Galatians 1:4 who gave himself for our sins to rescue us from the present evil age, according to the will of our God and Father,
I must confess something to you: in the past, I have not always read cards given to me on special occasions with all the sincerity and receptivity that the givers of the cards probably invested in the selection and purchase of the cards. I rushed through the reading of the preprinted words and went for the hand written words. I know for some, this might be an unforgivable slight, but it was not meant to be so.
This stems from the fact that I didn’t always spend as much time in the card selection process myself as I perhaps should have. But this bad behavior is in the past. I now will devote myself to spending hours standing the card aisles and carefully selecting the best card for the occasion. This is my pledge!
My wife found out that our local post office sells $6000 dollars worth of stamps every day! Who could be buying all those stamps? No one writes letters anymore. We all email, post, Snapchat, Instagram, don’t we? She of course found that out when she was buying stamps! We must be old!
Our text today comes from the opening greetings of Paul’s letter to the churches in the region of Galatia, part of modern Turkey. Paul spent almost thirty years traveling around his world visiting the major cities and sharing the liberating news of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection, and what that meant to everyone’s life.
Letters of Paul’s day, the first century AD, started with the author’s name and title, and then usually included some type of greeting. It is part of this greeting that is our text today. The previous verse that Paul wants to pass along grace and peace from both God the Father and from Jesus the Messiah. It is Jesus who is spoken about in our text today.
One of the central messages of Christianity is that Jesus gave Himself, gave His life, for us. He was the substitute, the one who died in our place. We deserved death, and He took the death we deserved on Himself. The substitutionary death is a core belief of orthodox Christian beliefs.
There are many today who have abandoned orthodox beliefs and have therefore rejected the Scripture’s proclamation that Jesus died for our sins. But this is exactly what the Scriptures proclaim. Our sins hindered our ability to have a relationship with God and with each other. Sin constantly got in the way. But Jesus made it possible for sin to be moved to the side, so that we could have direct access to the Father and to each other.
We needed rescue from this present evil age, because sin has had its impact on this world. If you doubt that, just look around. Bad things are happening. We are not getting better and better. The crime rates are not going down, and human hatred is not diminishing. We live in an evil age!
Jesus death and resurrection provides us rescue from the ongoing corruptive influences of sin, if we choose obedience to Him. Christians are not perfect human beings, but we are changed human beings. The core of who we are has been transformed by Jesus. We now operate on a different trajectory than we used to operate.
I guess the question arises, would other people know that our lives are on a different trajectory? Do we live differently? Do our lives speak the message of hope and transformation, or do we just look like everyone else?
Notice I didn’t say, that our speech is different. I said our lives get lived differently. Is that a reality? How do we spend our talent, time and treasure? Are they in line with the new trajectory?
The Arnold Journey 