We have been set free! Christ Jesus has delivered us from law, sin, and death through God’s grace and our faith in him. We have been set free from trying to be justified by our adherence to the law. We now serve God out of our thankfulness for his grace, empowered by the Holy Spirit to share in the salvation that Jesus has poured out upon us. So how will we use this freedom? We must now allow ourselves to be “burdened again by a yoke of slavery” to sin or law-keeping! Instead, we live by the power of the Holy Spirit so we can be transformed to become more and more like Jesus as we fulfill the “righteous requirement of the law” as we “do not live according to the flesh but according to the Spirit”. “It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery.” Galatians 5:1
June 5
Or don’t you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in