Day 114: How Have We Been Set Free Through The Spirit? PT01
Galatians 5:13
For you were called to freedom, brothers and sisters; only do not use your freedom as an opportunity to indulge your flesh, but through love serve one another.
This week we begin to deal with the question, “How do we live by the Holy Spirit?” The Holy Spirit has been given to us to enable us to do what no “external law” or commandment could never do: empower us to live out the life of Jesus, shaped by the goodness of His character.
It is important to understand the type of life Father God has called us to and also how He has provided for us to live that life. The Holy Spirit is more powerful than any law or commandment or anything that we could do in and of ourselves. As we submit to His leading, His fruit will become evident in our lives: love and all that accompanies it.
Galatians 5:1–6
For freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not be subject again to the yoke of slavery.
5:2 Listen! I, Paul, tell you that if you let yourselves be circumcised, Christ will be of no benefit to you at all! 5:3 And I testify again to every man who lets himself be circumcised that he is obligated to obey the whole law. 5:4 You who are trying to be declared righteous by the law have been alienated from Christ;
you have fallen away from grace!
5:5 For through the Spirit, by faith, we wait expectantly for the hope of righteousness. 5:6 For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision carries any weight—the only thing that matters is faith working through love.
For what purpose has Christ set us free?
What should we stand firm against?
According 5:4, what has happened to those who are seeking to be declared righteous by the Law?
What are we waiting for through the Spirit, by faith?
What is the only thing that matters?
Galatians is likely to be Paul’s first letter. It was written when some key issues of Truth and practical theology were being worked out in the early Church. This passage from Galatians is one of the more significant ones in Paul’s writings which deals with the role of the Holy Spirit in our lives—both as individuals and as members of the Body of Christ.
First of all, Paul emphasizes that Christ has set us free for freedom. That sounds like an obvious statement, but in the context it highlights an important point for Paul. In this letter, Paul is addressing a form of false teaching that entered this group of churches. The situation was very serious and Paul even called this teaching a “different Gospel”:
Galatians 1:6–7
I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you by the grace of Christ and are following a different gospel— 1:7 not that there really is another gospel, but there are some who are disturbing you and wanting to distort the gospel of Christ.
In the early Church, the people of God were dealing with the reality that Jesus changed everything! The new work that Father God was doing in the Church was to unite Jew (the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob) and Gentile (everyone else) together as one group, the Body of Christ (see Ephesians 2:11-22). Some from the Jewish tradition had a difficult time understanding and realizing that now, In Christ, the Law—the Mosaic Law—had been superceded by the power of God’s grace available in Christ through the Holy Spirit.
This became a major issue when Paul and Barnabas were chosen by the Holy Spirit in the church at Antioch to be sent out to take the Gospel to the nations. Soon, some men appeared adding to The Gospel:
Acts 15:1, 5
Now some men came down from Judea and began to teach the brothers, “Unless you are circumcised according to the custom of Moses, you cannot be saved.”…
15:5 … some from the religious party of the Pharisees who had believed stood up and said, “It is necessary to circumcise the Gentiles and to order them to observe the law of Moses.”
If you think back to our Phase 1 studies, we made a big point that the True Gospel is the Good News of Christ + Nothing! These false teachers were saying that it is Christ + Circumcision + Observing the Mosaic Law. As Paul says in Galatians 5:4, those who are teaching such things are alienated from Christ, they have fallen from grace. In other words, in not teaching the True Gospel, they were denying the reality of Christ’s work and God’s grace. This was a big controversy for the early Church. In fact, the first major Church Council recorded in Acts 15 deals with this issue. Over the years, this form of false teaching has been generally labeled legalism and we will discuss it further a little later.
The Elders and the Apostles came together in Jerusalem to decide what to do. After there had been much debate, Peter (who was the first to take the Gospel to the Gentiles) stands up makes the key point:
Acts 15:7–11
“Brothers, you know that some time ago God chose me to preach to the Gentiles so they would hear the message of the gospel and believe. 15:8 And God, who knows the heart, has testified to them by giving them the Holy Spirit just as he did to us, 15:9 and he made no distinction between them and us, cleansing their hearts by faith. 15:10 So now why are you putting God to the test by placing on the neck of the disciples a yoke that neither our ancestors nor we have been able to bear? 15:11 On the contrary, we believe that we are saved through the grace of the Lord Jesus, in the same way as they are.”
After Paul and Barnabas shared all the wonderful and even miraculous things that the Lord had done to confirm the Gospel spreading among the Gentiles, The Jerusalem Council decided that circumcision and observance of the Mosaic Law was not essential to salvation. They sent a letter to all the new churches explaining their decision (See Acts 15:22-29).
The main thread of Paul’s thought in Galatians could be summed up as: Father God has set His people free in Christ from the powerless requirements of the Mosaic Law and has given them the Holy Spirit to do what no law could ever do.
Paul says, “For through the Spirit, by faith, we wait expectantly for the hope of righteousness.” Because we have already been declared righteous by grace, through/by faith in Christ, we have the assured hope that when we finally stand in the Lord’s presence we will be welcomed by Him. We will be accepted not because of what we have done, but because of what He has done for us!
Then in summary, Paul says, “the only thing that matters is faith working through love.” That is the practical outworking of the power of the Holy Spirit. We will spend these final sessions talking about that key Truth.
Christ has set us free indeed (see John 8:36)! We are both free from the powerless requirements of the Law and free to follow Christ in the power of the Spirit. We will be exploring this core truth from here on.
*You can find a complete list of all the MilktoMeat readings here.
