Galatians 5

There are two choices for each person that desires to enter heaven: one, they can fulfill the enter law and be perfect; two, they can believe in Jesus and accept salvation from sin. Of course, no one except Christ can fulfill the Law and be perfect, so really it's just one choice. But we always want to make things harder than they have to be.

When you see an ad on TV advertising a great new product that will completely change your world and it only costs $9.95, you think it's too good to be true (and you might be right). You immediately believe that there must be a catch. There must be a hidden cost. Maybe it really costs more money. Maybe it costs more time to use than the advertised. Maybe it's not as easy to setup as they implied. It doesn't really matter. We are programmed to look for the catch. So if we don't even believe a guy on TV selling us something unimportant for $9.95, how much more unlikely is it that we simply believe that our eternal salvation is free?

It's a hard concept to grasp. How could that possibly be free? After all that I've done, how could it cost me nothing? It just doesn't seem real unless I have to put some work into it. I actually had a person tell me once that they wouldn't attend a certain church in the DFW area ever again because they preached salvation by grace. I was really confused, but this person told me that salvation couldn't possibly be that easy and that if it were it wouldn't be worth having so they were going to find a church that preached salvation by works. It's sad but true, and the Galatians seem to have fallen into the same trap.

The problem with this trap is that it really does cost more than you think. Like Paul says, you can't pick and choose with the Law. If you are going to base your theology on the Law and works, that's fine, but you have to uphold the entire Law; not just the parts that you like. You can't add to it or take away from it. You've got to fulfill it as it is written or it doesn't do you any good. Neither the Galatians nor any of the churches that preach work based salvation want to hear that, though.

Mostly, they want to pull apart the rules and find the ones that they think they can do really well and make that the requirements for salvation while ignoring the ones that they don't like or that they aren't very good at. Fortunately for us, that doesn't matter for salvation. God doesn't look at how well we measure up to the Law because the Law has already been fulfilled. He looks at our faith in Christ and sees the fulfillment of the Law and the salvation that we have.

But what about good works? Does this mean that once we are saved we don't have to do any good works? Sort of. We don't have to do them for salvation, but they will happen by default. When you live by the Spirit, the fruits of the Spirit just happen: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Good works are the result of salvation, not the other way around.