True love is transformative. No, we can’t love perfectly while here on this earth. But it will make a big difference in how we live our lives. Law-keeping is far inferior to walking in love. And that is why walking in God’s pure love while firmly maintaining our hold on grace is our aim. And someday, we are completely confident our bodies will be redeemed and “we will be like Him because we will see Him as He is.”

The Apostle Paul wrote to the church in Galatia to address some very important issues which they had forgotten—Christian freedom chief among them. Along with that, he also laid out some obligations of the Christian life. As Joy and I consider the celebration of the birth of our nation and our freedom in a few days, we are reminded anew of the above letter, written in 49 AD, just prior to the Jerusalem Council. (Acts 15) The theme of the book was, in one word, FREEDOM! And in two words, CHRISTIAN FREEDOM specifically. The Apostle’s exasperation with the Galatian church is clear and unbridled. He was also furious at the false teachers who had come in and led them away from their grace and freedom. They had initially embraced the true gospel of grace, but later on, when he was not there with them, they allowed themselves to be, in the words of Paul, “bewitched” by these false teachers to go back under the law and leave their grace behind. In order to bring them back to the freedom of the gospel, he asked a few rhetorical questions:

Did you receive the Spirit by works of the law or by hearing with faith?
Galatians 3:2b

The obvious answer is “by the hearing of faith.” He has been abundantly clear throughout his teaching that no one can be justified, made righteous before God, by the “works of the law.” His next question demonstrates the bankruptcy of the deception to which they had yielded:

Having begun by the Spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh?
Galatians 3:3

The balance of the chapter is spent reminding them that all the law can do is demonstrate to us our desperate condition and that without the freeing gospel of Christ, it will leave us in despair. The law chains and imprisons us—no one could ever or would ever be able to keep it. But faith in Christ’s work—His keeping of the whole law perfectly throughout His life—sets us free. How were the Galatians deceived into giving up their freedom? The false teachers crept in and manipulated them through fear and guilt and made demands on them which sounded “right” to these Christian’s confused minds. They put the heavy weight of the law right back on these Christian’s shoulders. Paul spends chapters three and four on the history of faith and the basis of freedom. He then reminds them of two very important things. The first is Freedom:

For freedom, Christ has set us free…
Galatians 5:1a

Why did Christ set us free? To enjoy freedom and to enjoy Him—to experience our spiritual walk with Him without the terrible guilt and shame that human attempts at law-keeping inevitably brings. All down through church history, beginning with the Galatians, many Christians have been deceived and persuaded to give up the freedom bought for them by the Savior. It is certainly happening in our day as well. People are deceived into giving up their grace and returning to the black hole of law-keeping and law-keeping failure that blights the soul. We see it in groups like Gwen Shamblin’s Remnant Fellowship, the Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons – and even in quite a few evangelical churches—brought in by people bearing the false teachings of Bill Gothard’s Institute in Basic Life Principles, for example, or with a whole host of other law-based killjoys that prey on the church. BTW, killjoy is an excellent moniker for these false teachers because putting people back under the weight of the law kills joy for certain.

The second thing Paul reminded them of is obligations. At first, that might sound contradictory, but once we understand the obligations they make perfect sense. The first is the commitment to or defense of freedom:

…stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.
Galatians 5:1b

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