Faith, Works, and the Promise of God | Hannah Guerrero | Galatians

02/13/24 • 40 min

The Apostle Paul begins addressing the Galatians directly and pulls no punches: “You foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you?” Paul is expressing his deep concern about what is taking place in Galatia, including: enslavement to religion, failure to live out the truth of the gospel, and threats to the unity of the community. The heart of matter that Paul is addressing is the bounded set approach on the “works of the law”—-actions like circumcision and dietary rules that the agitators used to draw boundary lines. Through Paul’s rhetorical questions, he communicates, again, that they do not need to take up the Jewish customs suggested by the other missionaries in order to be worthy of God’s grace or to truly belong to God’s people. They have already experienced the reality of the Spirit and God has worked miracles without them complying with the “works of the law.” God’s actions were not conditional on them being circumcised or living like Jews. God was always working by faith as evidenced through Abraham the man of faith. The promise of God came to fulfillment in Jesus the “seed” of Abraham. “ Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law” and thus made it possible for all of us to “receive the promise of the Spirit”. Here in this section of Galatians, we are again reminded that we cannot earn our belonging to God’s family. Our ethnic-racial distinctions , cultural- social distinctions, nationalism, and all other forms of belonging do not take precedent over our identity in Christ. God welcomes us because of Jesus — and we need to learn to understand the long story of Scripture as culminating in the promise of Jesus.

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Belonging By Faith Alone | Paul Walker | Galatians

The Apostle Paul tells a story of confronting Peter (Cephas) in Antioch about his hypocrisy. Some Jewish Christians have arrived from Jerusalem, the mother church. Unable to overcome years of drawing lines of separation through their actions, they cannot eat with Gentiles. Instead, they sit at a separate table. This is a bigger issue than seating arrangements. Whether through explicit statements or the nonverbal implication of dining at a separate table, these emissaries from the Jerusalem church draw a line that communicates to the Gentile Christians that they are inferior. They not only stopped eating with the Gentile Christians, they also ceased celebrating the Lord’s Supper together. In an honour-shame culture, the Gentiles and anyone who joined them were shamed and excluded from the life of the church. This is why the Apostle Paul describes the situation as “not acting in line with the truth of the gospel.” This asks the bigger question of how the Gospel bring us together when we are not the same. The Apostle Paul answers this by discussing how we are justified. This word “justification" is bigger than settling a legal case, but speaks to how we belong to the family of God. As N.T. Wright puts it, “Justification is all about being declared to be a member of God’s people; and this people is defined in relation to the Messiah himself. When we are justified we are “declared to be in the right” and thus members of God’s covenant community.” When Peter and the men from James broke table fellowship they were saying justification is through the works of the law —which referred to observing circumcision, food laws and Sabbath. The Apostle Paul reminds us that our justification is not something we earn. We receive it by faith alone, in Christ alone. We belong by faith alone so that we "live within the faithfulness of the son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” In our modern day of perplexing polarization, we too need to re-learn that our shared centred is Christ alone.

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Soil of Surrender | Paul Walker | Stories of Surrender

God is sowing. Are we fertile soil?
The seed of the Kingdom message (logos v19) is generously sown on all types of soil. God extravagantly spreads his love. This seed is representative of what Jesus taught us through his teachings, life, death, and resurrection. It is the Good news! But this Good news is not always equally received. It lands on paths (v4), rocky places (v5), thorns (v7), and finally on good soil. How we choose to respond is the difference between being a crowd member and a disciple. In this season of Lent, we contend with the questions of: How are we responding to God’s love that is freely sown into the soil of our lives? How are we hearing? What type of soil are we? Is our hearing leading to multiplication? These are important questions of evaluation, but not the solution to infertile soil. The disciples are fertile soil because the disciples are not afraid to ask Jesus to explain why he teaches in parables. This reminds us that surrender is not so much “giving up,” as we tend to think, nearly as much as it is a “giving to” the moment, the event, the person, and the situation. Just like the disciples, we too need to till the soil of surrender by taking the next step towards following Jesus.