Galatians 5: Living in Faith and LoveSýnishorn

There is only one reason why Jesus came, died, and rose again, and that was to set us free—to set us free from sin’s pollution, sin’s penalty and sin’s power. How stupid it would be, having been set free, to go back to being slaves again! But that’s what we do, every time we give in to the idea that we have to ‘do’ something in order to be in God’s favour. We become slaves of the law once again. 

We must resist that temptation and stand our ground! We must not give away the liberty that Christ has won for us on that cross. If we do, then He will have died for nothing.

So then, the quickest way to lose our liberty is to begin to think that we have to observe some ritual or law or regulation in order to please God. (I talked about some of these ways in a previous study.) That’s exactly what the Galatians had done. They had begun to listen to these Jewish ‘trouble-makers’ who said that they should observe the Jewish rite of circumcision if they were to be true Christians.

Let’s suppose someone told you that you could not really be sure of being a real Christian unless you washed your hands ten times a day! Suppose you became convinced of this, and began to observe this ‘law’ very carefully. What do you think would happen? What would be your relationship with Christ’? What would be your relationship with others’?

Paul says in verse 2, ‘Christ will be of no advantage to you’. Your relationship with Him will no longer be one of faith and trust, but one of relying on your attempts to keep this ‘law’. You will be looking to your own efforts to obey, rather than to Him, and what He has done. 

In fact, what He has done on the cross has not changed, but you will get nothing out of it. You will not benefit by it. In other words, you are saying: ‘Christ is not enough. I also have to do this thing as well.’ In other words, your relationship with Him is no longer one of faith and trust alone. Since faith and trust alone is the basis upon which God accepts us, then Christ’s death is of no value to us when we add our works to His.

Then in verse 3 Paul tells us that it is no use trying to keep one law in order to be accepted by God: we have to keep them all! If I decide that it’s going to be law-way by which I am to gain salvation, then I have to go all the way, and observe perfectly every one of them! What an impossible task!

In verse 4 he tells us two awful things that result from us trying to justify ourselves. We are ‘cut off from Christ’ and we are ‘fallen from grace’. Here you are, slavishly washing your hands ten times a day, fully convinced that this is what God wants of you, and that it will win you His favour and you will be saved at last. 

So where does Christ come into it? He may as well not exist. You have excluded Him from being of any value to you. And what has grace got to do with your relationship with God? So long as you keep washing your hands ten times a day, you don’t need God’s favour (His grace)— you are buying His favour by your works.

Can you see that if acceptance by God is the result of Him taking the initiative and doing it all through Christ. then anything we try to do only cancels out God’s grace’? It nullifies grace. It reduces it to zero in effect. There is no such thing as salvation through Christ and something else. It is entirely through Christ, or it is not at all.

By contrast to this law-way. the true Christian is the one who simply trusts, through the Spirit, in Christ (verse 5). He knows that Jesus has done everything that is needed on the cross to ensure that one day he will be able to fully enjoy a justification that God has worked out for him. He knows that he will one day stand before God as a righteous person, with no guilt or sin or wrong—and God will have done it all!

So then, for those who are ‘in Christ’ there is no such thing as this law or that law, this regulation or that regulation. Nor is there any value in saying ‘I don’t observe an,.’ laws. so there!’. It’s not a question of laws or no laws.

The real issue is FAITH. It is a trust in God that shows (or is evidenced) by love. In other words. we show our real faith in Christ by the way in which we love (verse 6).

Just come back to the ‘law’ of washing your hands. Do you think you would have much time to be loving God, or others, while you were so busy worrying about your hands being washed’? Just use your imagination for a moment, and think about what would happen if you were in the middle of helping someone when you remembered you’d forgotten to wash your hands that day. 

What a panic you’d be in! ‘Sorry, got to go... no time to love!’ And wouldn’t there be times when you’d really resent God for holding you to this law in order to be accepted by Him’? In fact, could it be possible that you might really hate Him at such times? Would you feel much like loving Him then?

Can you see the colossal contrast between law-way and faith-way? The first gets us to the point where we actually hate God. The second leads us to being so profoundly thankful that we really do want to love Him. That’s why Paul says in verse 6, ‘faith works through love’. We come to have faith in Christ when we see what He has done. Love flows out of that, and as love grows, so too does faith.