Freedom To Love
Texts: Galatians 5:13-15; Matthew 22:34-40
Pastor Phil Hughes, American Fork Presbyterian Church, UT
July 2, 2023
We are nearing the end of this sermon series in Galatians. Why so long in this one book that isn’t all that long? Because the main message of Galatians is so vital for following Jesus. Living by grace is at the heart of being a Christian. It’s the fuel on which our engine runs.
In a time when so many see religion as oppressive with so many rules, ordinances, and have-to’s what Paul wrote to the Galatians reminds us that being acceptable to God is not about what we do for God but what God has done for us.
While many religions promote spiritual and moral perfection, grace in Christ teaches us that our failings are places where God’s kindness and mercy can touch us. Grace frees us from having to climb some spiritual mountain and allows us to rest in the love of Christ even when our feet slip.
The Galatians were not getting how to live by grace. Paul writes them to get them back on track.
In Romans, another letter of Paul, he writes, “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death.”[1]
We are not condemned. We are set free. But this freedom is a dangerous thing. Who knows what we will do, what choices we will make, what direction we will go? Yet this is how we stand: free. The question is: what are we going to do with our freedom?
That is our standing before God this morning: uncondemned. It doesn’t matter what happened this week, this month, or even this morning. Christ’s redeeming work is for the past, the present and the future. What are we going to do with this freedom?
It is sometimes the case that people who have been in prison or jail for a longtime fear being set free. Sometimes when a person is freed they will do something to get put back in. It is safer for them to live with the bars, guards, strict rules and having others tell them what to do, when to do it, and how to behave.
After the breakup of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall, many people who had lived under communism experienced a new freedom. But some of those countries experienced sky rocketing rates of addictions to alcoholism and pornography, and breakdowns in their society that they never knew before.
Freedom is a tricky thing. Freedom can be dangerous if not understood.
We are free from the old religious law. We are free from a checklist of religious rules. You can keep track of people, even control them, when you have a lot of rules. But God isn’t interested in keeping track of us as if we were animals in a zoo. He has freed us with the life of his Son. Now, what are we going to do with our freedom?
The Lamb of God has been slain and taken away our sin and guilt. We are free because of the grace of Christ.
This bothers people in churches of a more legalistic bent. It bothered those who were hearing Paul say that they no longer had to keep the laws of Judaism to be right with God.
This is part of the danger of grace. Won’t people get out of hand? Won’t people become spiritually lazy? If God has done it all through Christ for us, why do any thing? People will stop coming to worship, never open their Bibles, forget about morality and just do anything they want. Because, after all, isn’t Christianity just about being a good person? How are people going to pursue being good if they don’t have to run on a religious treadmill?
And so we hear that we are to try harder and do more so that we can get our lives together. Christianity becomes what we do for God rather than what he has done for us.
A pastor who wrote a book called, “One Way Love: Inexhaustible Grace for an Exhausted World” said, “…if we’re not careful we can give people the impression that Christianity is first and foremost about the sacrifice we make for Jesus rather than the sacrifice Jesus made for us; our performance for him rather than his performance for us; our obedience for him rather than his obedience for us. The hub of Christianity is not “do something for Jesus.” The hub of Christianity is “Jesus has done everything for you.” I fear that too many people, both inside and outside the church, have heard this plea for intensified devotion and concluded that the focus of the Christian faith is our love for God instead of God’s love for us.”[2]
Paul insists to the Galatians that we are called to freedom in Christ. We are free from Christian performance, from our performance being the thing that determines whether God loves us or not, and from constantly worrying about how we are doing.
We are free from everything having to be in order. Because maybe right now we aren’t at our best. Maybe we are depressed. Maybe we are finding it hard if not impossible to pray. Maybe our family is falling apart. Maybe our attitude has just been lousy. But that doesn’t determine our standing before our Lord.
