United Methodist Church Westlake Village

Breaking Free from Religious Rules

• United Methodist Church Westlake Village

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Freedom takes on profound new meaning when examined through the lens of Paul's letter to the Galatians. Beyond the political liberty we often celebrate, Paul reveals a deeper spiritual freedom that liberates believers from the burden of religious rule-following toward an authentic relationship with God.

The message unpacks how early Christianity navigated its Jewish roots while establishing a distinct identity. Paul's nuanced contrast between "law" and "faith" wasn't rejecting divine guidance but transforming how we understand it. The Levitical laws—from dietary restrictions to circumcision—once served as clear markers of religious devotion. But Paul suggests we've matured spiritually, much like children who grow from needing explicit rules to grasping the principles behind them.

This evolution brings remarkable freedom. No longer must we measure our worthiness through perfect adherence to religious regulations. Instead, we're justified through faith—trusting God's presence and living that trust in relationship with others. The focus shifts from numerous specific behaviors to core principles like loving God and neighbor. Most liberating is the "implied space for grace" that comes with this understanding. Where law offers only obedience or disobedience, faith creates room for growth, learning, and restoration when we inevitably fall short.

What does this mean for us today? We're invited to celebrate the freedom to be authentically human while growing toward who God created us to be. We aren't "enslaved by the worst things we seem to end up doing" because God's unconditional love provides a way forward. This Independence Day season, consider what it means to be spiritually free—to know a God who loves you completely and has equipped you with everything needed to bring something valuable to this world. That's true freedom worth celebrating.

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Pastor Darren:

Well, this turned out to be even more serendipitous that we have this passage here. I didn't intend for this so much, but this passage in Galatians it doesn't actually use the word freedom, but a lot of passages from Paul in his letters that are very similar to this do so I thought, oh, this would be an interesting time to talk about freedom, two days after our Independence Day celebrations, and after we finish I have arranged for some fireworks to blow up in this region, and in this region I'm suggesting you wet yourself down. Just kidding if that wasn't clear, anyway. So do you ever wonder about the world in which Christianity is trying to get established? Jesus has been crucified, been resurrected. Now we've got the apostles, we've got Paul out there trying to establish Christianity, right, and we know that that is a world where there was Roman oppression. So there was that issue to deal with, in fact very significant Roman oppression to the extent that they tore down the temple, the Jewish temple. So I mean it was very significant. But then you also have this relationship between the Jewish faith and the Christian faith, this new thing that has been evolving from the Jewish faith, and if you think about it, you can imagine the nuance that would be needed by somebody like Paul to be able to describe that difference and the importance of that difference and the importance of that difference. We are a religion that is grounded in the Hebrew Bible, in the scriptures of the Old Testament. So we are grounded in the Jewish faith but we are a significant evolution from that faith and so that nuance could be pretty significant in those early, early days. Nuance could be pretty significant in those early, early days. And today Christianity has reached far, far more broad than the Jewish faith. But in the time the Jewish faith was the established religion. So Christianity is kind of the upstart, trying to get out there, get known.

Pastor Darren:

So this is all that's going on, and in the midst of it Paul is trying to say it's this and this, and I hope you can hear the difficulty of that nuance, of that challenge, and he's trying to do it persuasively. He's trying to help people understand this Christianity. This is the way to go. This is the thing that's going to bring you more identification with God. So at this point I want to make sure I say I'm comparing Christianity to the Hebrew faith of 2,000 years ago and that the Jewish faith has evolved since then. So it's an unfair comparison to be making. So just understand that, as we're doing this, because we're trying to understand what was written and the context of it being written in its time and what the conversation was about. So we know that the Jewish faith has evolved, just as the Christian faith has evolved, and so a modern conversation would be more useful. But, digging into our scriptures, we want to understand exactly what was going on there.

Pastor Darren:

And Paul he's using two words to describe this nuance he uses law and he uses faith law and he uses faith. Now, we should know law doesn't mean what we generally believe that it means today. Right, when we think of law, we're thinking about government. Right, we're talking about a society developing a government class that establishes the laws, adjusts the laws, withholds the laws and tries to help everybody else follow the laws. That's what we do as a society together, so that we can exist A little different from the time of the kings, where the king, it was mainly the directive of a single person deciding what would be true and what would be law and what would be punishable and what wouldn't. We moved to this other system that was based in laws that we establish as a society and then uphold as a society.

