The Same Old Barn

Galatians 2:15-21 (The Message)

We Jews know that we have no advantage of birth over "non-Jewish sinners."

We know very well that we are not set right with God by rule-keeping but only through personal faith in Jesus Christ. How do we know? We tried it—and we had the best system of rules the world has ever seen! Convinced that no human being can please God by self-improvement, we believed in Jesus as the Messiah so that we might be set right before God by trusting in the Messiah, not by trying to be good.

Have some of you noticed that we are not yet perfect? (No great surprise, right?)

And are you ready to make the accusation that since people like me, who go through Christ in order to get things right with God, aren't perfectly virtuous, Christ must therefore be an accessory to sin? The accusation is frivolous.

If I was "trying to be good," I would be rebuilding the same old barn that I tore down. I would be acting as a charlatan.

What actually took place is this: I tried keeping rules and working my head off to please God, and it didn't work. So I quit being a "law man" so that I could be God's man. Christ's life showed me how, and enabled me to do it. I identified myself completely with him. Indeed, I have been crucified with Christ.

My ego is no longer central.

It is no longer important that I appear righteous before you or have your good opinion, and I am no longer driven to impress God. Christ lives in me. The life you see me living is not "mine," but it is lived by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. I am not going to go back on that.

Is it not clear to you that to go back to that old rule-keeping, peer-pleasing religion would be an abandonment of everything personal and free in my relationship with God? I refuse to do that, to repudiate God's grace. If a living relationship with God could come by rule-keeping, then Christ died unnecessarily.

How many times do we need God to tell us...stop building the "same old barn."

Paul really wanted to do things right. He really wanted to please God...maybe.

Or, maybe, in his first life as "Saul," he really wanted to use God to his advantage. He liked the idea of pleasing God, but what he really, really liked was everybody knowing that he was the best God-pleaser of them all.

God made him famous. He really knew how to do the God thing better than anybody else. And that life left his lost and empty.

Really consider these words...they're the ones we'll be considering together on Sunday at SOTH:

My ego is no longer central.

I don't need your good opinion of me.

I don't have to impress God.

It's no longer my life you see me living.

What could those statements mean for each of us?

Grace & Peace -- Adam

Don't wanna be a martyr in this war
Don't wanna hear the same excuses anymore
That everything's a threat
And it's only gonna get worse if we let it

Don't wanna blame the rich for what they got
Don't point a finger at the poor for what they have not
Though the politician and the priest
Live in the belly of the beast because we fed it

Freedom is seldom found
By beating someone to the ground
Telling them how everything is gonna be now, yeah

Now if the tables were turned tell me how you would feel
Somebody busted up into your house telling you to stay still
While the leaders will deny defeat
Innocents they testify by dying in the street

Freedom is seldom found
By beating someone to the ground
Telling them how everything is gonna be now

Freedom is seldom found
By beating someone to the ground
Telling them how everything is gonna be now