My wife and I have a pretty odd sense of humor sometimes, and there’s a terrible joke I like to make on occasion. If we’re in particularly sassy moods, when she says “I love you”, I’ll respond “I’m contractually obligated to say that I love you too.” Obviously, I correct myself afterwards and tell her the truth that I do love her with all my heart, but my bad joke comes to mind reading Paul’s experience with the churches in Galatia that he expands upon in Galatians 2 & 3. The notion that true love, and the following display of it, could be adequately viewed as just fulfilling a contract or obligation, a list of guidelines to follow, is preposterous. But that’s what the gist of people were telling those Christian converts: faith in Jesus is not sufficient to ensure your salvation, you have to observe the laws of the Jews to share in their salvation as well.
God sent Christ to die for our sake out of love, as John 3 famously says. Galatians 2:16 says “…we know that a person is not justified by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ.” After Christ took on the price of our sin in His death, it isn’t the rules or traditions we observe that cleanses our sin: it’s our belief in His act of sacrifice. It’s our pure gratitude and thankfulness that make us sing and praise, not our good deeds or works of our hands. Not that following laws and rules is bad or foolish – they’re there for a reason. “Because of transgressions until the Seed to whom the promise referred had come,” as Paul puts it – until Christ stepped in between us and sin as our mediator. Simply put, we’ve fallen short of leading sinless lives like Christ on our own, and it is not the rules and behaviors we as Christians follow that can save us – only Jesus Christ can make us truly just & grant us eternal life. And that is why we spend our lives selflessly giving all we have for His benefit – out of gratitude, out of reverence, out of awe, and because we love Him.
Lord, I say of prayer of gratitude that you would send your son to die on our behalf as a living sacrifice that we may live by your side for eternity. I am grateful that my gratitude is not merely contractual, but a relationship with the living, breathing Word of God; that I am not condemned, but made free and upright by Jesus. Help me more closely follow your word and your desires for me, Lord, not for my own gain, but for yours, because I am a faithful child of God who finds freedom from the slavery of sin and the shackles of death in Christ alone.