The Way Of Faith Or The Way Of Law

Those who depend on the law to make them right with God are under his curse, for the Scriptures say, “Cursed is everyone who does not observe and obey all the commands that are written in God’s Book of the Law.” So it is clear that no one can be made right with God by trying to keep the law. For the Scriptures say, “It is through faith that a righteous person has life.” This way of faith is very different from the way of law, which says, “It is through obeying the law that a person has life.” Galatians 3:10-12

OUR CHILDREN have an enemy who is continuously at work tempting them to think and feel that because they are in a family that talks about God, goes to church, and reads the Bible, they are under God’s blessing. But the book of Galatians concerns a group of people who did all of those things and yet were under God’s curse.

The issue in question in this portion of Paul’s letter was what determined whether the Galatians could expect to experience divine blessing or divine curse. And the answer didn’t depend on whether they were church people or nonchurch people. It was about whether or not they had come to see their utter inability to keep the law of God and therefore had taken hold of Christ, who perfectly kept the law in their place. Unfortunately, they were still trying, through their religious activity and good morals, to earn the divine blessing they craved.

Efforts to fill up the local food pantry or build wells in Africa and commitments to save sex for marriage and refuse to buy lottery tickets can be law-keeping done in human strength to win God’s favor, or they can be done in dependence upon the strength of Christ, out of love for Christ and a desire to bring glory to him. The question of curse or blessing hangs on how we obey and who gets the credit.

Lord, we want ________ to obey your Word and live a holy life. We want ________ to experience and expect your divine blessing, not your divine curse. What we don’t want is for ________ to be caught up in just trying to live by your law when he has no power to live that way and no sense of your forgiveness when he fails to live in that way.