Sabbath: From Slaves to Heirs
Image © Pacific Press from GoodSalt.com
Read for This Week’s Study: Gal. 3:26-4:20; Rom. 6:1-11; Heb. 2:14-18; Heb. 4:14-15; Rom. 9:4-5.
Memory Text: “So you are no longer a slave, but a son, and if a son, then an heir through God” (Galatians 4:7, ESV).
Paul tells the Galatians that they should not live and act as slaves but as the sons and daughters of God, with all the rights and privileges thereof — a truth that the young Martin Luther needed to hear. As his convictions of sin deepened, the young man sought by his own works to obtain pardon and peace. He led a most rigorous life, endeavoring by fasting, vigils, and scourgings to subdue the evils of his nature, from which the monastic life had brought no release. He shrank from no sacrifice by which he might attain to that purity of heart which would enable him to stand approved before God. He was, he had said later, a pious monk who strictly followed the rules of his order, and yet he found no peace within. “If ever monk could obtain heaven by his monkish works, I should certainly have been entitled to it.” Yet it didn’t work for him.
Only as he later began to understand the truth about salvation in Christ, as revealed in the Galatians, did he ever start to have any kind of spiritual freedom and hope for his own soul. As a result, too, our world has never been the same.
It is noteworthy that many children of God still live like slaves though they bask in the privileges of the freedoms found in Christ. Freedom from guilty, freedom from fear of the unknown, freedom from the fear of failure and many myriad forms of enslavement which oppress those who do not know God. What a relieve to know that according to John 1:12 we are now the children of God in Jesus , and there is no need for us to live like slaves.
To be sons and daughters of God gives a sense of permenancy. No matter how far you may fall Christ is there to pick us up.As a slave your worth is only as good as your work.lets embrace our privileged position of being in God’s family.
So I have a thought. Why is it than, that people who are in monasteries, and in Catholic churches that never marry, assuming that they don’t drink, if they read the Bib!e like we do, how come they think that if they do the things that they abstain from, like marriage, praying in weird positions how come they don’t see that they are saved by grace? That they don’t have to go to extremes like Martin Luther did?
Interesting, the possibilities of being an heir in our society. Those that are adopted parents, If they have children by birth and there is now what we call step children, unusual problems are often a challenge. Such as money that is allotted if the parents die with a will and legal shares are distributed. They are all children of the parents. In well regulated families they are all loving fathers and mothers of all the children and want what is best for them. I believe there is a correlation to what Paul is saying in Galatians 4:7