Pastor Darren:

So, for the early people of faith, this was not how they understood the word law. For them, the law was the instruction of faith. The law was how you lived out faith. It was a list of laws You've heard the phrase Levitical laws. They were behaviors that one was expected to follow as a way of showing that they had faith. And if you were trying to measure your faith well, it was somewhat easy you would measure it against how much did you follow these rules and these laws that basically define what it is to be Jewish in the day?

Pastor Darren:

So, paul, what he's trying to do is help everybody move into this new awareness, this new way of understanding God's presence and God's desire for us, understanding God's presence and God's desire for us. It's an awareness that's not grounded in religious laws and rules, but in the presence of the Spirit that we are looking to engage with this Spirit, this presence of God in and amongst us. When he's talking about faith presence of God in and amongst us when he's talking about faith, he's talking about trusting God's presence in the world around us, and you know me, I would argue he's also talking about living that faith, living that trust in God's presence, not just believing it but acting as if it's true, and we would be measuring our success in that space a fair amount differently. Right, as you can probably imagine, you might refer to the Great Commandment as a way to measure how we live into that new understanding. Right, love God and love neighbor. So now, we're not talking about rules about eating or keeping food, or rules about women and men and how they live together, or talking about increasing the population, if you know what I mean. We're talking about different markers and measures, and they imply a different and, I might argue, a more intimate relationship with God.

Pastor Darren:

For me, the metaphor that I often will go to in this context is about parenting, parenting when we're parenting young children. Really, all along the journey there's these stages, there's these places where they need structure, they need rules, and sometimes they don't even understand why they have the rules, and sometimes they aren't even glad there are rules. Amen, we know kids, although we probably shouldn't pretend we're any different. All right, let's be honest. Not all of us like rules, but we know that progression.

Pastor Darren:

There's a time that if we're going to send our kids to the park, it starts off with okay, here are the rules around the park. First you only go with mom or dad and we've got to make sure we look both ways and we always are taking care of each other and taking care of our. You know there's these rules. And then the more you do it, the more you start understanding the spirit of the rules. And as you build that trust in your kids that they understand the spirit of the rules, they're given more and more freedom to be able to live that out all the way into teenage-dom. You know where you go, from having curfews and only being able to drive and to certain places or during certain times and things like that, all the way to okay, they've proven they understand the spirit of these rules. It's about safety, it's about respect and all that stuff.

Pastor Darren:

I think that is the best metaphor that I feel like I can come up with, or at least that comes to my brain when I'm talking about the distinction Paul is trying to make 2,000 years ago from the Jewish faith that we had reached a stage where we were ready for a place where we understood the spirit of the law and we didn't necessarily need all of the law, and those of you who have read all of the law probably would understand that it would come with a good feeling of freedom as well. Right, we were moving away from some words like disciplinarian as a guideline for our faith and more to something more gracious. But can you imagine the people who are living in those times understanding that maybe it wasn't all about following these rules? All of a sudden, you can realize wait, I might be able to eat what I want. I might be able to eat whatever I want. I might be able to live however I want to live. You can maybe imagine how that might have felt. And I haven't even mentioned one of the big ones, right Circumcision, am I right? Okay, none of you are real impressed with that. I'm guessing my brothers back 2,000, 3,000 years ago. It was a bigger deal than the way you're treating it right now. I think it was significant. We're reading Genesis right now.

Pastor Darren:

I'm pretty convinced that the day that Abram went back to all the fellas and said, hey, here's what God wants us to do, that was not the happiest day at camp, right, in fact, it might have been one of the worst, I would think, second only to the day they had to do it Right? So these laws that in some ways can feel to some maybe meaningless, maybe cumbersome. They might start feeling that this freedom, that faith, isn't about just following this big set of laws. Following God doesn't mean just this. It really, in a lot of ways, comes down to some simpler things, some more direct things. So let's see, I lost myself just a little bit.

