Daily devotional · July 4
Free to Love
“It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not be encumbered once more by a yoke of slavery. Take notice: I, Paul, tell you that if you let yourselves be circumcised, Christ will be of no value to you at all. Again I testify to every man who gets himself circumcised that he is obligated to obey the whole law. You who are trying to be justified by the law have been severed from Christ; you have fallen away from grace. But by faith we eagerly await through the Spirit the hope of righteousness. For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision has any value. What matters is faith expressing itself through love.”
Paul writes to people who had been set free and were quietly walking back into chains, this time the chains of trying to earn God's approval. Freedom in Christ is not permission to do anything we like; it is release from the exhausting need to prove ourselves. Notice where the passage lands: the only thing that counts is faith working itself out through love. Freedom exists for the sake of loving others. Any faith that makes us more anxious, more comparing, or more judgmental has drifted from this. Around the start of July many countries celebrate their own kinds of independence, and it is a fitting moment to ask what still has hold of us. Today, identify one rule you have been using to measure your worth before God. Lay it down, and instead choose one concrete act of love toward a neighbor, without keeping score.
Prayer
Christ, you set me free. Teach me to use that freedom to love, not to prove myself.