Don’T Abuse Your Freedom
DON’T ABUSE YOUR FREEDOM
GALATIANS 5:13-15
True Christian freedom allows the opportunity to love and serve one another humbly.
Here, almost every word gives room for pause, reflection, comment and application, as we seek to take God’s word into our hearts (Psalm 119:11).
Up to this point in his running debate with the impressionable Galatian Christians, Paul has been making plain the danger of bad religion. He has done it by a series of contrasts: law versus promise; merit versus grace; and slavery versus liberty. But now it is time for him to say more exactly what Christian liberty really is, for it may be that, as in other places of early Christianity, there was a tendency to misunderstand and misapply the slogan “saved only by grace”: see Romans 6:1ff.
Christian freedom is not license, and does not give us free rein to please ourselves (5:13). There is a valuable safeguard to prevent such a degeneration. What is it? 5:13b supplies the all-important direction, and the writer picks up the same word as he has used in earlier discussion and gives it a new twist: “Be slaves,” not to any legalistic code or supposedly merit-earning ceremony such as circumcision, “to one another in the love you show in your mutual relationships.” Through love serve one another.
In this way the spirit of the law is honored (5:14) as Christians put other people (especially those who have a claim on us) first in their consideration and care. Evidently there was need to underline this teaching in a Christian assembly where all was far from harmony and brotherly love (5:15).
Notes 5:13: “opportunity” (ESV), is literally “a base of operations,” used in the military sense. The “flesh” in this verse means the self-life, still present in the believer and which struggles to reassert itself or, to continue the military metaphor, provides a launching-pad from which sin (as a missile) may be let loose, to hurt others. 5:14 quotes Leviticus 19:18 (see Romans 13:8-10) and asks the deceptively simple questions, “Who is my neighbor? What does it mean to ‘love’”? The answer to the first question is supplied in Luke 10:25-37: my neighbor is anyone in need, who lies across my path, or whom my helping hand can reach. A good substitute for “love,” a modern term with a wide range of meanings, would be “care.” “You shall care for your neighbor as you care for yourself.”