February 3, 2025: Monday Bible Study on Paul’s letter to the Galatians 3:15-22
Monday morning greetings to all of you who are on this email to do this morning's Bible Study.
On Sunday at American, we had our congregational meeting. We approved the program budget with a small decrease in the overall budget for 2025. We also elected our new Congregational Council. Our first council meeting will be after church on Sunday, in my office. We will also install the new council that morning at worship. I hope that you will be able to be with us at the worship service that morning. I thank God for the Gospel Music Group and their wonderful talents. Jeff, our drummer, and vocalists Annette, Melody, Debbie, Holly, Jeremiah, and Joanna. The Bell Choir begins their work on their new Easter music in the next several weeks. Our members' commitment to ring their bells is amazing. I am the director, but without the talents of Holly, Annette, Tricia, Gail, Jared, Fyn, and Melody we could not have the bells ringing at our worship. We have welcomed 2 new members in the last two months too. Welcome to Cathy and Gerri. Life continues at American, and we all need to be thankful to God for our small congregation's vitality, and for His call on all of our lives to witness to the Gospel, and offer our support of our time, talents, and resources for the work of Christ's church at American.
Today we move to Galatians 3:15-22. A quick read of this passage reveals exactly how complicated, Paul, a former Pharisee could be as he unwound the complications between the law of Moses, and the Grace we all know through Jesus Christ.
In more modern terms, and you may have experienced this in the life of your family at the very difficult time of arranging for celebrations of life (funerals) for them. If everything is not stated clearly in legal documents, directing the family to arrange for the deceased's wishes in their celebration of life, the family is likely to not see eye to eye on what they each think their family member would have wanted for the service. In today's reading it is a similar situation with regards to law and grace. Paul tells the reader of this letter, that God did spell out want He wanted in black and white. And now, the agitators who are present with the Galatian community are really trying to insert their own agendas in this congregation's life. Instead of the freedom in Christ which Paul had previously indicated, these people wanted instead to create strong ethnic ties, which included circumcision as the way in which the community of believers must be filled. Gentiles getting circumcised was how these Gentiles must become members of the Galatian Church. It is here that you and I must remember that God's original covenant with Abraham was based on Abraham's faith, not the law. Paul says that placing such a measure as keeping the law as how outsiders might join the Galatians' Church is taking the law, which Paul now understands is only an interim move by God to maintain His children until the fullness of God's grace is revealed in Jesus Christ. Therefore, it is belief that is required by God as the means of becoming part of His Christian Children. Is it any wonder that the Jews who wanted the Law to be in a position of primacy, help us to know that in some ways today, we can get caught doing the same thing in our modern-day faith communities, failing to be open to all people who believe. In recent decades in the ELCA Lutheran Church we have been through these conversations and through representative national assemblies, have come much closer to inclusivity for all people who believe in Christ as their Lord and Savior. If we still look to the Old Testament for our guide in being community, we, like the interlopers who wanted the primacy of the law above all else, will discover, time and again, that as Paul tells us, we are set free from the burden of earning our way before God, and instead can only come to righteousness through our faith in Jesus Christ. No person could ever be the mediator of the one family that was to be created through Abraham, not even Moses. One family, which Abraham was promised, must depend on something more than obedience to the Law. God saw righteous for Abraham and all who would follow through belief, not through the Law of Moses which followed. The completion of God's intent to save His created children, was only through the Messiah, Jesus Christ. He alone is the means by which all of us will be received in God's Heaven, through faith alone, revealed to us in God's Word, and held in our lives by the Love of the Spirit.
May God bless your life today and always.
In Christ's love, Pastor Kim
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