Galatians 3:23-29
June 23, 2013
Now before faith came, we were
imprisoned and guarded under the law until faith would be revealed. Therefore
the law was our disciplinarian until Christ came, so that we might be justified
by faith. But now that faith has come, we are no longer subject to a
disciplinarian, for in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith.
As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with
Christ. There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free,
there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. And
if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to
the promise.
How often have you had a conversation with someone who
said something along the lines of, “It
all boils down to following the 10 Commandments”? Or, “If people would just follow the Bible,…”?
Among Christians, you hear a lot of comments that
are similar to these, suggesting that if we would just follow the Commandments
and the law of the Bible, then we would be right with God, and the world would
be right with God. The problem is that they are wrong,... at least according to
the apostle Paul.
There are a lot of Christians who want to take us back to
pre-Christ days, to a day when the expectations of faith were very different, although
they don’t realize it. These Christians teach a Christianity that is all about
following the biblical law found in Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.
They believe that true religion is all about doing the right things, following
the law, and living in the right, proscribed way.
So what’s wrong with that? What’s wrong with following the law? Isn’t
the law good? According to Paul, it’s not bad to follow the law, but it is limited,
and ultimately impossible. Following only the law is limited because it turns
religion into a matter of obeying an overlord disciplinarian, rather than God.
You heard Paul say as much in our passage: “Therefore
the law was our disciplinarian until Christ came, so that we might be justified
by faith. But now that faith has come, we are no longer subject to a
disciplinarian,…” He is saying that the law ultimately failed because it’s
role was to discipline our lives, not necessarily to open us up to God. The
focus was on serving the law, not God, even though the law came from God. We
too easily turn the law into a God-substitute.
Actually, what Paul says is even more dynamic and
powerful. He goes on to say that because we live a life of faith in following
Christ, instead of following the law, we are now able to do what the law
prevented us from doing. He says this when he says, “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free,
there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.”
This phrase is a powerful one because it goes beyond the law. The Jewish law
proscribed differences between people. It outlined who is good and who is bad.
For instance, it stated that Jews were to have no interactions, or at least limited
interactions, with Gentiles (what Paul calls “Greeks”). It supported the idea
that women were less than men, and that they were chattel, much like sheep and
goats. It supported the idea of slavery. Paul’s statement is that there is now
a life in Christ that takes us beyond these separations to make us one with
each other and with God. Women are equal to men. Gentiles and Jews are now part
of the same life. Slaves are now equal to their masters.
Paul presents a different vision for how to live as a Christian,
one that is focused on following in faith rather than following the law. What’s
the difference between the two? The difference is that one leads to spiritual energy,
the other to spiritual exhaustion. Let me show you the difference.
Paul’s point is that following the law is an effort bound
for failure because we tire of living that disciplined, and modern psychology
is showing how true this idea is. In a book titled, Switch, by Chip and Dan Heath (two business and marketing
researchers), they talk about an experiment done in a university to test the
ability of people to follow the rules. They invited college students to be part
an experiment that they said was testing the ability to remember and describe
the taste of certain foods. They asked the students to show up for the
experiment without having eaten in at least three hours. When the students
showed up, the rooms smelled fantastic because the experimenters had just baked
chocolate chip cookies.
The students were individually placed in a room with a
bowl of radishes and a bowl of cookies and chocolates. One-half of the group
was asked to eat only cookies and chocolates, while ignoring the radishes. The
other half were asked to eat radishes, but to leave alone the cookies and
chocolates. Then the experimenter would pretend to have an issue requiring her
or him to leave the room suddenly, with instructions to just eat one, not the
other. The students were left alone in the room for 15 minutes. The good news
is that the cookie eaters didn’t cheat and sneak radishes, but also,
surprisingly, the radish eaters didn’t sneak and eat the cookies.
