by Clint Wilson, Community and Care Pastor
There is only one gospel. There is only one Jesus Christ. Many are the imitators, the half-truths and partial-pictures. From its first moments, the early Christian church was faced with competing portraits of faith, religion, and history. To help ferry people of faith across the rivers of uncertainty, Paul wrote to small, Christian outposts full of those asking questions like, “What should I believe? Who should I believe?” In an age of so much information and misinformation, can you relate? In what is probably his first letter—the powerful little book of Galatians—Paul provides his readers with a priceless truth. One way to test if we have heard and received the good news of Jesus is to ask ourselves: Do we feel free? Deeply, profoundly free? Have we received the freedom that backs the transformation we receive through the Holy Spirit?
The anti-apartheid leader Nelson Mandela once said, “To be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.” Galatians is an invitation to cast off our chains, whatever those may be. We leave behind our shame, that feeling that we aren’t enough, that lingering feeling that we will never be good enough. In that freedom we are given, however, is also the responsibility to respect and enhance each other’s God-given freedoms. At City Church we celebrate a gospel that is founded not in religious rules and endless moral principles, but rather in the endless love and liberating power of Jesus Christ at work in our lives. We have been set free by Jesus’ sacrifice, full stop. May we learn to live in a grace that is far greater than our pasts, our failures, our doubts. May we live like we are, truly, finally, free.
Freedom Unbound: Galatians and the Gospel begins this Sunday, May 22 at the House of Blues.
