Designed for Freedom

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of Norwich, Hornsville Heights, St. Newfield.

Our Bible reading is from Galatians chapter 3, starting from verse 1.

Galatians 3 · chapter mention

You foolish Galatians, who has bewitched you?

Before your very eyes, Jesus Christ was clearly portrayed as crucified.

I would like to learn just one thing from you. Did you receive the Spirit by

the works of the law, or by believing what you heard? Are you so foolish?

After beginning by means of the Spirit, are you now trying to finish by means of the flesh?

Have you experienced so much in vain, if it really was in vain?

So again I ask, does God give you His Spirit and work miracles among you by

the works of the law, or by your believing what you heard.

So also Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness.

Understand, then, that those who have faith are children of Abraham.

Scripture foresaw that God would justify the Gentiles by faith and announced

the gospel in advance to Abraham.

All nations will be blessed through you.

So those who rely on faith are blessed along with Abraham. the man of faith.

For all who rely on the works of the law are under a curse, as it is written.

Cursed is anyone, everyone, who does not continue to do everything written in the book of the law.

Clearly, no one who relies on the law is justified before God,

because the righteous will live by faith.

The law is not based on faith. On the contrary, it says, The person who does

these things will live by them.

Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us.

For it is written, Cursed is everyone who hung on a pole.

He redeemed us in order that the blessing given to Abraham might come to the

Gentiles through Christ Jesus, so that by faith we might receive the promise

of the Spirit, and that is the word of the Lord.

Last week we looked at Paul defending his right and authority to speak into

the lives of the Galatian people.

There's a group of people who were coming around and were saying to the Galatian

people that you needed to not only follow Jesus, but you also needed to follow the Jewish law,

and Paul spoke about that.

Paul introduced the Galatians to something that may have been new to them,

but it certainly was being spoken about to them that they needed to have Jesus plus.

And Paul said, no, you don't. You just need Jesus. You need the grace and kindness

that Jesus offers through his death and salvation.

Now, what happens is that as Paul speaks about this, he speaks with authority of the apostle.

And he could have turned around to the Galatian people and said,

I'm telling you this because I told you so.

But we know now as a parent, if you're a parent, that I told you so, why should I do it?

Because I said so doesn't necessarily work.

And in fact, what happens is most people get a bit of an arca and go the opposite

direction if you said, I told you so.

So Paul thinks to himself, well, since that may not be a motivator, how about God's word?

How about we look back into the scriptures?

How about we give some examples of what the Jewish people have looked at and

historically looked at throughout the years to say, even back then you were saved by grace,

not by the works of the law.

So Paul opens up and he starts to speak about the Galatians,

about things that have happened in the past. Let's pray.

Lord, as we look at your word this morning, I pray that you open up our hearts and our minds.

That you might dive down deep into the way that we think and the way that we

act and that you might convict us,

Lord, if we are falling along the lines of the Jewish people who came around

or whether strengthen us, Lord, if we're not.

And your spirit has told us that we are saved by your grace and your kindness.

So I pray, Lord, that as your word goes out, that your spirit might go before

and prepare us for you and equip us for you. I pray this, Lord, in your name. Amen.

In a children's book, A View from the Zoo, I don't know whether you've read

that or not, if you're a parent and you want to have a great book,

A View from the Zoo is a fantastic book.

Gary Richman tells the story of a young zookeeper who was assigned to care for

15 red-tailed hawks in the zoo's health center.

The birds were absolutely beautiful and strong, but they were confined to a small cage,

not because they had done anything wrong or because of any kind of health concerns,

but because they were being held as evidence in a court case against a man who

had captured them illegally.

So the zookeeper, as you can imagine, people who love animals and connected

with animals, struggled with the situation that he found himself in with the birds there.

They were innocent, yet they were locked up.

It didn't seem right. Now, finally, after much deliberation,

he decided there was only one compassionate solution to the problem,

and that was to set them free by accident, of course.

So during a mandatory staff meeting, he quietly slipped away and opened up the

cage door and returned to the meeting.

And later on, he walked past the cage, expecting it to be empty and all the

birds had flown away. But to his surprise, all 15 birds were still in the cage.

He rushed in, flapping his arms, trying to startle them into flight.

And a few birds flew a few meters away, but most of them returned back to the cage.

See, they were designed for freedom, these hawks, yet they were conditioned,

held conditioned by captivity.

The open skies were theirs, but they chose what was familiar to them.

And that image is a powerful picture of what can happen in our Christian life.

In Christ, we have been made free, free from having earned, having the need

to earn God's approval, free from the pressure of religious performance,

free from the weight or expectations that others might have upon us on the way

that we should live and we should behave.

Yet how often do we find ourselves living as though we're still caged?

Strangely, freedom can be unsettling. Life on the outside of the cage can be scary.