It’s here that the real experiment took place. The
students were then complimented for their honesty, and asked to take part in
another experiment. They were taken into another room to solve a puzzle. They
were given a certain geometrical design, and asked to turn it into another
design by moving the lines, without lifting the pencil from the paper. They
were given a stack of clean sheets of paper to attempt their tries. What they
didn’t know was that the puzzle was actually unsolvable, and the experimenters
were really testing how long the students were willing to try to solve the
puzzle before giving up. The students who had eaten only cookies averaged 19 minutes
of work, with 34 attempts. Those that had eaten only radishes averaged 8
minutes of work, with 19 attempts. In other words, those who had to demonstrate
great willpower and restraint in ignoring the cookies basically ran out of
willpower sooner during the puzzle experiment.
How does this relate to the law? It basically says that
obeying the law, which requires great amounts of daily discipline and willpower
(much like ignoring cookies), eventually fails because people get discipline exhaustion. People get tired
of trying to be disciplined, and there is a limit to their willpower energy.
The failure of the law is that eventually even the best law followers get
tired, break the law, and fail. Paul understood this, and proposed a different
way. His way was to connect people directly with Christ, with the Holy Spirit,
and to allow the power of Christ within us to lead us in the right way. This is
the way of faith over law.
Let me give an example of faith over law. As you may or
may not know, I often work with other pastors, serving as a counselor, coach,
and spiritual director. I help them find a way to become healthier in how they
live as ministers and as people. As a result, I get to work with a number of
pastors from different Christian traditions who struggle with things that they
won’t share with others.
A number of years ago I worked with a pastor who was
coming out of a more fundamentalist denomination than ours. He was struggling
with a number of issues, and one of them was a growing obsession with online
pornography. Personally, I think the spread of cyber-porn has been a huge
problem with men in general, and there are many male pastors who struggle with
it, too. With the pastors it’s even more devastating because they know that
they are not supposed to be looking at pornographic images, but the stresses of
their vocations and lives often make them vulnerable because cyber-porn is so
anonymous and easy to do. This pastor was struggling, and he said that the more
he tried to stop, the more obsessed he became with it.
Knowing what I know about how we can suffer “discipline
exhaustion,” I took a different approach—one that is in line with what Paul
says in our passage today. I told him to quit trying so hard, but instead to
turn his obsession into an opportunity for prayer—to give it all to God. We
prayed that God would help him and transform him, and then I suggested to him
that each time he had the idea to look at porn, to turn this into a time of
prayer. Each time, just say to God, “God, you know I’m struggling with my
desire to look at porn right now. Please help me to let go of this desire.” I
also told him that he was going to fail at times, and that after he got over
the disappointment of failing, to turn that over to God, too.
Over the ensuing months and years, he noticed that his
desire diminished dramatically. He said that he still couldn’t help himself two
or three times a year, but that this was dramatically different from the daily viewings
he had. He also said that even in those two or three times, his online viewing
was more glimpsing than viewing.
The difference was that he shifted from trying to adhere
to a law, and instead turned his viewing into an opportunity for prayer and
faith. Instead of using willpower, he used the Spirit’s power.
Paul preached a Christianity of giving to God so that we
can discover what’s right directly from God, not from law. The law still has a
role to show us how God wants us to live, but Paul’s point is to keep our focus
on God, not on turning the law into a false, demanding god.
The irony about what Paul preached is that it completely
goes against what most people think of Paul. Many think of Paul as an Old
Testament-type figure, full of judgment and preaching about the law. In fact,
Paul was trying to teach people to let go of a focus on the law in order to
create a focus on Christ and Christ’s way. The basic gist of his teaching was
similar to that found in John’s gospel, which is that grace, Christ, and the Spirit
are in you and can transform you, if you let them. We are not apart from God,
expected to mold our lives into ones that are appealing and pleasing to God. We
are asked and invited to open up our lives to God’s indwelling Spirit, and to
allow that Spirit to transform us to transcend the law—to live the way the law
intended for us to live, but to be able to do so because the Spirit is alive in
us.
It’s due to this emphasis on following Christ in
faith, rather then subjecting ourselves to law, that we preach a life of
prayer, love, and service. When we open up to Christ by allowing the indwelling
Spirit come alive in us, we naturally live as the law intended us to live, but
we do it through the power of God, not the power of will.
Paul would be the first to say that there’s nothing wrong
with law, but there is a better way—a higher way—if we choose it.
Amen.
