Is The Work of Jesus Wasted on You?
Galatians 4:8-11 Formerly, when you did not know God, you were enslaved to beings that by nature are not gods. Now, however, that you have come to know God, or rather to be known by God, how can you turn back again to the weak and beggarly elemental spirits? How can you want to be enslaved to them again? You are observing special days, and months, and seasons, and years. I am afraid that my work for you may have been wasted.
A good friend, will always tell you the truth. In fact I love the saying, that a friend always stabs you in the front. There are plenty of people out there who will tell you nice things to your face, and then go behind your back and whisper things about you, right.
You have those people in your life, I have those people in my life. But a true friend, is someone who stabs you in the front; someone who tells you how things really are. We don’t always like it. None of us likes criticism, but as you read in Proverbs 27:17, just as iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another.
I have just a handful of people who do that for me in my life. I trust them. I know they have a good heart. I know they have my interests at heart. And so when they come to me, and they have something difficult to say, as much as I’m like the next person, as much as I don’t really like criticism all that much either, I sit down, I listen, I evaluate, and I take to heart what they have to say to me.
That’s the sort of relationship that the Apostle Paul had with the church in Galatia, back there in the 1st Century AD. I mean he loved those guys. He’d been there at the beginning, he’d been the one who told them about the amazing grace of God through Jesus Christ. But it wasn’t long, until some Jewish Christians came along, while Paul was away elsewhere, to convince the Galatians that this whole idea of grace was a nonsense.
After all, all these freedoms that Paul had taught them about leads to loose living. No, no, go back to the old Jewish law. To circumcision. To tithing. To all the things that you have to do to appease God. After all, in many respects, you look around at all the other religions in this world, and their all about appeasing one or more gods.
So Paul writes this to them:
Galatians 4:8-11: Formerly, when you did not know God, you were enslaved to beings that by nature are not gods. Now, however, that you have come to know God, or rather to be known by God, how can you turn back again to the weak and beggarly elemental spirits? How can you want to be enslaved to them again? You are observing special days, and months, and seasons, and years. I am afraid that my work for you may have been wasted.
Let me hit you right between the eyes. Is that what you’re doing? Having heard about the grace you have in Jesus Christ, have you returned back to the old ways of following a bunch of rules?
Because if you have, the work of Jesus on that Cross for you, is being wasted. Completely … wasted.
That’s God’s Word. Fresh … for you … today.
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