heir is a minor, he has no advantage over the slave. Though legally he owns the entire inheritance, he is subject to tutors and administrators until whatever date the father has set for emancipation. That is the way it is with us: When we were minors, we were just like slaves ordered around by simple instructions (the tutors and administrators of this world), with no say in the conduct of our own lives” (The Message).

That’s where they were. But now everything has changed. “But when the time arrived that was set by God the Father, God sent his Son, born among us of a woman, born under the conditions of the law so that he might redeem those of us who have been kidnapped by the law. Thus we have been set free to experience our rightful heritage” (The Message). Paul uses the word redeem to describe how this change has come about. In using this word, he is pointing to a practice that people would have been familiar with. “Sometimes a slave caught the attention of a wealthy free person and for some reason or other – compassion, affection, justice – the free person decided to free the slave. The free person would then go to the temple or shrine and deposit with the priests the sum of money required for manumission. The priests would then deliver an oracle: The god Apollo has purchased this slave so-and-so from owners such-and-such and is now free. The priests then passed the redemption price on to the recent owner. The exslave who all his or her life had been treated as an inferior, useful only for purposes of running someone else’s errands, doing someone else’s work, was no longer subject to such evaluation. The person was free. No price could be put on that head again” (Eugene Peterson, Traveling Light, p. 116). In redemption, the slave was bought and paid for, then set free. Christ was born under the law, lived without ever violating it, and then died to pay the price to redeem us from the law. He paid our redemption price. But then God went even further; He not only redeemed us from the law, He also adopted us as His children. We’ve not only been set free from bondage to the law, we’ve been adopted into God’s family. We’re no longer slaves; we’re not even mere free citizens. We’re part of God’s family.

That’s our personal identity. We’ve been adopted as God’s children and are no longer slaves. We may still feel like slaves sometimes. No doubt when slaves were redeemed in the ancient world it took a long time for the reality of the change to sink in. We easily fall into old patterns and begin thinking of ourselves as slaves in bondage to the law. But Paul wants us to know the truth about who we are: the price has been paid in full, and we’ve been adopted as God’s children. We now belong to Him.

That leads to the next point, which is about our corporate identity. We aren’t adopted as “only children.” Often evangelical teachers make so much of the personal nature of faith that they undermine the importance of the Church. We aren’t redeemed and left on our own. We’re redeemed as part of a body; we’re made part of God’s family: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” Listen to this verse in The Message: “In Christ’s family there can be no division into Jew and non-Jew, slave and free, male and female. Among us you are all equal. That is, we are all in a common relationship with Jesus Christ.” In this world that is so full of discord and hatred and alienation, God has given us a place where we belong. He’s made us part of His family. We may not always feel a strong sense of belonging in the church, but the truth is that this is our family; we’re united in Jesus Christ. As we’re increasingly transformed into His image, we’ll experience a growing bond with His people. But whether we feel like it or not at any particular time, the Church is a place where we belong. It’s not that we’ve decided to get together with others who think like we do; it’s that God has adopted us together as part of His family and has called us to grow together into His image.

The third point is about our future. Our life in Christ is not primarily about things that are happening in the present moment. We’re living in an in-between time. The price for our redemption has been paid, but we haven’t entered into our full inheritance. We’re looking forward to the time when we will experience the fullness of what Christ has purchased for us. “Also, since you are Christ’s family, then you are Abraham’s famous ‘descendant,’ heirs according to the covenant promises” (The Message). We don’t always feel like people who’ve been set free. We don’t always feel like we belong in the Church. But we look forward to a time when we will feel these things, when we will experience the reality of these things. We won’t always be living by faith. As God’s children, we are also His heirs: “So you are no longer slaves, but God’s children; and since you are his children, he has made you also heirs.”

Who are we? We’re God’s children; we’ve been redeemed from bondage to the law and have been adopted. Where do we belong? We’ve been made part of God’s family, a body of people who are being transformed into the image of Jesus Christ. And what do we have to look forward to? Our full inheritance as God’s children. Paul said our future inheritance is so glorious that it can’t even be compared to the sufferings we experience in this life: “I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us” (Romans 8:18).

The man I mentioned at the beginning of the sermon was teaching things that lead to bondage. That’s what false teachings do. They lead us to forget who we are. If we think God always gives physical healing, then when we don’t experience healing we’ll question our relationship with God. We’ll be in slavery; whether or not we’ve received physical healing will become the foundation of our relationship with God. False teachings always lead us into bondage in one way or another.

