Category: 21 Days to Freedom

Galatians 5:13-15 (NLT)

“For you have been called to live in freedom, my brothers and sisters. But don’t use your freedom to satisfy your sinful nature. Instead, use your freedom to serve one another in love. For the whole law can be summed up in this one command: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ But if you are always biting and devouring one another, watch out! Beware of destroying one another.”

Jesus has beckoned us into freedom, depositing his Spirit directly into our hearts and minds. I envision this to be something like an invitation by a friend to dare to try something new and adventurous. “Be free! Just take that leap!” But of course, a little freedom can turn into trouble pretty fast. Fun and games, eyes getting poked out and all that… Let’s face it, we are masters at messing things up. We’re born that way, as any mother will tell you approximately 10 minutes after cleaning her entire house which now once again appears to be a pig sty. Messing things up is just what we do.

Grace goes horribly wrong when our freedom starts to harm us. The big blunder? Selfishness. Freedom to live by the Spirit quickly turns into justifications and permission to indulge. A “no rules” system requires our hearts to choose the right things to better ourselves and others.

Here’s your freedom for today: freedom in the Spirit makes it possible to love. In contrast, sin harms you. Period. Just like using chocolate cake as a “reward” when you are trying to work on your physical health, it undermines your real goals. Selfishness turns to self-centeredness which turns to sabotage of ourselves and everyone around us. What are you using freedom to justify today? In what ways is sin destroying your life and the lives of those around you? I challenge you to find ways to love yourself and others today, using your freedom to help you stay truly free.

 

Galatians 5:16-18 (NLT)

“So I say, let the Holy Spirit guide your lives. Then you won’t be doing what your sinful nature craves. The sinful nature wants to do evil, which is just the opposite of what the Spirit wants. And the Spirit gives us desires that are the opposite of what the sinful nature desires. These two forces are constantly fighting each other, so you are not free to carry out your good intentions. But when you are directed by the Spirit, you are not under obligation to the law of Moses.”

Do you ever feel like you are in the middle of a battle, being pulled in opposite directions all the time? The reality is that is exactly what is going on. Pick your favorite good versus evil movie and apply it to your everyday life. That exact war is raging inside of all of us every single day. I’m caught by the word “let” — “let the Holy Spirit guide your lives…” There is a sense that our permission is required for the Holy Spirit to guide us. We have to allow that guidance, he won’t force his way in. The catch? You have to let go of all that your body and mind crave.

The Spirit and our flesh are in opposition, constantly fighting. Remember those New Year’s resolutions you are no longer doing? Yeah… We aren’t free to easily succeed at all the great things we want to do to improve our lives. The failure to keep God’s laws was the ultimate New Year’s resolution gone bad, and it proved that our human efforts would never be able to move us forward.

Here’s your freedom for today: when we are directed by the Spirit, our hearts are changed. We don’t have obligations and requirements and hoops to jump through. The Holy Spirit is there to guide us in the midst of the battle, not to take us off the battlefield. What are the battles raging inside you today? How can you invite the Holy Spirit to guide you in the midst of that war? What freedom might you find in simply asking for help?

 

Galatians 5:19-21 (NLT)

“When you follow the desires of your sinful nature, the results are very clear: sexual immorality, impurity, lustful pleasures, idolatry, sorcery, hostility, quarreling, jealousy, outbursts of anger, selfish ambition, dissension, division, envy, drunkenness, wild parties, and other sins like these. Let me tell you again, as I have before, that anyone living that sort of life will not inherit the Kingdom of God.”

In yesterday’s post, we were reminded that the flesh and the Spirit are in constant opposition. They simply lead us in two very different directions. Paul, the writer of Galatians, goes into more detail here and in the verses we will cover tomorrow about just how opposite those opposites are. In case we were unsure of exactly what types of things “flesh” means, here we have an extensive list. It is tempting to read this list and think, “Well, I don’t think I’m that bad…” And right there, before we’ve even had time to really soak in all these verses have to say, we’ve compared ourselves to others and excused ourselves from having to look inward.

Now, I’ve never been the “wild parties” type, and I’ve been a Christian since age 5. However, when we gloss over verses like this with a cursory glance, it contributes to the very thing Jesus came to abolish: an “I think I’m okay” attitude. Jesus made the case pretty clearly that none of us can do this on our own. Our flesh is not a comparison scale, as if our ability to not murder anyone is really doing well for us. Sorry, but we don’t get to gloss over our flesh just because we haven’t done something really bad. We can’t make a list of rules tailored to all the things we don’t struggle with and say, “If you can manage to hold the line here at my standard, then you get to count as a ‘good Christian.'” This kind of thinking is exactly how the evangelical Christian subculture has developed a lot of really problematic tendencies including judging outsiders (something the Bible tells us specifically not to do in 1 Corinthians 5:12).

Okay, so if we lean into these verses and look closely, what do we see? How about instead of only reading the flesh-sins I’m not doing, I read only the ones I am guilty of? Confession time: for me that has included impurity, hostility, quarreling, jealousy, outbursts of anger, selfish ambition, dissension, division and envy. 9 out of 15. How is it that I was ready to dismiss a list, over half of which I have been guilty of in my lifetime, just because I have managed to not engage in 6 of them?

Now let’s not forget the point of this whole chapter: we no longer live under a whole bunch of rules and it has already been established that we cannot be perfect. The list in these verses is just some examples, but there are so many more things he could have listed (which is clear by his “etc, etc, etc” type statement at the end of the list). The list is not meant to make us feel badly. That was already the problem with the law. No, this list is meant to help us understand freedom.

