Devotions - Read Online
Tuesday | 27 June 2017
When a person receives a messenger of Christ, they hear the word of present truth that proclaims to them their name as a son of God. The preaching of a messenger is not just words or information about God. Christ Himself, through His messengers, pours out upon them the spirit of grace and supplication so that they can see Christ as crucified for them. Then they are able to mourn. Then they are able to receive the Spirit of God by which they are born. Once a person has been born of God, they will desire to be baptised into Christ and joined to the fellowship of His offering. This includes a participation in the sufferings of Christ.
Paul acknowledged that the Galatian Christians had indeed received the Spirit of Christ and joined the fellowship of Christ’s offering. However, instead of continuing in the way of the Spirit, they were seeking to have life apart from a fellowship in Christ’s offering. He said to them, ‘Having begun in the Spirit, are you now being made perfect by the flesh? Have you suffered so many things in vain – if indeed it was in vain?’ Judaising teachers from Jerusalem had come to the Christians in Asia, instructing the Gentile Christians to be circumcised in order to be saved. These teachers wanted to avoid persecution and suffering at the hands of the Jewish religious leaders, and were seeking their favour by attempting to proselytise the Gentiles to the Jewish religion. As a consequence of their influence, the Galatian believers were beginning to accept the false proposition that eternal life could be obtained by means other than by the Spirit, through participation in the offering of Christ.
Paul called the Judaisers, ‘the world’, and claimed that if the Galatians pursued relevance to the world as an alternative to an ongoing participation in the sufferings of Christ, then they would be severed from Christ’s body and forfeit their eternal reward. This is a most sobering consideration.
Further Study:
Galatians 6
Daily Proverb:
Proverbs 27
References:
Gal 3:3-4
Are you so foolish? Having begun by the Spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh? (4) Did you suffer so many things in vain--if indeed it was in vain?
Act 15:1
Some men came down from Judea and began teaching the brethren, "Unless you are circumcised according to the custom of Moses, you cannot be saved."
Gal 5:4, 6
(4) You have been severed from Christ, you who are seeking to be justified by law; you have fallen from grace.
(6) For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision means anything, but faith working through love.
Php 3:10
That I may know Him and the power of His resurrection and the fellowship of His sufferings, being conformed to His death.
Col 2:11
And in Him you were also circumcised with a circumcision made without hands, in the removal of the body of the flesh by the circumcision of Christ.