See, the cage offers a sense of clarity, a checklist of the shoulds that we can go and check off.

Have we had our quiet time today? Have we given financially?

Am I on appropriate times on the roster? Am I on my behaviors in line with what

people would find approval of?

Are my appearances right? Do I look like a Christian?

Which is strange because when you go to places like SRE and you ask them to

draw a picture of a Christian, it's incredible what you get,

these little stick figures.

And it's certainly not the way that I look.

But Paul's message to the Galatians and to us is this, that God acceptance is

not built on performance, but on a promise.

And we're not loved because of what we do. We're loved because that is the character of God.

God is love, so he loves us.

In Galatians 3 and 4, Paul presents three powerful arguments to remind the Galatians

and us of this liberating truth that we are loved by him.

The first one is an evaluation of experience.

Second, freedom comes from as we trust in what God says. And third,

freedom comes as we trust in what Christ has done.

Just like the hawks, as Christians, we were designed for freedom.

We are no longer captives and the cage door is open.

An evaluation from experience in verses 1 to 5, you can see that.

Galatians find freedom when they remember what God has done.

See, Paul invites the Galatians to remember their own story,

the story of the history of Israel, when they first heard about the gospel,

the message that God is with them and believed in Jesus because of that gospel.

They were filled with joy of the Holy Spirit. Miracles happened in their presence.

We read about that in our reading.

Their lives had been changed, not because they kept a whole lot of rules,

but because they trusted in God.

And their own experience was a witness to that truth and faith, not their effort.

That the witness was that God was at work in them that brought them into the family of God.

It's like Acts 3, the lame beggar that we read about who couldn't contain himself.

He walked and leaped and praised God when he found Jesus, when Jesus came and

his experience of Jesus released him from the burden of sitting at the gate

of religion but never been able to walk with God.

He walked and leaped and praised God.

Nothing could contain him. Jesus said, don't go and tell anybody,

not a hope this side of the planet that that was going to happen.

And in the opening verses of Galatians, Paul asked a series of powerful,

heartfelt questions, calling the Galatians to reflect upon their own spiritual journey.

Now, in essence, Mark's paraphrase says this, you foolish Galatians.

It's as if somebody cast a spell on you.

Remember how I clearly portrayed Christ as crucified when I was with you.

You trusted God to save you, and he did. He gave you his spirit.

You weren't following the law back then, were you? So let me ask you this.

Did God give you his spirit because you believed what he had done or because you earned it?

Did he work miracles among you because of your own efforts or because of your faith?

And Paul urges them to remember their new life that had began in Jesus.

Through God's grace, the Spirit was given to them freely, not because they had

checked the right boxes, but because they trusted in Jesus.

But now, almost without realizing it, they slip back into a performance mindset.

They step back into the cage, the cage

of law and effort so sad

after being set free by God's grace

and that same danger that they experienced in Galatian church we experience

today that sometimes we can think that we are in this cage and we can't get

out I've told this story before when I was surfing out at Newport,

and were talking about how we were going to church that night and how one guy

was talking to another guy how he was going to church that night and asked, are you going to church?

He said, no, church will steal your soul if you let it.

Many begin their Christian journey with joy and freedom and grace.

And I'm sure for that other guy that was surfing, that's probably the way that

he got to it, only to later fall into the patterns of duty and obligation.

Church attendance giving quiet times ministry acts of compassion these can subtly

shift from joyful responses to what God has given to us to burdensome shoulds.

The question is worth asking, why do we do the things that we do? Why are you on roster?

Why do you give? And let me say you give incredibly generously.

Let me say the rosters are fantastically well-populized.

You sing to the top of your lungs.

You worship our Lord. But why do you do that?

Is it from joy and gratitude of what God has done?

Or is it to meet expectations, your own maybe or maybe others,

in the hope that God would be more pleased with you or even more that people

will see you differently in a more positive way.

It will steal your soul if you let it.

If you serve and you walk with God out of obligation and duty, it will steal your soul.

And it trying to maintain a religious persona is so difficult to maintain because

it's just something that's put on.

What's the solution? Well, we need to come honestly before God, share our heart.

This haunting poem depicts the struggle of maintaining a caged charade and the

freedom of honestly coming before God in his mercy and his grace.

And it talks about the internal struggle to be open and honest in our experience with God.

Meets us in the cage. You glance and see someone put together,

a smile that comes easily, a voice that joins in prayer, a diploma on the wall,

a mission story ready to tell.

I know how to show up, I know what to say, but what you see is just the surface,

a version I've learned to present.

There's more beneath. A heart that sometimes aches in silence.

A soul that questions even as it kneels.

A mind tired from the weight of keeping it all together.

Inside there's a cage. Not made of iron or stone, but of expectation and fear

and the pressure to be always okay.

