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July 06, 2003 |
"Galatians" Series |
Pastor Brian Shimer
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"Are you Free?"*
Galatians 5:1-26
(Sermon delivered by Anna Shimer, Brian Shimer's daughter)
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Dennis Kinlaw, author and professor, writes: "I had been a Christian about six years when I realized that a substantial portion of my ambition was permeated by pride. I had my own ideas about what success in the ministry ought to be like, and the Lord confronted me about it.
He asked me, "Are you willing to let Me take your life and spend it the way I please?"
"What are You going to do with it?" I asked him.
Quietly He responded, "you don't trust Me, do you?"
"Well, it is not that I don't trust you, but it would help if you would tell me what You plan to do with my life."
"No, I am not going to tell you My plans. You will never know full freedom until you look Me in the face and say, 'God, You can do what You please with me.'"
And so I tried to look Him in the face and give Him my full self.
"What is that on the corner of your life?" He asked.
"That is my thumb. Can't I keep one finger on my life?"
"No, if you are going to turn it loose, you have to take all fingers off."
I tried to remove that finger from my life, and I found that I could not. You see, it is only by His grace that we are ever set free. Finally, I looked up and said, "God, can You take that finger off?"
"If you will let Me crack it hard enough and long enough, I can."
"Well, start cracking," I said, terrified. At that point, I quit kneeling and found myself flat on my face before God. Slowly, He began to set me free.
Dr Kinlaw continues: "There is a power in the Cross that can set us free from the tyranny of self-interest that either controls or contaminates our lives. If we let Him set us free, we can relax and rest in Him - no longer driven to strive for what we desire for ourselves. We will find that His desires become ours."
(May 12, A Day with The Master, Kinlaw FAP ©2002)
Ever thought of God wanting to do some cracking on your lives?
The Peru team can relate to this concept. The Sovereign God wants us free to serve him unhindered by personal sin, or as Kinlaw wrote, self-interest.
God began cracking on us before departure, but especially beginning at the Portland Airport on the day of departure. There, Dad (Pastor Brian) read us the news release describing the resurgence of Shining Path, the dangerous, anti-Christian, communist terrorist organization in Peru. We divided into teams as buddies, and were exhorted again never to be alone. From that day through two weeks of challenges with altitude sickness, changing schedules, and team relationships, God had plenty of tools to use to assist us in growth in Freedom. God's goal is freedom, that we would release the controls, that we would let Him free us totally from sin and free us into vital service for Him.
When Paul was writing to the Christians he had won to Christ in the region of Galatia, which is in modern day Turkey, he wrote to them about freedom. For the Jewish believer, in Christ, he was freed from following all the daily Jewish regulations and ceremonial rituals. For both the Gentile and the Jewish believer, Jesus Christ meant freedom from the bondage of sin. Sin may remain in a person's life but need not reign.
Since Paul had first preached to the Galatian Christians, other preachers had come among them and they had turned from the freedom of the true Gospel. They had begun to adopt Jewish regulations for the life of Christian believers. They were advocating circumcision, the eating of certain foods, the separation from Gentiles. Paul calls such teachings "bondage," the fruit of a false gospel.
The book of Galatians is Paul's defense of the true gospel which he'd originally delivered to the Christians in the region of Galatia and they had originally accepted. Our emphasis will be on this book over the next few weeks as we look again at the true gospel - a source of joy.
Today we are going to look at the idea of freedom, Paul talks about in Galatians chapter 5. The whole book deals with the theme of freedom and you'll notice 5:1 begins,
"It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery."
When we accept Christ, he sets us free from the bondage of sin and worldly rules and regulations. Then we have a choice. We can "stand firm" in that freedom and live like free people, or we can let ourselves be again burdened with a yoke of slavery.
The idea of a yoke of slavery is not a modern concept. But we can all understand the concept of working for a really harsh boss. We can imagine the difficulty caused by a boss who shows no grace, allows no breaks and is really nothing but a tyrant. This is what Paul is illustrating here. Being in Christ is like being self-employed with all the perks - freedom of schedule, time frame, days off and location of work - while being in the bondage of slavery and sin is like working for a tyrant. Paul is pretty clear in verse one, saying, "don't go back to bondage!" He has more to say about that later in the chapter, even with some choice words for those who led the Galatians' astray. Make sure to go back and read that later. For now, go with me to verse 13. I'm reading out of The Message translation.
"It is absolutely clear that God has called you to a free life. Just make sure that you don't use this freedom as an excuse to do whatever you want to do and destroy your freedom. Rather, use your freedom to serve one another in love; that's how freedom grows."