We all have dark places in our lives. There are parts of me that aren’t good and they don’t seem to be changing real fast. Instead of obsessing on myself and becoming more self-centered than I already am I try to look at Christ and what he has done for me already. I try to become more centered on him. There are times my prayer is “Phil, you are a screw up. But Christ has died and risen for you. You are free and forgiven. So get up, keep going, and live.”
At the beginning of chapter five Paul says that it is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Paul is big on the freedom of the gospel. He uses the word more than anyone in the New Testament. He uses “freedom” twenty-eight times in his letters, and he uses it ten times in Galatians, more than in any other letter he writes.
But does this freedom mean anything goes?
There are probably two big dangers to freedom: legalism and license.
Legalism fights freedom and binds us with a lot of rules and regulations and burdens. License abuses freedom and says you can do anything you want, as you want, whenever you want. Jesus frees us from sin, but he doesn’t free us to sin. Apparently this freedom we have in Christ is more than doing as we please.
This is what Paul says: yes we are free, but “do not use your freedom to indulge the flesh.” Do not use freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence. Paul uses a military term for the spot from where an offensive movement was launched. It was the base of operations. He is saying “don’t use your freedom as a beachhead for your own indulgence.” Freedom is not a launching point to satisfy our own lives. Just because we have nothing to do or prove to be accepted and loved by God doesn’t mean we can live for ourselves.
Instead, Paul says “serve one another humbly in love.” We are to use our freedom to love one another. By the way, while the Bible in our pews uses the word “serve” and some Bibles read “be servants” the actual word means “slave.” Be slaves of one another in love.
We speak of servanthood in our churches. Even the corporate world has picked up on this and there are now corporate leaders who speak of “servant-leadership”. But the biblical word is “slave”. We should probably speak of “slave-hood” which obviously has a much stronger punch than “servant”. It isn’t nearly as respectable. If I am a servant I can keep some respectability. I might be able to swallow being a servant. But “slave?”
Ironic that as Paul speaks of freedom he speaks of being slaves to one another. And we are to do this by signing our rights away for one another in love. Freedom in Christ is not “me-centered” but “other-centered.”
Then Paul says that the entire law, meaning the Jewish law – everything we find in the Old Testament – is fulfilled by keeping this one command: “Love your neighbor as you love yourself.”
“Love your neighbor as yourself” comes from the Jewish law and the book of Leviticus. Jesus emphasized this same part of the law when he was asked what was the greatest of all the commandments. He said the first is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind and soul. The second is this one: love your neighbor as you love yourself. It’s the same verse Paul quotes.
If we go back and read this in Leviticus here is how it reads: “‘Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against anyone among your people, but love your neighbor as yourself.” Seeking revenge or holding grudges is not loving our neighbor. To love someone like ourself is to ask ourselves, “how do I want to be treated?”
There were 613 different laws that had been created and written in the Jewish religion. Paul says everything can be boiled down to one simple law: love that other person.
Jesus gave a new commandment to his disciples to love one another as he has loved us.[3] James refers to this same command in his book and calls this law from Leviticus, the “royal law”.[4]
In his letter to the Romans Paul says that we should owe no one anything except to love one another. Just as he says here in Galatians that the entire law of God is fulfilled by keeping this one command, so he says the same thing in Romans. Think of it, not committing adultery, not murdering, not stealing, not coveting, and others are all summed up in the one commandment of loving our neighbor as ourselves.[5] The whole enchilada rolled up in this one command.
Just love. And love is always practiced on one another. We are free to love. No, there isn’t a list of rules that God is keeping to make sure we are in order. And isn’t it easier to not have to run through a hundred things to make sure we are doing them all right, but we can just keep one thing in front of us? As challenging as that sometimes can be…
Loving our neighbor is specific. It can be easy to say “I love everybody.” Some throw out slogans about loving the whole world. But the word of God is “love your neighbor.” It’s easy to love everybody until I meet that one person who drives me nuts. That obnoxious, unruly, rude person. He or she tries my patience. They stretch my Christian sensitivities. Then I get tested as to whether or not I love my neighbor. We love the world by giving loving attention to each single member that passes our way.