Zoom in on the key word in the last verse: inherit. Sin robs us of our inheritance. If I knew that I were due for a big inheritance and I found out someone or something was going to rob me of it, I would fight back pretty hard on that. And this is Paul’s point: a whole bunch of rules can’t save you, and in fact when you focus on the rules your flesh leads you down a harmful road that robs you of the freedom God is longing to give you. You’ll never get to God relying on your own strength to save you. You know what your own strength gets you? Death and destruction.

Here’s your freedom for today: if you want to find true freedom, it helps to get mad at the right thing. You don’t need to be mad at God for taking away all your “fun,” and you don’t need to be mad at yourself for making a whole bunch of stupid mistakes. But get as mad as you want at Satan and the power of the flesh to rob you blind. Since the flesh and the Spirit are complete opposition, the more you deny your flesh the stronger the Spirit-power in you becomes. Instead of feeding the flesh, like leaving food out for a mangy stray cat you don’t even want, feed your spirit. What are some ways you can feed your spirit today?

Galatians 5:22-23 (NLT)

“But the Holy Spirit produces this kind of fruit in our lives: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against these things!”

We are going to simmer on these two verses for a week or so because they are simply packed with the secrets to emotional freedom. In my book, On Edge: Mental Illness in the Christian Context, I write about the fruit of the Spirit and how we often treat these verses like a list of feelings. The warmer and squishier we feel, the more of a “good Christian” we are. Funny how we are so much better at seeming like “good Christians” on sunny days…

If I feel lots of love, joy, peace and patience then I am awesome, right? Yay Jesus! But hold up — then I arrive at “kindness” and I’m confused. I can’t really feel kindness, nor can I feel kind. I can be kind, or I can experience the kindness of someone else. Same with goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.

Here’s where we start to go wrong (once again!) in our “Christian” thinking: if I can’t feel these things and I must do these things, then this must be a list of rules. A wonderfully holy to-do list. How many of you have said that you are “working on” one of these fruits? I know I have. Let’s take patience — I have worked on becoming more patient through mostly behavioral methods that anyone, Christian or not, could achieve. Slow down, count to 10, take deep breaths, think before I speak. Sure, tack “pray” on there, too (by which I mean that muttering under your breath, “Jesus, hurry up and make me patient before I kill the children!” is not really prayer). These methods may seem effective, but it is why loads of non-Christians can love and be patient and experience joy. These methods work on the surface but they are not supernatural. Since these verses are talking about something produced in our lives directly by the Holy Spirit, it must be supernatural.

Reminder about our context in this chapter: we are working on a mental shift. Rules = slavery and constant failure, Spirit-living = freedom. Let’s not jump right back into a slavery mindset by turning this list into a new set of rules that we try to conquer ourselves. Let’s look for the freedom being offered to us here. We know that our flesh and the Spirit are in constant opposition and war. In yesterday’s post we got a list of the things the flesh produces in our lives. It wasn’t pretty. Today’s verses offer a hope beyond anything we could ever imagine on our own: total freedom from rules and personal destruction. The Spirit’s war is a fight on our behalf — an effort to reclaim the inheritance being robbed from us by the flesh and the enemy. When he fights for us, here’s what we get: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Why do we get these? Because he is being all of those things towards us.

Here’s your freedom for today: stop trying to “work on” the fruit of the Spirit. Be a receiver. Embrace the Holy Spirit’s love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control towards you. Let him be all of these things in your life today. It is only when you receive in this way from him that these things can ever be supernaturally produced within you.

Galatians 5:22 – Love

“But the Holy Spirit produces this kind of fruit in our lives: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against these things!”

Love may be the single most complicated word to understand in our world today. You can grab a dictionary, sure, but it will not even begin to define “love” in a way that holds more power than your own personal experiences. Each of us carries definitions of that word, and many of these definitions involve significant pain.

Pause for a moment. What does “love” mean to you? Who are the people who have said, “I love you” in your life? How did they act towards you? If those questions are complicated, I would encourage you to write more extensively in a journal to process your thoughts and experiences.

God has a lot to say about love. In the New Living Translation, the word appears 759 times. Jesus used it twice when summing up the greatest commandments: Love God and love each other. Paul said that if you don’t love, anything else you do is basically about as pleasant to God as the clattering noise of pot lids being used as percussion instruments.

Perhaps the most freeing verses about love are found in 1 John. Since John was known as the “disciple Jesus loved” it makes sense that he would have one of the best definitions of love around. Few of us have had an earthly source of love so pure as that. 1 John 4:9-10 say,

“God showed how much he loved us by sending his one and only Son into the world so that we might have eternal life through him. This is real love—not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as a sacrifice to take away our sins.”

And verses 17-19 add,

“And as we live in God, our love grows more perfect. So we will not be afraid on the day of judgment, but we can face him with confidence because we live like Jesus here in this world. Such love has no fear, because perfect love expels all fear. If we are afraid, it is for fear of punishment, and this shows that we have not fully experienced his perfect love. We love each other because he loved us first.”

Real love, regardless of anything you have ever experienced before, is defined by the very fact that God loved you and came to rescue you. Real love does not expect anything in return because we know that there is nothing we can give back to God that would be an equal exchange. God never asks for a “quid pro quo.”

Here’s your freedom for today: the only way we know love is by being loved. Any love that has eternal value comes from dwelling in the presence of the Holy Spirit and being filled by his love for us. We know from our Galatians 5 study that we no longer have to focus on rules and punishment. And so it is with love. We are free to love because we are loved. What would freedom look like for you today if you threw away everything you have ever thought about love and started over? Even if you have been a Jesus-follower for a long time, I challenge you to throw out everything you think you know and start again. That is what I am doing right now as I write this. Because the love of God is deep and infinite, I know I have only barely cracked the surface so far. Are you ready to dive in deeper with me?