It is absolutely clear that God has called us to a free life, Paul wrote. God wants us to be set free from all that hinders that freedom and then to serve others in that freedom. In Peru, we had many opportunities to serve others in freedom and experienced great transformation in our own lives as God freed us to serve others.
Edson Gilmore, a retired pastor, was one of the members of our team in Peru. You may have met him when he and his wife visited here the Sunday before we left. He's a great guy with a good sense of humor. A couple months ago, we were developing our skit of the Good Samaritan at one of our team meetings. Parts were dividing up easily. "Okay, we've got a good guy, three robbers, innkeepers!" Dad and Linda were in charge of the casting. "Hey, what about a donkey?" Everybody looked around. "Edson could do it!" someone suggested. Edson was a great donkey. He crawled around on dirt, wood floors, carpet, tile and grass without complaint and all the time with a silly grin on his face. The kids loved him! But more than that, he was such an example to all of us of Christian freedom.
Another such example was a Peruvian woman named Jochobed. 27-year-old Jochobed is the leader of the IME's dance and music team. After our team participated in the IME's outdoor children's ministry last Sunday, Jochobed invited us all to come into her house for a moment, especially to see where she taught an inside Sunday School class before the outdoor ministry each week.
I'm not sure what I expected Jochobed's house to look like, but I was incredibly surprised. It was dim inside and the doorway was very low. The room was maybe a little larger than my bedroom at home, but not much, and it was very bare, especially compared to the Sunday school classrooms I am used to. The floor is wood, there were wooden benches along three walls and there are some calendar pictures on the wall. Jochobed teaches about 30 kids every Sunday in this tiny room. Her supplies are also very limited. She has 4 pairs of scissors and two cups of broken crayons, colored pencils and pens for all of the kids to share. Although Jochobed's home was nicer than some of the others in Cerro de Pasco, she was living in poverty compared to my home.
But Jochobed is not what I think of when I think of poverty. She is a beautiful, cheerful and friendly person. Because she is in Christ, Jochobed is not enslaved by her circumstances or by her poverty. Rather, she is free.
We were running on a pretty tight schedule when we were in Peru and one of the challenges we faced as a team was remaining free to follow God's leading and stick as much as possible to an impossible schedule. During the first three days of ministry in Cerro de Pasco, we were visiting at least four different schools every day and facilitating an English class each evening.
On Tuesday night, the team was sprawled in exhaustion all over the Cuevas living room as Pastor Marcos of the IME church reviewed Wednesday's schedule with us. Wednesday was more than overwhelming. We were looking at five schools - two before lunch and three after - followed by our English class. The only relief was that we would be able to sleep in, as our first school wasn't until 10 am. But Marcos wasn't finished yet. "We just got another confirmation back this evening," Pastor Marcos added as he finished outlining the schedule. "Another school wants you to come do a program for their whole student body - about 600 students - at 7:45 tomorrow morning." I was pretty ready to burst into tears at that point.
It's a good thing, though, that God doesn't run on human schedules. We learned over and over again during that week of ministry in Cerro that God is more than able to change our schedule at the last minute for something better and Wednesday morning was one of those lessons. By the time Wednesday morning arrived, the two original schools that had been scheduled before lunch had been cancelled, although we still had to do the program at 7:45. If the other schools had not been cancelled, we would have had to rush off after that first program to the next school, but instead, we hung around for a few moments after our big presentation and a couple teachers asked if we could come into their classrooms to share a bit more with their students. So for an additional hour, two small groups of team members shared in two different classrooms and in both of these classrooms, many of the students committed their lives to Christ. While the rest of the team was waiting down in the school yard, a construction crew wandered up and asked for more information about Jesus Christ. Because our schedule was changed - two schools cancelled and one added - the seven members of that construction crew, as well as several women that had been standing nearby, received Jesus into their hearts. We couldn't have planned something like that. Only God can. And we could only be receptive to His plan if we were free in Christ.
When we stand firm in freedom, God has more room to move in our lives and in others around us. As we learned in Peru, God can provide freedom from pride, freedom in poverty and freedom from schedules, when we are standing in freedom and resisting slavery and bondage.
But you don't have to go to Peru in order to experience this kind of freedom. If you've accepted Christ into your life, then He has already provided freedom to you. All you have to do it accept that freedom and stand firm in it, then serve others through that freedom, like Paul says in Galatians.
Take a moment to look at your life. Where are you still bound up in sin and slavery? How can you exercise freedom in that area? If you're bound up in pride, for example, you might try being a donkey!
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