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Are you a rule-breaker or rule-follower? Where do you fit on a scale from 1 (totally breaker) – 10 (total follower)? What you think of somebody who is the opposite of you?

If you were the Supreme Commander, what law (that doesn’t currently exist) would you create? What curret law would you immediately do away with.

We all have a dysfunctional relationship with rules. We love the ones that we agree with (and find rather easy to follow) while detest the ones we disagree with (and don’t want to follow). And when we find ourselves breaking these rules (legal, relational, spiritual, HOA etc) we tend to give ourselves a pass, convincing ourselves and others that 1) we had a valid reason for breaking the rule, 2) that this breakage doesn’t make me a bad person, yet 3) if you break rules, you reason isn’t valid and 4) your breakage in fact makes you a “bad person”.

C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity actually uses this natural, univeral, ingrained sense of “right and wrong” as proof that there must be a higher power that has created and rules the universe with moral laws just as surely as he has created and rules with physical laws (gravity etc). With extremely few and typically superficial variations the world has generally agreed on what is right and what is wrong. Lewis would go on to say that no civilization has EVER celebrated a person that breaks promises and even become a traiter. That’s because the perfect and pure God (that we now know is Jesus) has created us in his image to live perfectly and purely. And every last one of knows with great clarity that there are universal rules, and that we all break them repeatedly. We also all demand justice. Real Justice. But we don’t see our justice-scales as being “that” tipped while adamantly insisting that the overtly tipped scales of “those” people (insert what you see as a really ugly sin here, like sexual and physical abuse). We are partially right. “Their” scales MUST be leveled. But, so do ours. Just as much! You better read that again. JUST AS MUCH. What if the scale-maker truly is “perfect and pure” and we are not compared to one another but to Him? Would we still want pure justice? Maybe not, but we certainly NEED it, or else there would be no hope and all would be lost. Then we will either have to pay justice penalty ourselves, or be humbled as Another pays that payment on our behalf. That’s why Jesus’ perfect and pure life ending with his Ultimate death on the Cross is so so much bigger than we can possibly realize. Jesus had to level the scales for every believer. And with his leveling our standing before God, we have been freed not just from the just penalty, but from the burden of the Law that we somehow try to use to achieve wholeness.

This is where Paul was going in Galatians 3:23-25 ”Now before faith came, we were held captive under the law, imprisoned until the coming faith would be revealed. 24 So then, the law was our guardian until Christ came, in order that we might be justified by faith. 25 But now that faith has come, we are no longer under a guardian…” This Law reveals the character of God (because they describe what perfection and love look like), reveal how far from perfection and purity that we are, how much Jesus paid to make us perfect and pure, and what it looks like to live out of our new re-created and imputed identity.

Read THIS if you’d like to see what has become known as the “Three Uses of the Law”. I think it’s very helpful, freeing and encouraging to know what God’s Law is actually designed for so that maybe, just for a minute, I’ll stop misusing it to do something that it wasn’t designed for and cannot do (i.e. create my own personal righteousness).

Galatians 2:3
But even Titus, who was with me, was not forced to be circumcised, though he was a Greek.

We are an insider/outsider people, having hearts filled with various “us” and “them” filters ranging from gender, school allegiance, education, race, political affiliation, social class and, of course, spirituality. Us church-folk can be brutal in this. We have learned all the loving and unifying Bible words to use, but in our hearts we crucify those who disagree, relegating different Christ-followers to either second-class spirituality, or, even worse, to hell itself. When we do this (and we are usually sly enough to only do it in our hearts, not in our words or overt actions), we are might be mistaking fruit for root. We list different behaviors (many of which God has clearly commanded while others are more cultural distinctives that we’ve elevated to universal truths) as mandatory for a person to be adopted into God’s family, rather than realizing that the only requirement for being adopted is to believe that our only hope is in Jesus alone, the very Son of God, has come to live, die, raise and ascend so that our treacherous sins can be forgiven and Jesus’ life can be our own. Full Stop. Plus nothing. But we get the ingredients inverted, making the fruit that God’s love produces in us the requirement of God’s love.

In this passage Paul has gone to Jerusalem to meet with the church leaders so they can be of one mind regarding the Gospel because there were “spies” who had infiltrated the church, saying that salvation comes from Jesus, but you have to become a Jew first in order to then be a Christian and be acceptable to God. In their church meeting (everybody’s favorite thing) the leaders unanimously agreed that God’s love and gift are offered without string (5b “the truth of the gospel might be preserved for you”). This is because they realized the ultimate and true “us vs. them” is not horizontal between us, but between all of humanity and God. In our rebellion we’ve rejected the One True King, pitting us against him. But God didn’t treat us the way we treat others, Thank God!

