Mark my words! I, Paul, tell you that if you let yourselves be circumcised, Christ will be of no value to you at all. Again I declare to every man who lets himself be circumcised that he is obligated to obey the whole law.
Galatians 5:2,3
I’ve always been a fan of science fiction, especially when space travel was involved. Maybe it’s because there was so much buzz around NASA and the early Mercury program.
Nothing could stop me from following and watching each and every step in the quest for space. I read every book in the public and school libraries on space and space travel. Every day I looked through the newspaper for articles on NASA and the astronauts. I watched every flight on television.
While Buck Rogers was a little before my time, Rocky Jones Space Ranger[1] was right in my wheelhouse. Since it was space travel “in the not-too-distant future,” I would dream about going there myself.
It didn’t matter that their Orbit Jet XV-2 rocket used electricity to blast off. It didn’t matter that they never fired their space age weapons but settled everything with a fistfight. And it didn’t matter that the writers didn’t know the difference between planets, moons, stars, and constellations,
As you can imagine, I thought I’d died and went to heaven when Star Trek came on. It was in color. They used their phasers like cowboys in westerns. And they had the ultimate weapon, photon torpedoes, to escape from danger and destroy enemy ships.
Rocky Jones and Captain Kirk had many things in common. Their fierce determination. Their ability to fight anyone and anything, no matter the odds. But they also had something else in common: the need for power for their beloved ships.
They went nowhere without power. They always had to have power, and lots of it. And when they got into trouble, they asked for more power. When they got into a tight spot, they put the pedal-to-the-medal. Full speed and beyond was needed to save them and their crew.
Paul’s saying the same thing to the Galatians about their daily living for Jesus. On their own, they could never live for God. They’d always fall short. They needed power to live their lives. And God supplied them all the power needed through his Holy Spirit who was living in them.
But daily living is different from their eternity. God’s grace has bought their salvation once and for all. There’s no removing them from his hand. Their eternal destiny is secure in and through the death of Jesus on the cross.
And out of loving, thankful hearts, our response is to deeply desire to live life like he wants us to. It’s not a matter of what we think is best, or what gives us the biggest pleasure, but what pleases the one we love.
We are to humbly give ourselves over to the one who loves us. Who already gave himself for us, paying the eternal debt that we could never pay. It’s not a matter of following some set of rules or laws, but God’s grace is what makes all the difference in the world.
Some people were bothering the Galatians and trying to get them to turn away from God’s grace. They were telling them that in addition to Jesus that they needed to obey the Jewish rules. And the first, big rule was that all males had to be circumcised.
Now, I don’t know about you, but that’s not some little rule. That’s sounds like a great big rule to me. It’s not just showing up once a week at the synagogue, or not eating meat on Fridays. It’s a rule that changes everything for the rest of your life.
Once you go through with circumcision, that’s it’ There’s no undoing it. You’re on the hook to follow all the laws. You can’t pick and choose which laws to follow. You have to obey all of them. You’re signing up and committing to do all 613 of them.
And oh, by the way, part of that process of agreeing to do all the laws is to let other people look into your life, making sure you follow them all. You’re giving power to them to poke around in the most intimate details of your life just to tell you what to do. What not to do.
This isn’t even close to what God wants for you and me. His plan is for us to receive his loving forgiveness so we can be embraced by our heavenly Father.
In response, we’ll want to glorify him in all parts of our life, easily giving him control because we’re convinced that he has nothing but our good in his heart for us.
We can’t do this on our own. We need more power than we could ever come up with. He gives us more power to live a life of freedom, peace, and loving response to him.
Don’t you want this “more power” too?
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