“Through Jesus, Paul learned that God was not an impersonal force to be used to make people behave in certain prescribed ways, but a personal Savior who set us free to live a free life. God did not coerce us from without, but set us free from within… Paul’s letter to the Galatian churches helps them, and us, recover the original freedom. It also gives us direction in the nature of God’s gift of freedom – most necessary guidance, for freedom is a delicate and subtle gift, easily perverted and often squandered.” -Eugene Peterson, Introduction to Galatians
Galatians 2:19-21 What actually took place is this: I tried keeping rules and working my head off to please God, and it didn’t work. So I quit being a “law man” so that I could be God’s man. Christ’s life showed me how, and enabled me to do it. I identified myself completely with him. Indeed, I have been crucified with Christ. My ego is no longer central. It is no longer important that I appear righteous before you or have your good opinion, and I am no longer driven to impress God. Christ lives in me. The life you see me living is not “mine,” but it is lived by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. I am not going to go back on that.
Is it not clear to you that to go back to that old rule-keeping, peer-pleasing religion would be an abandonment of everything personal and free in my relationship with God? I refuse to do that, to repudiate God’s grace. If a living relationship with God could come by rule-keeping, then Christ died unnecessarily.
Thoughts splay a million different directions. Seems our world pulses on these splayed thoughts. Jumping from place to place, activity to activity, idea to idea, multi-tasking, multi-focusing. Being in one place while thinking about another… Scrolling and scrolling and scrolling but never actually getting anywhere… Never settled. At least slightly on edge, some say prepared while others call it paranoid and in this state, do it perfectly… at least perfectly based on 100 different people’s opinions at any given moment. There. How is that? OR… Focus our attention on the Breather of the Stars, the Maker of the Way and simply do the task in front of us without concern for what everyone else thinks or what everyone else is doing… Using our freedom to choose The More… this is real freedom. To know whose we are and live into that truth. There is wonder in this freedom. Wonder and life and peace and gratitude and love… so much love… This love will not come from the world. Look to the source of all Love, and there is a never-ceasing fountain for all who choose Him, Love.