We are no longer slaves. We are God’s adopted children. This outlook determines everything. It’s meant to transform every area of our lives: our sense of personal identity, our sense of where we belong, and our understanding of what we have to look forward to in the future. The price has been paid in full. We’ve been redeemed from slavery and adopted as God’s own children. The hymn "Day By Day," begins with these words: “Day by day and with each passing moment, strength I find to meet my trials here; trusting in my Father’s wise bestowment, I’ve no cause for worry or for fear.” Then, in the next verse: “The protection of His child and treasure is a charge that on Himself He laid....” God, our Father, has adopted us as His children and has committed Himself to care for us. He is a perfect Father, and we belong to Him. He is everything we expect fathers to be (but which we all fail to be in one way or another). We’re not slaves; we’re adopted children of our heavenly Father.

The Purpose of the Law, Galatians 3:15-25

At one point in Jesus’ ministry, the people asked Him a question that was very important to them: “what must we do to perform the works of God?” “What do we need to do to become people who are pleasing to God?” And Jesus gave them a surprising answer: “This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent” (John 6:28-29). It wasn’t what they expected; it wasn’t what they were looking for, and as the discussion continued, many of His own disciples turned away and no longer followed Him. They wanted something more tangible, something they could do, that everyone could see and know that they were people who performed the works of God.

The Galatians, at this point, were asking a similar question, and they were receiving a very definite answer from some teachers who had come into the area. They were asking “what must we do to perform the works of God,” and these teachers were telling them: “be circumcised and submit to the Law of Moses.” The people who questioned Jesus were looking for this sort of answer; it’s just the kind of thing they were hoping for: “If you want to perform the works of God, do this and everything will be fine.”

This question doesn’t seem as urgent to us, living at the beginning of the 21st Century. We live in a very different kind of society, and “doing the works of God” is not as high on our agenda. But here’s a question we do ask: “how can I be successful?” “What do I need to do to become a success?” It really doesn’t matter what kind of success we’re concerned about: financial prosperity, personal happiness, a fulfilling career, a good reputation, or a leadership position in the church. We want to be successful; we don’t want to be failures. We want to know that our lives have counted for something. And when we come into God’s presence, very often the most pressing question on our minds is this: “what do I need to do to become successful?” That’s one reason there are so many self-help books in Christian bookstores. We want to know how to succeed in life.

Eugene Peterson makes this interesting observation: “Among the apostles, the one absolutely stunning success was Judas, and the one thoroughly groveling failure was Peter. Judas was a success in the ways that most impress us: he was successful both financially and politically. He cleverly arranged to control the money of the apostolic band; he skillfully manipulated the political forces of the day to accomplish his goal. And Peter was a failure in ways that we most dread: he was impotent in a crisis and socially inept. At the arrest of Jesus he collapsed, a hapless, blustering coward; in the most critical situations of his life with Jesus, the confession on the road to Caesarea Philippi and the vision on the Mount of Transfiguration, he said the most embarrassingly inappropriate things. He was not the companion we would want with us in time of danger, and he was not the kind of person we would feel comfortable with at a social occasion” (Traveling Light, p. 95).

The teachers at Galatia are telling the churches there how to become successful before God, but they’re off track because they don’t really understand the purpose of the law in God’s plan of redemption. They’re telling the Galatians how to become successful by using the law, when the purpose of the law is to show them their failure. The law has a place in God’s work of redemption, but it’s different than they’ve been assuming. The law, in God’s purposes, is not the main thing. God’s primary way of dealing with His people is through the promise; the purpose of the law is to show us our neediness. The purpose of the law is not to give us the secrets of success; the purpose of the law is to underscore our failure and show us our need.

The first point Paul makes, in verses 15-18, is that the promise was given long before the law. Paul was being accused of starting a new sect. The false teachers were accusing him of departing from the teaching of the Old Testament, of laying aside God’s revelation in the past. So Paul wants the Galatians to know that this is not true at all. God dealt with Abraham, the father of the Jewish people, on the basis of promise, not law. And God not only made a promise to Abraham, but to his descendants as well. The law, which was given more than 400 years later, can’t override God’s promise to Abraham and his descendants.