I perform well, but when the lights go out and it's just me in the quiet, The cage feels real.

And yet he meets me there. Not with disappointment, not with shame,

but with tenderness, with presence, with grace.

He doesn't rush me out of the cage. He comes in, he sits beside me.

He whispers truth I had forgotten.

I'm not alone. I'm not a fraud. I'm his.

And somehow in that place of hiddenness, I begin to breathe.

The cage feels less like a prison and more like a meeting place where mercy

finds me and freedom begins.

The experience God wants for us is to truly experience his grace and his kindness,

and he will release us from obligation to freedom to serve with him,

freedom to not only love, but to feel and understand and experience his true

love that he wants to give you.

We need in a large degree to know where to start.

Well, I think honesty is where we start. The next thing we need to know is that

we need to understand our relationship with God is transforming and releasing.

And we do that by understanding that what we do and how we act is a response,

a loving commitment to the one who has been committed to us.

We're motivated by relationship, not through obligation.

Loving commitment flows from affection and trust and devotion.

It says, I want to do this because I love you.

It's voluntary and joyful. It's less about rules and more about a heart's response in love.

I mean, think of a person who sacrifices for someone so deeply in love,

not because they must, but because they want to.

It's like a covenant commitment for them that you enter into.

For those who are married, you enter into a covenant, a covenant of love.

It's those marriage vows, isn't it?

In good times and in bad times, in sickness and in health and in everything

in life, no matter what you're going through, you're going to give yourself

to the other person in love.

It's about long-term fidelity, not mere compliance.

It values the other person, not about a command.

So brings light, doesn't it? When Jesus says, if you love me,

you'll keep my commandments. It's not talking about you need to do the commandments

and obey the law as a demonstration of your love.

You're saying, if your loving relationship grows so deeply of what I've been

giving to you and you've given back to me, then you will keep my commandments

out of a loving commitment.

Love leads to a loving commitment.

But obedience, on the other hand, is motivated by duty and authority.

Obedience focuses on submission to a command or a standard.

It can be done a lot of times without emotion, purely out of obligation or fear

of consequences of what might happen if you didn't do it. It can be detached and legalistic.

So obedience without love can be cold and mechanical or even resentful.

It's transactional and sometimes can come about as performance or reward or

even avoiding punishment.

So there's this tension and this

balance of loving Jesus and following his commands or loving out of faith.

Obligation. Love without obedience can become mere sentimentality,

but obedience without love can become religious bondage.

I mean, an easy illustration is your family at a home.

Do you put the garbage out because you have to?

Otherwise, it will stink the next week. Maybe that's probably it. That could be it.

But do you do chores at home out of obligation, obedience, or you can do them

out of loving commitment to your family.

Both look the same, but the heart behind it is very different.

And as we grow in our love for Jesus, our lives will start to reflect Christ

more and more, not because we should, but because we want to.

We want to out of love. We want to trust him out of love.

We want to have a deepening joy for him in our relationship with him.

So we'll move forward with that.

So that's the first thing, that we'll find freedom in an honest evaluation and

learning from our experiences with him.

The second one, we come into a freedom when we trust God in what he says.

So Paul's opponents likely pointed to Moses for support.

Their claims would have been, look at what the law says about circumcision and about rule keeping.

This is what Moses drew down for us. But the Galatians, to the Galatians in

chapter 3, 6 and 9, Paul goes back even further than Moses.

He goes back to Abraham and he reminds the Galatians where the foundation of faith truly lies.

Genesis 15, 6, Abraham believed God and was credited to him as righteousness.

Now, this moment came well after God called Abraham, like in chapter 12,

where he made three foundational promises to Abraham.

He said, Abraham, you're going to become a great nation. You would inherit a

land and through you, all nations would be blessed.

Yet by the time we reach Genesis 15, where this has been said,

that Abraham believed God and was credited to him as righteousness,

The whole sort of stuff has happened or hasn't happened.

He didn't have any children. And he's looking at himself and he's pretty old.

Sarah's pretty old. And he says, well, I don't think it's going to happen.

And he starts to question God and question the promises of God.

So in response, God took Abraham outside and he pointed to the stars and assured

him that his descendants would be as numerous as what you see.

Abraham believed in that moment, not through rule keeping, not through rituals,

but through trusting God's promises.

And it was declared right with God.

Paul's point's clear. Abraham was made right with God, not by obeying the law,

which didn't come for 430 years later,

nor by being circumcised, which comes in chapter 17 of Genesis,

but simply by believing God and what he said.

Paul says in chapter 3, 7 and 9, Understand then that those who believe are children of Abraham.

The Judaizers lost the debate. True descendants of Abraham are not those who

check the religious checkboxes, but those who trust in the promises of God.

