Wednesday, June 5, 2013 - 4:15 pm

Today I read Galatians 5 & 6, and I see brought together the ideas of freedom in Christ, the responsibility to live up to that freedom, and the importance of community, all in one verse. Galatians 5:13 says, "You, my brothers, were called to be free. But do not use your freedom to indulge the sinful nature; rather, serve one another in love." Since the easiest of these for me to put aside seems to be my responsibility, that's the one I'd like to look at for a moment. Consider the law, and the rules, as training wheels on a bike. They help us go straight and keep us from falling over while we learn how to keep our balance properly. They serve a good and useful function, but the intent from the beginning was always that they would be removed, and we would then know how to keep our balance without them. This is the kind of freedom that Galatians 5 is talking about, and the responsibility is not to break the rules now that they are not holding us, but to take on the job that they did ourselves. How foolish would it be for someone, upon removing the training wheels from their bike, to immediately fall over to one side, not through ignorance, but simply because they now had the ability to? How often have I misinterpreted my freedom to mean that I now have the right to act foolishly and hurt myself? As we've just seen, that's not what our freedom was designed for. Sure, we now have the ability to fall, but simply because we can do a thing, it does not necessarily follow that we must do that thing. Let's live up to the freedom we've been given, and thank God that He has entrusted His Holy Spirit to us, so that our inner 'training wheels' can kick in when the outer ones are removed.