We just did the NFL draft as I'm recording this. It was a couple of weeks ago. This is where the professional American football teams get to pick from all the best college football players. And it's if you're not a fan of sports, you know, this is it's an incredibly boring event. But if you are a fan of sports, it's an incredibly boring event. There's not much to watch. It takes a very long time. It's pretty drab. But one thing I do kind of like is getting a peek into the psyche of a kid who just found out they're going to be a gajillionaire and they're going to be famous because they got drafted to play at the highest level of this sport. And you listen to the interviews and you'll, you know, I this last time around, I heard two very different kinds of kids. One is, you know, very flamboyant, clearly trying to do the uh, I don't know what you want to call it, like more entertainer than football player routine. And I heard one of these kids come out, and the whole speech was about like all you just got the sense that he was going to get to indulge every crazy idea or impulse he's ever had, ever. Like, now I've got the freedom, the money, the resources, the fame, the positioning to do anything I want to do. And I'd be very nervous if I were the team that just drafted him as he's talking about this newfound freedom and all of the crazy things. You get the impression he's probably gonna want to do with it. Well, then you get hear the interview with the very next kid that gets drafted, and he's from the same school, the same part of the country, apparently the same person, but he's got a totally different perspective. And he comes out and talks about how this opportunity is gonna give him the freedom to become a part of a community, to serve other people, to learn to be a great teammate and to better himself as a person and to help his family. And both parties are using the same operative word, the same operative principle. It's freedom. But they're talking about using it for completely different things. Likewise in Galatians 5, that theme keeps coming up: slavery versus freedom, slavery versus freedom, there's freedom in Christ. And no doubt there were people in the conversation who were pushing back on Paul and were saying, What does he mean by freedom? And probably they were accusing him, well, definitely they were accusing him, of using the term freedom in Christ the same way the prior of those two freshly drafted kids was using the word freedom. Now I'm free to do what I want, any old time, anything. I can just any I'm gonna indulge every crazy single thing because I'm not bound by the law anymore. I can just, you know, I got forgiveness from Jesus, so we're just gonna go crazy here. Well, but Paul is making it really clear that that isn't what he means by freedom in Christ. He's gonna spell out here that this life by the Spirit, that is the big theme of the home stretch Act three of the book of Galatians, that this life by the Spirit that is born out of a freedom in Christ is one where you use your freedom to do redemptive stuff because you're freed up by no longer having this heavy, impossible burden of the law upon you. Instead, that burden has been lifted off of the Christian by the work of Christ. You're not bound by all of these impossible things anymore. Rather, the law did its job, it pointed you to Jesus, it pointed out your need, and now with this freedom in Christ, with guided by the Spirit and this life by the Spirit, you've got all kinds of freedom, not from responsibility, but freedom to do awesome kingdom redemptive stuff. So here's the text. Galatians 5, uh passage starts in verse 13. You know what? I'll just back it up and read verse 12 just for the sake of context. As for those agitators, I wish they'd go the whole way and emasculate themselves. You, my brothers and sisters, were called to be free, but don't use your freedom to indulge the flesh, rather, serve one another humbly in love, for the entire law is fulfilled in keeping this one command. Love your neighbor as yourself. Huh. I guess contextually I probably didn't need to read verse twelve. But if you caught everything after verse twelve, you see what we're driving at here. You see where we're at in the book. You're called to be free. Freedom in Christ. You've been given this thing. Okay, so now what are you gonna use it for? Because implicit in the word freedom, what comes with freedom is opportunity. You get to pick, you've got agency here, you have decision-making power, you're vested, you have a responsibility that's been handed off to you. What are you gonna do with it? Well, Paul's no idiot. He knows that you could use that kind of liberty, that kind of latitude, that kind of unburdenedness to do stupid stuff. Of course you could. Brothers, let me take an example from everyday life. I have two dogs, they're Pomeranian huskies, both of them. We got Maya and Freya. Maya's the old one, Freya's the baby. Freya's a little white wolf. She looks like a permanent baby husky. It's crazy. I mean, what's the cutest thing in all of dogdum? It's a baby husky. She's got the blue eyes and the curly tail and the perpetual smile, but she's tiny. It's just it's weird. It totally worked. Really cool breed. Maya, she looks more like a kind of border collie or something. She's what it looks like when a Pomski doesn't work out, a Pomeranian husky hybrid. They're both great dogs. Freya has been a real pest, but she's growing into it. She's getting better. She still chews things up too much, but she's becoming much more loyal. She's getting out a puppy and into dogdom. But this is a difference between them. If I give them too much freedom, like let's say just let them out in the yard and maybe forget to close the gate, the black dog, Maya, she's gone. That gate's open. Ha, suckers. I have freedom. I'm going to use it to inconvenience you by running as far away as possible. I got a tracker on her. We can go get her back or whatever. It's a pain in the butt and it's annoying. Freya, on the other hand, who is a nuisance in other ways, she doesn't use her freedom to run away. Rather, she uses her freedom to figure out that her sister ran away. We call them sisters, they're not literally sisters. And then she comes back to us and whines and lets us know, Maya left. She's gone. I don't