Gentiles Share Abraham's Promise

God Destroys and Recreates

Abraham and Sarah Birth God's People

Galatians 3:6-14 The Message

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.

For Reflection

The answer is yes, God works things in your life in two ways.  First through God's intentional design of the Creation. Have you ever noticed how  a confluence of incidents has shaped your life?  Those are not just coincidental. God has gifted each of us with the capacity to respond to our environment and the freedom to choose our own life paths.  Daily, we confront choices that influence and alter the course of our lives.

Secondly, God guides our lives, but only upon request. God has given us a soul, a point in our hearts that yearns for righteousness.  That point is most active when we are frustrated with the darkness of our own decisions. The light of God illuminates the path toward God's intentions for us. It is that point when one embraces what God has prepared. It occurs when one gives up living life by one's own effort alone and begins to see the value of God's intentions and accepts God's promise that all things can be made right. 

Pray

Pray about all things.  Pray so that you can perceive the world as God has intended it to be.  Pray so that you can understand the limitations of viewing the world solely through the distortions of the human lens. Pray so that you can see clearly the world as God has created it. 

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