Grace doesn’t mean it has all been done for us so just soak it all in and don’t do anything. No, grace is we can’t do anything to earn our way with God. He has loved us anyway, so be that way for others.
When we do things for other people out of love we aren’t trying to earn our way with them. When we do things for our children, wife or husband, grandchildren or friends we do it because we love them. In the same way, God doesn’t want us to serve out of compulsion but out of desire. That is why discipleship is a life that springs from grace.[6]
If we approach the freedom of God’s grace with an attitude of “what can I get away with?” then it proves we really do not grasp what God has in mind for us.[7] True understanding of grace doesn’t find out how much it can get away with, but recognizes the gift that grace is, the price that was paid for it, and the freedom we have because of it. When we speak of political and social freedom we often say, “Freedom isn’t free.” How much more so when it comes to the gospel. Our freedom was purchased at the cost of God’s own Son. To abuse the freedom that was paid for with the life of the Lord Jesus Christ is a much more fearful thing than any wrong we might do.
Apparently, the Galatians needed this reminding about love because then Paul chastises them for biting and devouring one another. He says if they keep doing that they will destroy themselves. What was going on?
Paul’s letters were written to real and specific situations, although we don’t always know the specifics of the particular situation. But the more rules there are, the meaner people can be. Too many rules and regulations do something to the spirit of a people.
If we make rules that say if you are going to be allowed to be part of our church, you have to dress a certain way, you have to pledge so much money, you have to work in so many ways in this church, you can’t be late for worship, you have to be here so many Sundays a year, you have to attend at least this many classes, you have to bring your Bible and it has to be a certain type of Bible, you can’t do this or that, and twenty other rules, we begin to spend my energy seeing how everyone measures up to the rules. And if people aren’t falling into line, how easy it is to become judgmental, critical and even abusive. The point becomes the regulations, not the relationships.
This might have been the way things were becoming in Galatia as they chose to be legalistic instead of live in the gospel of grace which brings freedom. Instead of love and compassion, there was backbiting and anger.
The Christian gospel is “love your neighbor as yourself” and everything is going to take care of itself.
Remember what I said at the beginning of this sermon: freedom can be dangerous. It can be used for good or for bad. Freedom is also a more difficult way to live.
The fine writer Philip Yancey, said this,
“At first glance legalism seems hard, but actually freedom in Christ is the harder way. It is relatively easy not to murder, hard to reach out in love; easy to avoid a neighbor’s bed, hard to keep a marriage alive; easy to pay taxes, hard to serve the poor. When living in freedom, I must remain open to the Spirit for guidance. I am more aware of what I have neglected than what I have achieved.”[8]
We are free in Christ.
We are free from having to be burdened by guilt that when we stumble God will turn his back on us.
We are free from having to keep a spiritual scorecard in the back of our mind about how many good things we are doing to please God and earn his favor.
We are free from knowing that our standing with God depends on what we do and the effort we put forth and how well we do it.
We are free from a faith that is about performance because grace tells us that our performance isn’t what makes us OK with our Heavenly Father, but that we are loved by him and have a good standing with our Father solely through the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Yes, we are free to do whatever we want because the Lamb has been slain and we are forgiven. Now what will we do with our freedom? God gives each of us the freedom to answer that anyway we want.
But the Christian response to freedom is not to use freedom to just indulge what we want, but rather, love God, and love your neighbor as yourself.
Prayer: Lord Jesus Christ, you have set us free. Help us not to abuse that freedom, nor to live under some forced religious compulsion. But lead us to live by the grace you give us. Amen.
[1] Romans 8:1-2
[2] Tullian Tchividjian, former pastor of Coral Gables Presbyterian Church in Ft. Lauderdale, FL. From an interview with Jonathan Merritt on the blog “On Faith and Culture”, Oct. 2, 2013.
[3] John 13:34-35
[4] James 2:8
[5] Romans 13:8-10
[6] See Philip Yancy, “What’s So Amazing About Grace?”, p.190.
[7] What’s So Amazing About Grace?, p.182
[8] p.209