Yesterday was another incredible day in the life of our church; it seems like every single week God continues to meet us where we are, challenge us to go further, and provide us with the necessary tools to get where He wants us to go. Pastor was gone this week and so as Associate Pastor I was responsible for making sure that things ran smoothly, and for delivering the Word of God to the people. This is not something that I take lightly; God has seen it fit to call me to preach and He always provides me with the words to say and the skills to know how to say those words. I spoke on Galatians 5 – it is here that Paul is talking to a group of Jewish Christians about not being slaves to the law, but rather having freedom in their relationship with Christ. I used this time to talk about our nation’s independence day and how our founding father’s fought hard for the freedoms that we enjoy today. In a much larger sense, Paul was waging war against slavery to the law; the Jewish Christians were intent on holding firm to the law in order to be deemed “good enough” for God, even though they had been freed from that burden by Jesus’ death and resurrection. Not only did they hold themselves to the law, but they held new Christians who were not Jews to that same law. I used this opportunity to explain that in our relationship with Christ, we have freedom; freedom from sin (to live a holy life), freedom from legalism (to not be justified by our acts but rather by our faith), and freedom to love (the greatest commandment).
I wonder – do we live in the freedom that we have been given? If we are Christians and have a relationship with Christ, then we are free. Do we then run back and, like a dog returning to its filth, once again hold ourselves to the standard of the law and judge others based on it? Or do we, like Christ, see ourselves and others through the eyes of God as broken individuals who are in desperate need of God’s grace? It does not escape me that we are free from sin as well and should not abuse the grace that we have been given, but too many times we focus on the “do’s” and “don’ts” of our faith and not so much on the loving each other as we love ourselves.
How do you see others? Through legalistic eyes, or through the eyes of the one who died so that we can have relationship with the God of the universe?
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