Galatians
5:1-6
1 So Christ
has truly set us free. Now make sure that you stay free, and don’t get tied up
again in slavery to the law.2 Listen! I, Paul, tell you
this: If you are counting on circumcision to make you right with God, then
Christ will be of no benefit to you.3 I’ll say it again.
If you are trying to find favor with God by being circumcised, you must obey
every regulation in the whole law of Moses.4 For if you
are trying to make yourselves right with God by keeping the law, you have been
cut off from Christ! You have fallen away from God’s grace.5 But
we who live by the Spirit eagerly wait to receive by faith (trust) the righteousness
God has promised to us.6 For when we place our faith (trust) in
Christ Jesus, there is no benefit in being circumcised or being uncircumcised.
What is important is faith (trust) expressing itself in love. Gal 5:1-6 (NLT)
Red Bull
Gospel
I have in my hand a can of an absolutely
terrible beverage known as Red Bull.
Now Red Bull consists of copious quantities of both caffeine and
sugar. If I were to drink a can of Red
Bull first thing in the morning we all know what will inevitably happen don’t
we? It might take a couple of hours or
maybe a little more but we all know what will happen long before the end of the
day. I am going to crash right? That sugar and caffeine is going to leave me
and I am going to be worse off than I was before. A Red Bull is not going to give me the
sustainable energy I need to make it through the day. In order for that to happen I need to get a
good nights’ sleep and consume the right nutrients throughout the day.
Oftentimes we find ourselves following a version of the
gospel that has a Red Bull effect on our faith.
This Gospel might be enough to sustain us for a period but eventually,
usually during one of life’s trials, we find ourselves crashing. This Red Bull gospel can’t get us through the
whole day, with all its challenges.
The Gospel
of Sin Management
Author and Philosopher Dallas Willard described this Red Bull
Gospel as The Gospel of Sin Management.
In his book The Divine Conspiracy Willard states:
History has brought us to the point where the
Christian message is thought to be essentially concerned with only how to deal
with sin: with wrongdoing or wrong-being and its effects. Life, our actual existence, is not included
in what is now presented as the heart of the Christian message, or it is
included only marginally…The current gospel then becomes a “gospel of sin
management.”
This Gospel of Sin Management reduces the Good News of Christ
to a list of do’s and don’ts. This is
what the apostle Paul was fighting against in his letter to the church of
Galatia, and it is a false gospel that we need to continue to fight against
today.
The Problem with the Gospel of Sin Management
At the core of the Christian faith is the message that we
cannot possibly live up to the expectations of God and…that’s okay because of
what He did for us. It’s what this Advent season is
all about. God has sent His son to save
us, to make up for the reality that we are not good enough. Christianity is the only world religion that
is not based on humanity’s ability to do the right things and avoid the wrong
ones. The problem with the Gospel of Sin
Management is that it reduces Christianity to just one of the many works-based
religions in the world.
Similarly a faith that is built on our own ability to perform
becomes unappealing and worse irrelevant when (not if) we fail to live up to
the expectations. You see if we buy into
the Gospel of Sin management than we can’t help but have a superficial view of
the Christian Faith. If my relationship
with God is solely dependent on my ability to perform than it will be an external,
part-time, powerless one. This is a
faith that doesn’t work for us so we shove it into the corner and forget about
it, temporarily or perhaps for good.
Paul’s Response
Paul was well aware of the damaging effect this Gospel of Sin
Management has. It was why he repeatedly
challenged it and made it abundantly clear that trust in Christ and not our own
efforts is the key to the Christian faith.
There are some who believe that the first verse of today’s second lesson
is a summary of all of Paul’s writings:
“1 So Christ has truly set us free. Now make sure that you stay free,
and don’t get tied up again in slavery to the law.” In the following verses Paul preaches freedom
from circumcision, a religious practice that was a necessary act according to
Jewish Law. Paul is telling us that we
are not only free from sin; we are also free from the need to “measure up.”