“But God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners (the ultimate outsiders), Christ died for us.”
Romans 5:8

God shattered the barrier that we created which justly divided us from Him in the person of Jesus so that membership in The Family is secured by Him, not by us, making the Family of God wildly and ridiculously diverse. Firmly keeping to the Essentials of Jesus as our Foundation and Cornerstone, we can now live and move through disagreements, diversity and freedom. We can sing differently, pray differently, baptize differently, eat differently, vote differently, play differently etc etc. This by no means waters down our firm belief and conviction in Jesus, neither does it water down our beliefs about the other aforementioned points of theology. Rather it draws us into more dependence and trust in Jesus, who is the author of our faith. Not only do Christians not have to be all alike, we SHOULDN’T be all alike. We need to listen to the Spirit of Christ personally, but also corporately (which is what Paul was doing when he went to Jerusalem). We need a miraculous spirit of humility and discernment to live out this motto:

In Essentials, Unity
In Non-Essentials, Liberty
In All Things, Charity

Yes, this is super messy, and scary. It forces us to deeply ask “What is essential?” Here’s a hint, not everything you believe is essential, even things you are extremely confident about.

Let’s finish with this story. In John 9 a blind man was healed by Jesus, which infuriated the Religious Elite because Jesus wasn’t following what they thought were essentials (they were wrong). When they asked the blind man for a testimony against Jesus, all he said was the Gospel:  “Whether he is a sinner I do not know. One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see.”

• What “us vs. them” dominates your average day?
• Who is inside and who is out?
• What things do you treat as “essential” that might not be?
• What “cultural distinctives” do you treat as “theological imperatives”?

Galatians 1:6 I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting him who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel

“Gospel” — this word is unbelievably over-used…and under-used. This word “Gospel” is derived from the Greek word “euangelion”, which simply is the word “good” plus the word “message” (or “news”). It is the proclamation of a glorious truth. We’ve often turn this word into an invitation or a point of advice, or into a secret handshake that makes us feel elite because WE are the REAL gospel people. But the reality is that The Gospel is  not primarily a fact, theology, philosophy or even way of life. The Gospel is a person. Jesus is The Gospel made flesh. He IS the good news that has come to us in the hurricane of our deepest need to give himself in our place so that we can be brought to life from now and forevermore (verses 1-5 pretty much explains the entire core of what The Gospel is).

But even saying this, we can see the Gospel as the baby-food of Christianity. But in fact The Gospel is for the believer and the non-believer. The Gospel is the beginning and the end; the way in, the way through and the final conclusion. We never for one moment outgrow the gospel and into deeper points of theology and truth. We don’t believe the Gospel to become a Christian and then turn to all the minutia of theology to grow. The Gospel is the Truth of our need and Jesus sacrificial gift, and it is what permeates every atom of our specific personal lives. This gospel freedom, which tells me that my identity is secured because of Jesus’ actions rather than mine, speaks hope when I’m insecure; when I fail and when I succeed; when I make my year-end goals; when I am criticized or flattered; when I am betrayed and when I betray somebody else.

I love to go backpacking. I love the whole process of packing my backpack, getting the dogs and food, hiking into the woods and setting the campsite up. I tend to go overkill and make a nice spot with hammock and a comfy tent (and I even bring 2 pillows because I’m like my comfort, even when camping). Yup, camping is sweet. But it’s not where I live, thank the Lord! For me, when I’m out in the wilderness, it’s a mixture between enjoyment and longing. I really enjoy being out there because it is so peaceful, fun and simple. But it’s also fun because it’s short term. If I had to live out in the forest, it wouldn’t really be much fun.

This is the illustration Paul uses in 2 Corinthians 5 when talking about this world and the next:

1 For we know that if the tent that is our earthly home is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. 2 For in this tent we groan, longing to put on our heavenly dwelling, 3 if indeed by putting it on we may not be found naked. 4 For while we are still in this tent, we groan, being burdened—not that we would be unclothed, but that we would be further clothed, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life. 5 He who has prepared us for this very thing is God, who has given us the Spirit as a guarantee.

Our current “tent” (our physical bodies and this current form of creation) is brokenly beautiful. And utterly temporary. Yet we all spend the vast majority of our resources making our tent comfy, with extra pillows and hammocks. We spend our time, money, obsessions etc etc on that which simply cannot last. On the one hand we ought to enjoy and dance in this “tent” we’ve been gifted, while also not worshiping it and acting like it’s the end-all, be-all. We have a greater tent God is preparing in advance for us. A “realer” tent that will swallow up this tent. What we have here won’t just vanish, it will be ingested into the REAL creation when God re-creates this broken beauty (our bodies, forests, relationships, animals etc). One day the clock will stop ticking and LIFE will overwhelm, overcome and overtake the fallen world. We saw this in it’s initial phase on the cross when Jesus, who was/is LIFE in the flesh, allowed darkness and death to overcome him so that, when he rose again, his LIFE would reverse the curse of sin and bring hope to our otherwise futile world.

So on the one hand…enjoy! This “camping trip” we are on can be beautifully bitter sweet. But what makes it even more enjoyable is knowing that it is temporary. I can give my entire self away because before the blink of an eye, it will be transformed into something more “real” that will reveal our current world as a fleeting shadow that is being transformed into glory .

See C.S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce for an amazing little short story that illuminates this concept.