- Lesson 10 in the Connect360 unit “A Cry for Freedom: Grace That Is Still Amazing” focuses on Galatians 5:1-15.
Growing up, one of the first rites of passage that gave personal freedom was turning 16 years old and receiving a driver’s license. The ability to drive yourself to see friends, to attend school, or obtain a job and go to work was the great mark of young adulthood.
For adolescents today, it seems like receiving your own cell phone marks the beginning of newfound freedom. The phone represents what the car keys once did. It is how friends connect, schoolwork can be completed, and even work can be done in the digital economy.
Did you ever abuse the freedom you received once you started driving? Do you know of a young person today that has abused their freedom in the online world?
Paul has spent lots of time, breath and ink showing that those who believe in Jesus are free—free from pagan pasts and also free from the claims made by the Jewish Law. It is a New Exodus—they are free because of what God has accomplished in the Messiah. But we are made free for a purpose—love. This emphasis on love—the love of God and love of neighbor—was first made by Jesus himself.
If the focus isn’t on love but on combative views, there will be “biting” and “eating”—like that of a wild animal that spends its days fighting and devouring until it ultimately is devoured.
Obviously, there was more going on in Galatia than just a minor theological disagreement. Paul was worried that if the church turned on itself, there would not be any church left, but a bloody trail where the church once stood.
So, Paul took the Galatians back to the beginning—love. He went back to the great command of the Torah, which the Jewish Christians would remember well. But it was also given by Jesus in his teaching on the greatest commands in the Bible: “Love God. Love People,” Christ said (Matthew 22:37–39, paraphrase). Freedom and love are the marks of the church.
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