Bonhoeffer
In his final work, ironically called Ethics, German
theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer claims that Christian Ethics is an oxymoron, a
giant contradiction. He rightly points out that
the in the Garden of Eden, humanity's first sin was to eat from the tree of
what? The tree of The knowledge of good and evil. So the very fact that we are
able to discern between right and wrong is a reminder of our sinfulness. The Spoken word poet and Christian rapper
Propaganda puts it this way “Even your good works are an extension of your
selfishness.” We were never supposed to be
the judge of right and wrong. The Gospel of Sin Management takes God right out
of the equation. God has nothing to do
with our faith, it’s all about us.
Galatians 5:2-4
It is with this in mind that Paul says “If you are counting
on circumcision to make you right with God, then Christ will be of no benefit
to you.” You see, it is not anything that we do that makes us pure enough to
please and come close to a holy God, but it’s what God has done and continues
to do in and through us. We have to
choose what we are putting our trust in.
Is it in the work of Christ and Him crucified or are we putting our
faith in our own ability to do the right thing. According to Paul we can only
have faith in one thing. Either we will
put our trust in Christ as the Lord who saves us and makes us righteous by His
spirit, or we will put our trust in ourselves, meaning our ability and our
commitment to live in obedience to the law.
Galatians
5:5
Paul’s message of freedom from good works can seem somewhat counter intuitive to us. We so easily
fall into believing the gospel of sin management because we think that Jesus
has done his part, and that our part is living up to God’s expectations.
But this message doesn't really mean freedom, but rather switching from one
form of bondage (sin) to another (sin management).
In Galatians 5:5 Paul describes a completely different scenario when he writes “But we who live by the Spirit eagerly wait to receive by faith the righteousness God has promised to us.” Paul is saying that it is God’s job to work in us to make us righteous, to make us a people who do the right things and it is our job to learn to trust God and to let Him make the changes in us. According to Paul we need to stop focusing on how we can live righteous and holy lives and start focusing on how we can strengthen our trust in Jesus Christ.
Trust
The Greek word translated as faith in this verse, and
throughout the New Testament, pisteuo (pis-TAY-u-o) can also be translated as
trust. So when we talk about faith we
are talking about trust. I think it is a
lot easier to think concretely when we talk in terms of trust. Having faith means that our actions are
determined by our decision to trust God with a given issue, relationship, or
circumstance. So then the question we
need to ask ourselves in any situation is “where do I place my trust? Is it in my instincts, desires, and
convictions, or do I trust Jesus Christ?”
Spiritual Practices
So, you see, EVERYTHING we do to grow in our faith is about
trusting God . In contrast with assuming that it is our work
that gives us deeper faith, the process described by Paul in our second lesson
shows that the way we deepen our trust in our savior is by putting ourselves in
a position to be drawn close to God.
This is the real purpose of the spiritual disciplines. They do not make us righteous because we do
them; instead, they put us in a position to be drawn into trusting God more
fully. We attend worship every Sunday,
read the bible and pray daily not out of obligation but because we trust that
these practices will put us in a situation to better trust in God when the insanity of life comes our way. If we do these
things because we think they will make us more righteous then we are saying we
don’t need God because we can and do change ourselves. We are putting our trust in ourselves as we
do these practices.
Conclusion
St. Augustine
once said “Love God, then do what you please”.
In verse six of our lesson Paul said “For
when we place our faith in Christ Jesus, there is no benefit in being
circumcised or being uncircumcised. What is important is faith expressing
itself in love.” I believe they are
saying that when we put our trust in God we naturally learn to love Him more,
and when we love God more and trust Him each step of the way, right behavior
naturally comes next. But when we put
our trust in doing the right things, our relationship with God can only be
sustained for so long, like the energy from a Red Bull. Eventually, though failure, pain, insecurity
or inner wrestling we will not have the power to keep the sin management
treadmill going, we will crash. In Disney’s
version of Aladdin there is a great scene where Aladdin holds out his hand to
the princess, Jasmine and asks “do you trust me?” It is time for us to stop seeing God as a
task master with a bull whip in His hand and to start seeing Him holding out an
open hand, asking us “Do you trust me?” We
all have a choice to make, where does our faith truly lie, who do we really
trust. I don’t know about you, but I
think it’s about time that I stop trusting myself and start trusting Him.
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