Free in Christ

Paul was angry at the Galatians. His letter to them is a scathing confrontation of the fact that they had been “walking by the flesh” instead of the Spirit. But the “flesh” for the Galatians was not pornography, drunkenness, or thievery. The Galatians had begun to measure their acceptance spiritually by whether or not they performed certain religious behaviors. They let religious performance direct the way they acted, instead of allowing that Spirit to do so. Paul calls this “walking in the flesh.”

Jeff VanVonderen, Families Where Grace is in Place  

Linda and I started to hash things out in an earlier post, and my comments weren’t cooperating with the links, so I’m going to start over.

So it’s not the carnality that oppressed the Galatians. It was living according to a rigid set of religious rituals. Their fleshly living — which was causing discord and strife — was living by a human system of rules instead of relishing the freedom of grace.

But when we conservative Evangelicals read Scripture, we goof. We see the fleshly living as carnality, and then we impose a Galatian kind of legalism.

In doing so, we read the flesh (meaning the physical body) as sinful, but it’s not! That’s not at all Scriptural. That’s Gnosticism.

And then we forget that Paul said in Christ we are completely new creatures: ”old things are passed away. Behold, all things are become new.” The old man has been crucified with Christ. Read Romans 5-7. It’s amazing.

Jeff VanVonderen unpacks it in Tired of Trying to Measure Up. We need so much more grace and so little religion in our churches.