How To Be Free

One of the most amazing things about being a Christian is that we are saved by God’s free gift of grace, and not by what we’ve done.

But the problem is that this clashes with our performance-based world, in which we love to reward achievement and success.

We love to be able to point to our wins and, ultimately, to justify ourselves by all the good things we’ve done.

Yet, if it was possible for us to achieve enough to save ourselves from God’s righteous anger, then Jesus wouldn’t have needed to die for us.

But Jesus had to die because we were helpless: and so that’s why we can only, ever, be saved by free grace—God’s rich mercy.

However it was only a short time after Jesus died that some of his redeemed people felt the need to reintroduce some of the Old Testament laws into the New Testament life.

The most obvious of these were related to the infamous Jewish customs of food laws (not eating with non-Jews) and circumcision (a physical ‘badge’ for men.)

But the Apostle Paul, who was converted to Christ after a life as a zealous Jew, saw that a return to this legalistic past was to deny the riches of the mercy of Jesus, and to instead return to the failed religion of the past.

Some did this because they wanted a clear way to show their own contribution to their faith, as some sort of visible guarantee or tangible achievement.

Yet, to do that was only to return to slavery, even though they had been freed by Jesus.

This is the message at the heart of Paul’s letter to the churches in Galatia, and it’s a timely reminder to embrace the rich mercy of Christ and celebrate true freedom.

JODIE McNEILL