FREE to ...

Ok, so adjusting to these 5/6 day work weeks MIGHT just be killing me.  It's kind of amazing how quickly the busyness sets back in.  Don't get me wrong, it's been good stuff.  Really good stuff. A LOT of good stuff.  A. LOT.  But mostly, by the time I've dragged home, I am too tired to think, let alone, write about it.

But the idea of freedom keeps creeping into my life this week.  Maybe it's because I spent a good long lunch talking with Laura, our women's ministry coordinator about it yesterday.  Maybe it's because we are reading Priscilla Shirer's One in a Million study.  Maybe it's because we talked about it Sunday at church.  And I had an amazingly challenging lunch conversation with Mallory that brought that back around today.  Maybe it's because I'm praying for Callie as she prepares to speak on that tomorrow night at Image Night.  Maybe it's because Sky spoke on this passage last night.  Maybe ... God wants me to understand the freedom that we have IN HIM in a fresh and new way.  Maybe ...

Christ has set us free to live a free life. So take your stand! Never again let anyone put a harness of slavery on you. I am emphatic about this.

The moment any one of you submits to circumcision or any other rule-keeping system, at that same moment Christ's hard-won gift of freedom is squandered. I repeat my warning: The person who accepts the ways of circumcision trades all the advantages of the free life in Christ for the obligations of the slave life of the law.

I suspect you would never intend this, but this is what happens. When you attempt to live by your own religious plans and projects, you are cut off from Christ, you fall out of grace. Meanwhile we expectantly wait for a satisfying relationship with the Spirit. For in Christ, neither our most conscientious religion nor disregard of religion amounts to anything. What matters is something far more interior: faith expressed in love.   Galatians 5:1-6 (Msg)

Not preaching a sermon on those verses, although Sky did a great job of it.  They are rich in meaning and challenge.  Here are my thoughts ...

• Sometimes freedom is not being free FROM as much as it is being FREE to.  Free to express our faith in love.
• We "fall out of grace" when we stop living in the grace that saved us and we start living in our own very human efforts.  I do it.  all. the. time.  We trust in God's grace to save us, but somewhere along the way we stop seeing it as enough.  So we try to supplement it with our own efforts and practices and plans.  And THAT is never going to be enough.  The grace that saved us is the grace we've got to live in every day to live this life!
• Our "religion" can become what enslaves us.  The very practices we use to grow closer to God can be the very things that instead become our idols and enslave us.  That's one of the reasons I cut the Daniel Fast short.  It's not that it's not a great thing.  But for me, it was becoming an idol that consumed time and energy that was better directed toward God and people.
• Our faith finds meaning as it is EXPRESSED in LOVE.

It is absolutely clear that God has called you to a free life. Just make sure that you don't use this freedom as an excuse to do whatever you want to do and destroy your freedom. Rather, use your freedom to serve one another in love; that's how freedom grows. For everything we know about God's Word is summed up in a single sentence: Love others as you love yourself. That's an act of true freedom. If you bite and ravage each other, watch out—in no time at all you will be annihilating each other, and where will your precious freedom be then?  Galatians 5:13