For Freedom He Set You Free

When I wrote "For freedom Christ has set us free" (Galatians 5:1), the word for freedom is the word for a slave set loose, made a free man, no longer owned. And when I speak of the yoke, I mean the wooden beam laid across an ox's neck to bend it to labor — that is what the law becomes when you make it your master again. Hear too the sharp thing I say: whoever seeks to be justified by law has "fallen away from grace" (Galatians 5:4) — the word is to slip and drop, as a flower falls from its stem and withers. And near the end I gather the whole law into one word, "You shall love your neighbor as yourself" (Galatians 5:14) — where "love" is not a warm feeling but the deed done for another's good.

I take up this same thread where I tell you that you were called to freedom, yet not a freedom that indulges the flesh but one that serves in the Spirit (Galatians 5:13). I say it again to the Romans: "For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace" (Romans 6:14). And I press the whole matter home there too — "Owe no one anything, except to love each other, for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law" (Romans 13:8).

I had labored among these Galatians and preached to them Christ crucified, and they received the Spirit by hearing with faith. But after I went, others came — men who taught that faith in Christ was not enough, that the men must be circumcised and take up the law of Moses to be truly counted in. This was no small addition; it was another gospel, and it emptied the cross. So I wrote hot, not to wound them but to snatch them back before this leaven worked through the whole lump. I write as one still bearing on my body the marks of what this gospel costs.

Here is the honest difficulty: if the whole law is fulfilled in loving your neighbor (Galatians 5:14), why do I fight so fiercely against those who keep the law? Am I not contradicting myself — tearing down law with one hand and commending it with the other? No. Look closely at what I set against grace: it is law kept to be justified, law as the ground of your standing before God. That I will not have, for it makes Christ of no advantage to you (Galatians 5:2). But the law kept out of the freedom love gives — that is the Spirit's own work in you, no yoke at all. The difference is not the deed but its root: are you serving to be accepted, or serving because in Christ you already are? Go back and read the whole of it with that question in hand.