And from the very beginning of God's plan was to bless all of the nations,

not just Israel, bless all the nations through Abraham so that promise finds

its fulfillment in the gospel of Jesus Christ going to the Gentiles.

So Galatians didn't need to become Jewish in order to be truly Christian.

They needed to trust in God, just as Abraham did.

And that's great news for us. The gospel, especially in a world that's so often

driven by performance in nearly every area of life, in school, in sport, in work,

in the acceptance of others, in relationship,

sometimes the advancement of nearly every area

of life will hinge on how someone will perform are they

successful are they not and sometimes success can

even become a measure of our worth and when

people fall short then their identity suffers God's

acceptance is not based on performance if you get anything get that but upon

his grace as we trust in it we also find freedom when we examine that grace

because freedom comes when we trust in what Jesus has done.

Trying to make ourselves right with God through the law doesn't put us into forgiveness.

It puts us under a curse because nobody can keep the law.

No one except for Jesus has kept the law.

And they knew that. It's like a burden that they wore on their head all the

time that they constantly had to go back for confession after confession,

after sacrifice, after sacrifice, after sacrifice. Why? Because they can't keep the law.

So the law, what it was made to do, to give freedom, was unable to and became

a curse as it became a burden upon them.

So that's Paul's third argument. He explains in Galatians 3.10,

that relying upon human effort to gain acceptance before God leads only to judgment.

To be right with God by the law means to perfectly keep it and we don't.

It's that weight of failure that they bore.

And under a weight of failure, you either get in and grind and try to do better

and do better and do better and do better until you succeed by performance or you recognize, I can't.

And so you come before God and confess to him that you are unable to,

but in thanks of what Jesus has done, has taken the curse of God on himself.

What the law couldn't provide, Jesus provided on the cross.

Deuteronomy 27 says, Cursed is everyone who does not uphold the words of the

law by carrying them out.

But the good news is, is that Jesus has taken upon himself.

He has redeemed us, we see in verse 14, in order that the blessings given to

Abraham might come to the Gentiles through Jesus Christ, so that by faith we

might receive the promise of the Spirit.

What does this mean practically?

Much is said about the Holy Spirit, about the gifts that he gives,

the power he gives, the presence in his life, the comfort that he walks with us.

But we need to remember that the Spirit's work is inseparable from the work of Jesus.

And this is important to remember as we get into Galatians 5 and 6.

We'll unpack that more detail as we get into that.

The Holy Spirit not only changes individuals' lives, but transforms us. He transforms us.

The Spirit leads us to reflect on the character of Jesus.

And as our love for Jesus grows, we're able to walk in line with the Holy Spirit,

is able to transform us so that we can walk well with him.

Even though the law brings down a curse that we are unable to keep and we find

ourselves separate from God because of our sin that we commit.

The Holy Spirit has come into this world to convict the world of sin,

righteousness, of judgment is often used by Satan to bring, not the Holy Spirit,

but Satan uses the sin that we still commit as condemnation,

that we're unable to walk with God and you're probably not walking with God

because you're probably sinning and you keep on sinning.

Yes, we do. But the Holy Spirit has come so that he might equip us and enable

us and empower us to walk in a way

that pleases God and to understand the forgiveness of Jesus when we don't.

Spirit-empowered life, there's a freedom, not the responsibility,

not a crushing weight of performance-based religion,

but a freedom to walk in grace,

a freedom to live by faith, a freedom to love others and to love God,

a freedom to be honest before God and bring ourselves to him so that we might

be out of the cage and we might live with him in power and might that he gives. Let's pray.

Lord, I pray for those who, like the poem, are stuck in a cage and want you

to come in and sit with them, not really knowing how to get out.

I pray, Lord, you do. You sit with them and your Holy Spirit might minister to people.

It might reassure people of your love and grace and that performance is not

needed to make ourselves right with you, but what you have given on the cross

and what you have done on the cross has freed us from that.

I pray, Lord, for those who find that burden, that weight unbearable,

I pray, Lord, that you might give them freedom.

They might walk out of that cage and you might lift them up like wings of eagles.

They might fly and they might walk and not faint. They might have the strength that you provide.

And for those of us, Lord, who are Christian people, who live free,

and then occasionally finding ourselves to go back into the cage because it's

comfortable in there, there's a set of rules and there's a set of guidelines,

there's check boxes that we can check.

I pray, Lord, that you remind us that it is a loving commitment to you that you want.

You've never been interested in sacrifices. You've never been interested in religious duty.

You've always been interested in a relationship

a true relationship of faith and trust in you so help

us to remember lord that you are trustworthy help us to recognize that because

you have given the ultimate sacrifice and that is death on the cross you bore

the curse and the weight of law keeping so that we might live freely before

you and i pray this in your name amen.