Living by Faith

Peter Neilson September 08, 2024 4 2

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Galatians 2:15–21 (MSG)

15-16 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.

17-18 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 pretender.

19-21 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.

21 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.

Who are you trying to impress? Paul has just described a piece of strenuous pastoral rebuke to Peter for backtracking on his new-found Gentile friends. Apparently, he was trying to impress some Jewish traditionalists.

Then Paul exposes the theological impossibility of getting right with God through impressive “self-improvement”, even following the world’s best rule book. His theological centre is Christ crucified where all things were “put right” once for all. That’s a matter of trust in what God has done for us, not fulfilling rules, regulations or rituals for him.

And now Paul is very personal. His dramatic encounter with the Risen Christ cut away the taproot of his self-righteous attempts at impressing his peers or trying to impress God. In that encounter, his ego was cancelled, “crucified with Christ”. He can say with Christians through the ages, “Christ lives in me.” Life is now re-centred on “the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me”.

How easily we let the Cross drift to our peripheral vision and slip back into old habits. Paul’s radical solution is to stop trying to impress, and instead to express the Living Christ who lives within us, and who continues to “love us and give himself” to us and through us.

Prayer:

God, who created us to reflect Your image,

We confess we are tired of projecting our own image,

All too keen to impress others, alive or dead,

Whose approval we crave.

Bring us back to the Cross to gaze in wonder

at Your love so freely given,

where all is seen, and all is forgiven,

where each is known, and each is accepted,

and we are set free to live the Christ-filled life

uninhibited by false expectations or imagined fears

through Christ Crucified and Risen. AMEN