Galatians 3:1-6, The Message - You crazy Galatians! Did someone put a spell on you? Have you taken leave of your senses? Something crazy has happened, for it’s obvious that you no longer have the crucified Jesus in clear focus in your lives. His sacrifice on the cross was certainly set before you clearly enough.
Let me put this question to you: How did your new life
begin? Was it by working your heads off to please God? Or was it by responding
to God’s Message to you? Are you going to continue this craziness? For only
crazy people would think they could complete by their own efforts what was
begun by God. If you weren’t smart enough or strong enough to begin it, how do
you suppose you could perfect it? Did you go through this whole painful
learning process for nothing? It is not yet a total loss, but it certainly will
be if you keep this up!
Answer this question: Does the God who lavishly provides
you with his own presence, his Holy Spirit, working things in your lives you
could never do for yourselves, does he do these things because of your
strenuous moral striving or because you trust him to do them in you? Don’t
these things happen among you just as they happened with Abraham? He believed
God, and that act of belief was turned into a life that was right with God.
Most of us give lip service to the
core message of Paul’s letter to the Galatians; our works (the things we do and
don’t do) don’t earn God’s favor. It’s
very possible that many in the Galatian churches did too. In the passage for today above, Paul calls
them out. Too often, we say we depend on
God’s grace and then turn around and live like we are self-sufficient. I have to confess that I am calling out
myself as much as anyone else. I’ve even
unintentionally taught this way of living at times. I have held up the following mantra from
Saint Augustine in the 4th Century.
“Pray like everything depends on
God; work like everything depends on you.”
It sounds so good; it’s from St.
Augustine for goodness sake. But it is
this very division of faith and works that Paul is confronting in this passage
in Galatians. His contention is that you can work as hard as you want, but
don’t ever be deluded that your work is doing a single thing to make you more
righteous (righteous meaning “right relationship with God and people). It is this very teaching that forms the basis
of Step 1 in any 12-step program:
“We admitted we were powerless over
alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.” (AA)
It’s insanity to believe that God would ask us to put our
faith in in God’s grace to save us, then expect us to take it from there.
Let me make it personal here. Think back to the time when you first
considered yourself a Christian. For
some of you, you can point to a moment. Others, like me, can only really point
to a season of our lives. Whether it’s a
moment or a season is not important. As
you think back to that time, is there some change that you have wanted to make
in your life that you actually were convinced would be a God-honoring change
that, despite constant effort since that time, has never been made? You’ve expended Herculean effort, but there
is no noticeable change. You might have
even prayed extensively for God to help you make the change (I know I
have). You’ve seen others make the same
change and give God the glory for it, but nothing has changed for you.
Paul himself understands how this
feels; he had a self-described “thorn in the flesh” he wanted God to change. We’ll discuss that in more depth when we get
to 2 Corinthians, but for now I just mention that God never helped him with
that problem. God’s answer was, my GRACE
is sufficient for you. God says that
what My grace is doing in you is more important that the changes you want to
see happen. That’s a hard pill for us to
swallow personally. But I want to call
us back to the point Paul is trying to make to the Galatians.
It’s also hard for us to accept
that the changes we would prefer to see in others are not our
responsibility. Just as God doesn’t
always cooperate with our self-improvement programs, God doesn’t always
cooperate in our “neighbor-improvement” programs. The bottom line is that Paul insists we all
have to completely trust God to mold and shape us as God wills, not as we
wish. Work hard? Yes! But trust God will effect the change in you
and in others that God wills.
Question: In what
ways has your life “become unmanageable?”
Prayer: Where our
lives have become unmanageable, bring us to a place where we can simply accept
our powerlessness and wholly put our trust in you to bring us to a better
place. Help us to wholly trust that same
process of your grace in others as well.
Amen.
Prayer Focus: Spend a
few minutes today specifically praying for people you know personally that
don’t know Christ.
Song: Change My Heart
Oh God - Eddie Espinosa
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