Listen to how this section reads in The Message: “Friends, let me give you an example from everyday affairs of the free life I am talking about. Once a person’s will has been ratified, no one else can annul it or add to it.... A will, earlier ratified by God, is not annulled by an addendum attached 430 years later, thereby negating the promise of the will. No, this addendum, with its instructions and regulations, has nothing to do with the promised inheritance in the will.” The Judaizers who were teaching in Galatia were assuming that law is God’s primary way of dealing with His people. They had made obedience to the letter of the law the fundamental thing that defined their relationship with God. So Paul shows here that they’re off track. God’s primary way of dealing with His people is through the promise. The law can’t be the primary thing, since it was added so much later. God is faithful to His Word; when He gave the law to Moses, He wasn’t canceling out His promises to Abraham.

Why do we have binding contracts drawn up by lawyers who exercise great care trying to eliminate loopholes and escape routes? Why are so many marriages disintegrating in our society (which means that people who’ve taken a solemn vow to remain together ‘till death do us part’ have decided to lay aside their promises)? Why are so many children embittered toward their parents for promises they’ve made but haven’t kept? We’re not faithful to our promises. We say we’re going to do something, but then we find that it’s not as easy as we expected, so we change our minds. Sometimes we fail to keep our promises though simple human weakness; we find that we’ve promised to do something that we’re unable to do. But much of the time we’re just unfaithful. God isn’t like this. He is true to His word. He’s not going to change His mind in the future, and He’s not going to be hindered by weakness in the way we are. God began His work of redemption with a promise to Abraham and his descendants. When He gave the law, 400 years later, it wasn’t that He said to Himself, “well, I can see that this isn’t working; I’d better try something else.” The law doesn’t cancel out the promise in that way. God’s fundamental way of dealing with people in this fallen world is through the promise.

There’s a reason God doesn’t deal with us through the law. Paul makes this point in verses 19-22: “if a law had been given that could impart life, then righteousness would certainly have come by the law.” The problem is that the law can’t impart life. But the problem is not with the law. The problem is with us: “What, then, was the purpose of the law? It was added because of transgressions.... But the scripture declares that the whole world is a prisoner of sin.” The law can’t give us life, because we are sinners; we’re people who are guilty of violating the law. The law can’t save us, because we’ve broken it.

Suppose we could take hold of ourselves and begin faithfully obeying the law from now on until the end of our lives. That’s the idea of legalism: we save ourselves by faithfully observing the law, without any lapses, until we stand before the judgment seat of Christ. Well, suppose we could do that. Would it do any good? We’ve already broken the law, so what we’re hoping is that our obedience in the future will outweigh our disobedience in the past. But the law doesn’t give us that hope. The law condemns us as sinners. The law shows us how many times we’ve failed to keep it. Even if we obey more than we disobey over the course of a lifetime, the law calls us to account for our disobedience. There’s no provision in the law that says “five acts of obedience cancel out one sin.” And, of course, the problem is not only with past sins. No matter how hard we try, we continue to fail in our attempts to obey the law. When we try to save ourselves by obeying the law, we only lead ourselves into deeper condemnation. The law is always there to show us how many times we’ve failed to keep it.

So, what is the purpose of the law? If it was given so much later than the promise, and if it’s unable to rescue us from our sinful condition, why did God give it at all? Paul explains this in verses 23-25: “Before this faith came, we were held prisoners by the law, locked up until faith should be revealed. So the law was put in charge to lead us to Christ that we might be justified by faith.” The purpose of the law is to lead us to Christ.

Paul uses an interesting word to describe the law’s function: “He calls the law a custodian: ‘The law was our custodian until Christ came.’ The meaning of the Greek word paidagogos that lies behind the English word custodian often loses something in translation. Greek families that were well enough off to have slaves chose one of them, usually an old and trusted slave, to be in charge of their child or children from the ages of six to sixteen. This custodian went with the child to school to see that no harm or mischief came to him. He was not the schoolmaster. He had nothing to do with the actual teaching of the child. It was only his duty to take him safely to the school and deliver him to the teacher. That, says Paul, is how the law works: it delivers us to the place of faith, to Christ” (Peterson, Traveling Light, pp. 104-105). This idea comes across clearly in The Message: “Until the time when we were mature enough to respond freely in faith to the living God, we were carefully surrounded and protected by the Mosaic law. The law was like those Greek tutors, with which you are familiar, who escort children to school and protect them from danger or distraction, making sure the children will really get to the place they set out for.” The purpose of the law is to keep us oriented to God, and to point out our need, our failure, which points us to our need of grace and mercy through Jesus Christ. The purpose of the law is to lead us to faith in Christ.

