Sermon Tone Analysis

Summary: don’t give up the freedom Christ has given you and return to law-slavery.

If you start down that road you lose everything - it’s all or nothing.

The righteousness we hope for will surely come through the Spirit and faith; for those in Messiah Jesus nothing that’s gone before has value - only faith working through love.

Big idea: we’re freed to flourish, living out love, in sure hope (no square watermelon)

Intro me

Well, welcome to 2022.

I expect for many of us this feels a bit like groundhog day - if you’ve seen that film?

It’s about a guy who’s living through the same day, over and over again.

Here we are at the start of another new year and there’s another variant.

Another vaccination.

And we’re living in yet another lockdown.

Yippee.

It’s pretty hard to be excited about life sometimes, right?

And I think this pandemic has left almost everyone feeling trapped, feeling constrained, feeling squashed and squeezed into a smaller life than the one we wanted to live, than the one we hoped we might live.

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So I want to start this morning with a question for you all about freedom.

If you were free, truly and totally free, what would that look like for you?

What would you do if you were free?

How would you live?

Hop onto slido for me and tell me: what would you do, or be, if you were truly and totally free?

You can chime in from home, too, if you’re on the livestream - there’s just a few seconds of delay before you’ll see your answers pop up here too.

For me, I don’t really know.

I have a bunch of ideas but then I start second-guessing myself.

If I was truly free, I’d retire and travel, see the world.

But would that really be freedom?

Certainly not in this covid era - that’d be a recipe for endless PCR tests!

But even apart from that, would I really want to be free from community?

Free from friends and family?

Maybe if I was truly free, I wouldn’t use that freedom to go anywhere after all.

Write a book?

Learn to cook?

What would you do if you were truly free?

Let’s take a look...

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It’s a big question, really: what is true freedom?

What would it look like to live out true freedom?

When a dolphin jumps from a wave, or a flower reaches out towards the sun, that seems a lot like true freedom, right?

And when you shut a dolphin in a pool and make it do tricks, or grow a watermelon into a square, that seems like the opposite, right?

But is a bird in flight just as free as a cactus rooted to the desert floor?

Perhaps we might say true freedom is the freedom to fully express yourself, to be who you really are?

Freedom to do what you are made to do, what you are wired to do.

Freedom to pursue everything you want, not be held back from anything?

Then we have to ask the question: would it be good for you and I to be totally free?

For everyone around us? What would we produce if we were totally unconstrained?

How would we live?

Would it be beautiful and good?

Would a freed world more and more resemble heaven?

Or would our freedom express itself in selfish grabbing and shoving and a fight over the spoils of a hellish world?

What would happen if all constraint was removed?

As we start this new year, we’re going to continue our journey through a short letter in the Bible, a letter written to a group of churches in an area which used to be called Galatia - modern-day Turkey.

A letter written by one of Jesus’ first followers, written to churches he had started which just a short while later were in danger of losing the plot, losing the message of hope that he’d brought to them.

We’ve been exploring this letter for quite a few months now but if you’re just joining us (or if you’ve simply forgotten what we covered last year), let me quickly bring you up to speed: some people had shown up in those new churches with an update, an add-on, an extra.

It’s great that you believe in Jesus, they said, there’s just one more thing: you also need to follow all these Jewish rules in order to really be right with God, to be a part of God’s people.

This letter we’re looking at is Paul, the guy who started all those churches, writing to say “oh no you don’t”.

He’s explaining Jesus plus nothing is all you need, not Jesus plus these Jewish rules.

And it can seem a bit repetitive in the letter because he’s really banging on that one point again and again - but it’s really important because it’s easy to lose that truth.

As we pick the letter up in this new year, we’ve arrived at a bit of a turning point.

Front and centre in what we’re going to be looking at today is this idea of freedom.

Listen with me this morning as Jennifer reads for us from Galatians chapter 5 - page 1176 in these blue bibles if you have one of them.

Galatians chapter 5 - just look for the big 5. Page 1176.

Thanks Jennifer.

"it is for freedom that Christ has set us free” - but free from what?

Well, that same verse tells us - look carefully at verse one.

“do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery.”

Again.

So what he’s warning them about is a return to something, not some new kid on the block.

Do not let yourselves be burdened again.

And what were they burdened by before?

The yolk of slavery.

Ok, couldn’t resist it.

Like so many times with the English language, we have two words which sound the same but mean something radically different.

It’s yoke - the thing that joins animals together to make them work, to harness them to a plough!

What is this yoke?

This burden to bear?

In view here is the Jewish religious Law, the Torah as it’s called.

The Law is described as a yoke, this burden, in the book of Acts, in chapter 15.

And that’s the point in the story of the earliest churches where we think the letter we’re studying is written.

So the burden in view the Jewish law - and particularly in focus here is circumcision, a permanent body-marking act that was the point of no return for people joining the Jewish faith.

But before you write all this off as irrelevant to us, know that it’s wider than that.

This letter is written to a mixed group, some ex-Jews, but some never Jewish - so-called “Gentiles”.

How could Paul write to them all here about being burdened again if he was just talking about this Jewish Law?

Well, if you were with us last year, perhaps you’ll remember we talked about the “basic principles of the world” which show up in chapter 4?

Our writer explained to us that there’s a basic principle in the world: we all have rules we feel we need to keep in order to be in the right with the powers that be, to earn our place: Get in with the eco-brigade?

Thou shalt Recycle.

Get in with the dentist?

Thou shalt Brush your teeth - morning and night - and floss after every meal.

Get in with God? Be a generally decent bloke.

Give to the poor.

We’ve all lived under that burden of needing to be good enough, to do right enough, to try hard enough to make the grade.

It’s a basic principle of our world, just the way we assume things work.

But the good news of Christianity is that Jesus Christ has set us free.

Free from needing to be good enough for God.

The bible word used in Galatians to describe what Jesus has done is that he has “redeemed” us - Jesus redeems us.

That’s not like redeeming coupons at Tesco, it’s a word from the slave-market meaning to buy-back, to buy someone from slavery into freedom.

Jesus has set us free from the Jewish law and all its regulations - but not just that.

He’s set us free from ever needing to prove to God that we make the grade, that we measure up.

And we are to stand firm in this freedom, not go back again to the Jewish Law, or back again to those basic principles of the world.

We relate to God through Jesus and what he’s done, not through what we’ve done.

We are redeemed - and we can, and should, live like it - to live free.