Pastor Darren:

Anyway, in addition, and maybe more importantly than all of this, we move from this arena of law as being sort of an obedience to this well, this arena where law and obedience is what faith is, to a different arena. It's an arena where it is grounded in our faith and our belief and our capacity to live out that belief. And then even one more step being able to recognize God's grace when we don't do it quite as well as maybe we could have or should have. This whole new arena that just feels, that must have felt just so freeing to those who were beginning to embrace it, this new mindset, instead of faith being this realm of policemen making sure we followed these rules, at least in its most simplistic understanding, to a different realm where it feels more like healthy parenting, where you have a parent entity, like a God, that is wanting as much for us as we want for ourselves and trying to create the arena of grace that allows us to live that out with some confidence, some security. So freedom, right? What exactly is going on with this idea of freedom in the way Paul is understanding it?

Pastor Darren:

Often when we talk about freedom in our modern society, we're talking about some sort of God-ordained freedom amidst society. I think we might want to slow the roll just a little bit on that, because I don't think Paul is really talking about freedom from following the laws of society. We have this system of justice. It's built on laws to maintain justice, to maintain equity. In today's world we often see freedom as a state of having as few of these guidelines, as few of these laws, as little of this interference as possible, as little outward control of the individual. That's kind of how we talk when we're talking about freedom. Often, the less control over the individual, the better it is, and maybe even God endowed that Well.

Pastor Darren:

When we're reading through our scriptures we probably ought to recognize that is not the type of freedom that Paul is talking about. He's talking about. Spiritual freedom is what Paul's talking about. We are free because we aren't just following rules as a way to live faith. Many of these rules again could appear meaningless, can feel cumbersome, where we're trying to understand the connection between that rule and how it benefits God or how it benefits God's world, if it's God's world. No, in this new arena, this new awareness, we're focused on the core of what matters, the core of what God wants from us. Love God, love neighbor, maybe like last week's passage from the Hebrew Bible in Micah do justice, love kindness, walk humbly. Those are the guidelines we're working from and there also comes an intellectual peace, maybe even a freedom from having that make a little more sense to us, god blessing us with an understanding that connects in our own brains, and the freedom that comes from that awareness and that confidence.

Pastor Darren:

Now, it's not that this statement about freedom being God-ordained freedom from governmental laws and societal laws is theologically wrong, necessarily. In fact, we could probably have some interesting conversation about that in the arena of faith, but we would want to recognize that it is an extrapolation of Scripture. We will have taken some liberties to go to that place, that definition of freedom. We'd been taking some liberties in our reading of Scripture to be able to do that. That's not what Paul was originally saying. He's talking about spiritual freedom. A spiritual freedom I see mostly in verse 24 of our passage today.

Pastor Darren:

Therefore, the law was our disciplinarian until Christ came, so that we might be justified by faith. Some of you may remember we talked about justified by faith. I sometimes like the word made worthy or made to know we have worth in God's eyes. In God's eyes we know we have worth in the way God created us and in God's intention for us. That is the justification by faith, but it's not coming from this disciplinarian anymore.

Pastor Darren:

With law there is a measure of blind obedience that can feel graceless. We are justified or understand as worthy to God by how we obey. But with faith there's this implied space for grace, god's unconditional love. In that space we can live more freely, knowing we can maintain a relationship, a meaningful relationship with God. Despite our inevitable humanity, we aren't enslaved by the worst things that we seem to end up doing, because God offers us grace.

Pastor Darren:

That's the freedom that Paul is talking about. So here, in this sacred time for we Americans, where we are celebrating all that is wonderful about our country and we're celebrating our values like freedom, I'm going to suggest you take some time to reflect on what it means to be spiritually free, to be blessed with this understanding of God in which we know a God that loves us loves us to the extent that it comes out in ways of wanting us to succeed as much as we ourselves want to succeed, an awareness that comes with knowing that God put inside of us the things that we need to be able to bring something of value and worth to this world. That's the kind of freedom Paul was hoping we would understand Freedom to be exactly who God wanted us to be and not to have to worry about our humanity getting in the way all the time. To me, that's something to celebrate to know that God is on our side. Amen.