Galatians 5

"So Christ has truly set us free. Now make sure that you stay free, and don't get tied up again in slavery to the law." 5:1

My friends in youth group always laugh because I'm a huge note-writer. We take notes in church, and even though we only have about 6 main points where we fill in some blanks like a guided reading, by the end of the sermon my entire page is usually covered, sometimes spilling onto the back. I'm just someone that learns best when i write down everything, and i listen better when i'm working on copying it all down.
So, last week at Bible Study our group leader told us we just had to read about 4 lines a night, spending 10 minutes each day. He said it split up about 6 minutes to read, 4 minutes to write. Or, for me, 5 minutes to read, 25 minutes to write. And as I went home and started working on Galatians 5, I pretty much proved them right. I read that verse up there, verse one, in about 30 seconds while I was in the waiting room at the Orthodontist, and immediately started writing, took it home, and had an entire blog's worth of ideas spinning around in my head ready to be written.

It's amazing how often it seems that the Bible has been written specifically for and directly speaking at me. All of Galatians is screaming in my head "HEY, THIS IS WHAT WAS BUGGING YOU, RIGHT? WELL HERE YOU GO, THIS IS ALL THE INFORMATION YOU COULD EVER NEED ON IT." I'm almost being pounded in the head by the idea that no! i actually don't have to follow the law. What an amazing idea.
We all get saved, sometimes you're just sitting in your room saying a prayer, sometimes you're cool like me and have a dramatic show of courage in a huge room of people at winter camp. Either way, you always have that chance to feel really fantastic for an entire week, maybe an entire month. Jesus is in your heart, and you know it, and life is just so amazingly fantastic that nothing could ever turn you away from God.

Oh, wait, that Satan guy is still walking around, and he's even pretty angry now because since you've gotten saved that means he's lost you, so he's going to start working overtime. And even though it doesn't really make sense, one of the biggest things he does is that he starts making you believe that you have to earn heaven. But wait! Didn't you just get saved? Doesn't that mean that by accepting Jesus, that's your one way ticket into heaven, and you're wiped clean, already exactly where you need to be to enter the kingdom of God?!

It's easy to see that when the Holy Spirit is controlling your life, but sometimes when the devil gets in the way it's not as easy. Then enters the idea of the law. People, myself included, start to believe that they have to do and say certain things to be "right" with God, or that if they mess up, it means they need to make up for it with some more good deeds. It becomes this crazy system of balance that shouldn't even work because your sin was so heavy and so destructive before you knew Christ that nothing could ever make it even save for Jesus himself. And by following the law, it's really saying that we don't need Jesus.

Anyway, that's a topic i already mentioned, but here's the big deal. Christ has SET US FREE. Are you set free from things that are good for you? Of course not. When you're "set free" from something it means being set free from jail, or from being grounded, or from being bound in some way. Jesus has set us free because he loves us, because it's for our own good.