Maybe you’re not asking the question, “what must I do to work the works of God.” If you’re like many today, you’re far more interested in learning how to live successfully. Here are some phrases from church advertisements I’ve received in the mail: “What if there was a church... where... real life issues are discussed?” “Real life issues,” not all that religious stuff that most churches talk about. “At [our church] we believe that finding real answers for life’s toughest problems is important” (and the context of this phrase makes it clear that they’re talking about the practical “how-to’s” of ordering our lives successfully. This same church sent out another brochure advertising a new sermon series: “How to Succeed at the Speed of Life.”

The message of the gospel is not “how to succeed.” The message of the gospel is “you’ve already failed in more ways than you know, and you’re going to fail again in the future (and you’ll fail even more if you try to do anything worthwhile), but God in His mercy has provided for this. Listen to the law, and acknowledge the truth about yourself, then come to Jesus Christ to receive mercy and grace. Trying to pretend that you’re a success (either at obeying the law or at having all of life figured out) will lead only to bondage.” The Galatians were being told how to be successful in God’s sight, and it was leading them into bondage. The free life of the gospel is a life lived in recognition of the truth about ourselves.

Eugene Peterson sums it up like this: “There we live by faith and failure, by faith and forgiveness, by faith and mercy, by faith and freedom. We do not live successfully. Success imprisons. Success is an unbiblical burden stupidly assumed by prideful persons who reject the risks and perils of faith, preferring to appear right rather than to be human” (p. 106). People who are obsessed with success are also inordinately concerned with appearances. Too often how we appear is more important to us than the truth of what we are.

In the middle of the 20th century, A.W. Tozer made this observation: “Much that passes for Christianity today is the brief bright effort of the severed branch to bring forth its fruit in its season. But the deep laws of life are against it. Preoccupation with appearances and a corresponding neglect of the out-of-sight root of the true spiritual life are prophetic signs which go unheeded. Immediate ‘results’ are all that matter, quick proofs of present success without a thought of next week or next year. Religious pragmatism is running wild among the orthodox. Truth is whatever works. If it gets results it is good. There is but one test for the religious leader: success. Everything is forgiven him except failure” (The Root of the Righteous, pp. 8-9).

The Corinthian church was full of pride. They were a “successful” church. So Paul decided to remind them of the truth: “Take a good look, friends, at who you were when you got called into this life. I don’t see many of ‘the brightest and the best’ among you, not many influential, not many from high-society families. Isn’t it obvious that God deliberately chose men and women that the culture overlooks and exploits and abuses, chose these ‘nobodies’ to expose the hollow pretensions of the ‘somebodies’? That makes it quite clear that none of you can get by with blowing your own horn before God. Everything that we have – right thinking and right living, a clean slate and a fresh start – comes from God by way of Jesus Christ. That’s why we have the saying, ‘If you’re going to blow a horn, blow a trumpet for God” (1 Corinthians 1:26-31, The Message). We’re not successes, and when we pretend otherwise we dishonor God. God is glorified when we acknowledge the truth. God’s way of redemption is to lead us to salvation in Jesus Christ by first showing us our failure to keep the law.

“This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent” (John 6:28-29). “There we live by faith and failure, by faith and forgiveness, by faith and mercy, by faith and freedom.” The law brings us into bondage, whether it’s the Mosaic law or a current Evangelical law about how to live a successful and happy middle class American life. Life in this world is full of sorrow and failure. Our vision of the Christian life needs to be in touch with this reality, and the foundation of our Christian lives is this: God has dealt with us, not as successes, but as failures. God knows all the truth about us. We don’t need to pretend. The law condemns us, but it doesn’t leave us in a state of condemnation; it leads us to a life of freedom in the grace of Jesus Christ: “But now you have arrived at your destination: By faith in Christ you are in direct relationship with God. Your baptism in Christ was not just washing you up for a fresh start. It also involved dressing you in an adult faith wardrobe – Christ’s life, the fulfillment of God’s original promise” (The Message). That’s the most fundamental reality of our lives as Christians. It’s not that we’ve learned the secret of living successfully. It’s that we’ve been reconciled to God and are in a relationship with Him which begins in this life and will continue throughout eternity.