April 6

Today's Reading: Galatians 5:1-26

Paul is writing here to address some false teachers who were proclaiming that it was necessary to be circumcised and become a Jew before becoming a disciple of Jesus. His main idea in this chapter is that doing so would put people in bondage to the law rather than giving them the freedom that is available in Christ.

Today, few would hold to that idea that was prevalent in the Galatian churches, but it is not uncommon at all to find Christians and churches who develop their own sets of rules  that they use to determine who is a "real Christian". We should resist any such efforts to put Christians right back into the same kind of bondage that Jesus freed us from. That obviously does not mean, however, that we are to use the freedom we have in Jesus as license to sin. Paul had a lot to say about that in Romans 6.