Christ has set you free

“For freedom Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.” (Galatians 5:1)

“Stand firm.”

But, before you can stand firm, you’ve got to know where to take your stand. Many have taken a stand, and even died, in the name of freedom. However, the freedom Paul speaks of is not just any old freedom. It’s certainly not a political freedom, like the freedom of speech; nor is it the freedom to follow your heart and its desires. (The heart is, after all, deceitful above all things).  Instead, it is the freedom for which Christ Himself has set you free.

Just as a bird cannot unlock its own cage, you were in bondage and unable to free yourself.     You needed to be set free.  Even if you had every sort of earthly freedom, apart from Christ, you remain a slave.  A slave to what?  Trying to justify yourself before God through works of the law.

The problem is, nobody–I repeat–nobody can do that.  Nothing we do will ever make us right before God.  Our delusion that we could somehow justify ourselves by is exactly the sin from whose bondage we need to be freed.

But Christ has set you free. How has He done this?  Not by giving you another set of rules to follow, but by giving you something completely new: a promise. 

As Paul writes in Galatians 3, “Christ redeemed you from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for you.”  He owned your sin so completely that He not only suffered its curse, but became the curse for us.  Christ suffered your sin all the way to its inevitable conclusion: death. He died and was raised so that He could make a sinner like you into a child of God, justifying you through faith, by giving you His promise of forgiveness and then keeping it.  “For as many of you as are baptized have put on Christ” (Galatians 3:27). 

The devil hates this promise and will try to steal it away from you. So don’t give an inch.  Paul knows that if you accept anything other than Jesus Christ as necessary for your justification, He would be of no advantage to you. In other words, your sin would still be on you.  If your sin remains on you, you’re lost and condemned, and there is nothing you can do about it.

But Christ has set you free.  Your sin no longer belongs to you; it belongs only to Him, and He has defeated it for you.  Therefore, stand firm.

Christ’s grace and peace,

Pastor Raleigh