think she's supposed to do that. And I just think, good job, little white wolf. You had all the freedom in the world. The great wide world was open to you. And rather than using that freedom to go and do something dumb like your sister, you came back to let us know what was up. What an amazing redemptive way to use your freedom, little puppy. Likewise with us. Anytime we have any kind of liberty, there is opportunity to do redemptive stuff. There's opportunity to do destructive stuff. There's opportunity to indulge dark impulses that comes with freedom. There's opportunity to do things with no accountability that are good because we just actually wanted to, because we feel gratitude or a sense of debt for the good things that have happened in our lives, and we want to give them away to other people, or a sense of awe of the things of the kingdom of God. And so we just want to live them out. Every single one of us have had both experiences with freedom and opportunity that we've had in our lives. Well, what Paul is saying is that if things are going right and you are living life by the Spirit, the freedom thing, it's not a negative. This is definitely a 100% unqualified good thing. You are unburdened from this entangling hassle that is trying to earn your own right standing with God that you can't get right anyway, that takes up all your time and all your thought and eliminates any ability to take any risk to go and try and do something good, you become an overly safe button pusher who isn't really vested in anything other than just not getting in trouble. Whereas in Christ, you are not burdened by that. There's all the opportunity not to indulge the flesh, but rather to serve one another humbly in love. And guess what? Sometimes you're going to try to serve one another humbly in love and do things that are good and productive and redemptive and beautiful and God-honoring, and you probably won't even get it right. It won't be that effective, or the whole thing will just backfire. But you are invited with this freedom into creativity and taking swings and trying to be a part of the beauty that is this whole family of faith, kingdom of God thing. And I love that this is what Paul is pivoting to because up until this point in the letter, most of what he's had to say has been defensive. He's got the defensive shield out and he's deflecting the arrows and the sword swings of you need to be doing the law. Everybody needs to be getting circumcised, and he's knocking this one away and knocking away that attack. But we still haven't really seen Paul's offense. We haven't seen really his constructive proposal yet. Okay, so if not the law, then what? Well, he said, faith is how you have right standing with God. But but like, how do you live? What do you do when that's all there is to getting right standing with God? When you don't have all of this clutter and obligation and this 80-hour a week full-time impress God job, what do you do with all that time that's freed up by your right standing with God being earned by the work of Christ on the cross and not by your adherence to the Old Testament law? What do you do with all of that? Well, now we're getting his constructive proposal. What you do with it is figure out how to be kingdom-y. What you do with it is figure out how to imitate Christ. What you do with it is be shrewd. Look at the world around you. Look at the situation you're in, look at your little tiny corner of the world that you live in that you might find mundane, that you might even be a little bit sick of, that you might be looking for a change from, but that's where you happen to be right now. Look at that situation. Look at the people who are there, look at the circumstances who are there, and think to yourself, what would it look like to do things that honor God and show other people the love of Christ, and that exemplify the values of the kingdom of God and bring the light of the kingdom of God into this place where I just happen to be right now. It's so empowering. There's such opportunity in it. And further, by choosing this phrase, life by the spirit, the hint, the intonation here on the front end of this flow of thought that Paul gets into here in the third act of Galatians, the intonation is that you don't even have to just make this stuff up and be ultra clever that somehow you're guided by the Holy Spirit. You're indwelt by God the Spirit and walked through this stuff. I mean, what he's describing is really a contrast between a reactionary approach to faith and life that says, I am shackled by all of this heavy burden of stuff, and all of my energy just has to go into dealing with this burden I drag around, versus nah, you're freed up to I mean, the world is it's wide open. What do you want to do with it? Well, at the most basic level, Paul's answer to that question is you've been set free. Don't use your freedom for idiotic things, obviously. Use your freedom for the thing that bought you the freedom in the first place for God, for his kingdom, for the glory of God, to serve others the way you were served when you didn't do it. Do it out of humility and love. Because you can. I mean, sure, God commands you to obey him and to love other people, but also you just can because the weight of sin and guilt and obligation have been lifted off of your shoulders by the work of Christ. In the same way that two kids who just came into a whole bunch of money because they're talented at football might look at their newfound freedom and react to it completely differently. One saying, Ah, now I have the freedom through the money and the fame and the power to do literally any idiotic thing that I would want to do that's selfish and destructive, and the other saying, now I have the freedom to do bigger and more redemptive things with the position and the opportunities that I've been given. So in the same way it was for the recipients of this letter to the Galatians, so in the same way it is for you. Freedom in Christ is available to you. What will we do with it? Well, Paul says, obviously, don't use it to engage the stuff of the flesh. Rather, use it to humbly serve one another in love. There's a lot more to unpack with that idea. Moving forward. That's plenty for now. I'm Matt. This is a 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.