Are you right with God just because you "follow the rules"

The person who lives in right relationship with God does it by embracing what God arranges for him (Gal 3:11)

Hello Dear Friends-

Today's message comes after a wonderful Mothers Day weekend and a return to reality. For some of us, all of our days are generally pleasant; for others, we want to escape, running to those things that make us happiest. Whatever your situation is, please read today's scriptures and relect on your relationship with God.

Are you in right relationship with Him because you attend church every week? Do you have credit with God because of the large checks you write to the church? Or, do you believe you are right with God because you're generally a good person? Whatever your lives bring, and how you respond, reflect on the status of your relationship with God right now. Where should you be and how does religion support (or inhibit) that relationship? Better yet, how do other Christians impact your relationship with the Lord?

For further edification, read Galatians chapter 1-4 and invest the time in completing this exercise.

No matter how long this review and reflection takes, I pray that you will stick with it and allow it to spark your creative and spiritual energy. Spring is the time for sowing and charting new territories. Even though some of us are in the desert, please remember that new life grows there too. Allow this time of transition to refine you for the next stage of your life.

If all is well, and you are in the harvesting stages of your life, praise be to God! Serve Him by sharing this Word with someone else. Save a copy of this Word for your files because our lives occur in seasons and cycles. As we experience spring in one aspect of our lives, the onset of winter to can occur in another area. Keep this Word for encouragement.

In the meantime, stay Blessed,

K.

Galatians 3: 5-14

^{5 -6}Answer this question: Does the God who lavishly provides you with his own presence, his Holy Spirit, working things in your lives you could never do for yourselves, does he do these things because of your strenuous moral striving or because you trust him to do them in you? Don't these things happen among you just as they happened with Abraham? He believed God, and that act of belief was turned into a life that was right with God.

^{7 -8}Is it not obvious to you that persons who put their trust in Christ (not persons who put their trust in the law!) are like Abraham: children of faith? It was all laid out beforehand in Scripture that God would set things right with non-Jews by faith. Scripture anticipated this in the promise to Abraham: "All nations will be blessed in you."

^{9 -10}So those now who live by faith are blessed along with Abraham, who lived by faith—this is no new doctrine! And that means that anyone who tries to live by his own effort, independent of God, is doomed to failure. Scripture backs this up: "Utterly cursed is every person who fails to carry out every detail written in the Book of the law."

^{11 -12}The obvious impossibility of carrying out such a moral program should make it plain that no one can sustain a relationship with God that way. The person who lives in right relationship with God does it by embracing what God arranges for him. Doing things for God is the opposite of entering into what God does for you. Habakkuk had it right: "The person who believes God, is set right by God—and that's the real life." Rule-keeping does not naturally evolve into living by faith, but only perpetuates itself in more and more rule-keeping, a fact observed in Scripture: "The one who does these things [rule-keeping] continues to live by them."

^{13 -14}Christ redeemed us from that self-defeating, cursed life by absorbing it completely into himself. Do you remember the Scripture that says, "Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree"? That is what happened when Jesus was nailed to the cross: He became a curse, and at the same time dissolved the curse. And now, because of that, the air is cleared and we can see that Abraham's blessing is present and available for non-Jews, too. We are all able to receive God's life, his Spirit, in and with us by believing—just the way Abraham received it.