Getting our toes stepped on

   Pastor Fred continued our sermon series by preaching out of Galatians 4:21-30 and he explored the Old Covenant and the New Covenant. If we are focused on the Old Covenant which is focused on legalism and it makes it about what we can do for God and we insist that we have to earn our salvation. It is about doing things for God so that we might find favor. Or we don’t do things because we think that we will upset God and He will not love us, or that we will look bad in front of other Christians. In essence this could be perverting the good news of the Gospel and the power of God because it makes it about what we can do and not on what God can do. How about instead we are mote concerned with the freedom of the new covenant and focus what God does to and through us.  So here are some of my thoughts.

  The first one is from Matthew 21:31 which Jesus tells the religious leaders that the prostitutes and tax collectors will make it into heaven before them. The religious leaders new the law and the freedom that God has to offer, but they chose not to live out in that freedom because they were more concerned about following their version of the law instead of living in Gods grace. The prostitutes and tax collectors took their checkered past sought Gods grace and forgiveness and chose to do the will of the Father. So my question is, do we want to look holy or to be holy?

  My second thought is that we may believe in God, but how often we don’t like what He has to say.  In essence we feel that our twos are getting stepped on.  I think that this is why we avoid the Old Testament because we don’t like what God has to say. God seems vengeful and it doesn’t give us the warm fuzzies. How often have you heard that the God of the New Testament is not the same God of the Old Testament? We serve a God that never changes and just because we don’t like what God has to say doesn’t mean that there are two different Gods or that God changes. The Old Testament points to the New Testament and the New Testament fulfills the Old Testament. We can’t have one without the other.  On a side note, if are either red letter Christians or want to disregard the Old Testament, that is working towards heresy. 

  I will with the story of Nicodemus when he met with Jesus in John 3. He was a teacher that was supposed too know the law and God because he spent all of his time studying it. So did Jesus call Nicodemus a fool because he didn’t know what it means to be born again or that he knew what it meant to be born again and he just didn’t like the answer? I think we are a lot like Nicodemus because we know the answer a lot of the time but how often do  we still ask questions to hopefully get an answer we like or to get God to change His mind? I will close with what Jesus essentially told Nicodemus, the flesh produces flesh and is subject to and lives and dies by the law while the spirit produces spirit and lives by grace and has eternal life. So do we live by the bondage of the law or the freedom of grace in the spirit? 

Grace and Peace

Tom Boustead