I hope to tie those a little bit together today as did Paul.  That’s kind of what I understand that he’s done here.  In the first four chapters, he’s talked a lot about law to these people who weren’t Jewish.  And then, in Chapter 5, he starts telling them about the freedom that they can find in Christ and not having to specifically be restricted by the Jewish law.  You know, I think the 4^th of July as we say it is Independence Day.  I want you to say those two words, “independence” and then I want you to say “religion” and “freedom”.  Freedom-it’s sort of almost upbeat “freedom”; and then we’ve got the patriotic songs and we feel like America and we are proud.  And then something about religion kind of, it’s kind of stifling isn’t it?  Not necessary Christianity, not necessarily spirituality, but religion.  It kind of has a box around it, restrictions, rules, regulations, restraints. 

            Paul says that sometimes our greatest liberation is, and can be found in, our commitment.  That’s a paradox of Christianity—that our greatest liberation can be found in our commitments.  Most of us might have questions about freedom, particularly in light of the war and some restrictions on personal freedoms in our country and trying to liberate others.  But we also have questions about religion, don’t we?  And one of the lessons that I learned, and you might have applied it yourself on the interstate, you can’t yield just a little.  You can’t yield the right-of-way just a little.  You either stop or you yield.  And many people stop when they are coming in to the interstate.  But it tells us to yield, to pause, to allow others to enter.   To yield—we forget that we have the freedom to not just freedom from.  In fact, what Paul does in Chapter 5, is he says, “You have freedom to let the spirit and the life of the spirit show in your life.  You as a Christian believer have the Holy Spirit. You don’t have to go get these qualities.”  See, that’s the difference with Christianity.  Christianity you don’t attain, you don’t obtain, it just becomes the gift of Christ in you and you allow yourself, your spirit to yield to the spirit of Christ.  And the fruit of the spirit Paul gives in the latter part of the chapter. 

            But with those fruits come freedom--freedom to exercise them, freedom so that when you exercise and allow the spirit of love that it drives out hate.  You have the freedom to exercise in your life patience.  You have the freedom to be gentle with those who aren’t.  You have the freedom, because of the spirit of Christ that works within you, to yield your self-control into another’s life.  You have the freedom to yield.  And that’s the real test of freedom, I think.  It’s not that we are free from but that we have freedom to. 

            I was, I guess, about the same age, 16 or so, when our youth minister decided that we all needed a little taste of reality.  And he was an EMT in Louisville General Hospital.  And that’s where all of the police cases were brought.  So if there was an accident or an incident in a bar perhaps, then the policemen would come in with the prisoners or whoever had been charged, perhaps in handcuffs, and we would treat them.  Well, he let us go down with him one night.  And it was a Saturday night.  About midnight things were not too lively.  But at 2:00 a.m. when the bars closed, it got very lively.  And there was a free-for-all in the emergency room because their had been a fight in a bar and all at once all those things that Paul talks about not being the fruit of the spirit came leaping forth and spewing forth more than bodily fluids in that emergency room.  There was jealousy, there was anger, there was dissension, there were quarrels.  There was probably a little bit of envy, a little bit of lust.  All these things that had been bottled up, came forth.  

            And Paul says that sometimes in our Christian lives that we think we are free from those things and then other times we realize that we too are stuck in a roundabout, that we are stuck in a roundabout that we can’t get off of.  Just like in Paoli there was a roundabout and I couldn’t get across it by standing still.  There is a roundabout in our lives that we can get on like a merry-go-round and suddenly we find ourselves to be full of struggles and irritations and resentments.  And we just keep going in circles with the same crowd—not necessarily people but with emotions and with those, what Paul calls “fleshly desires”, that discord in our lives.  But we would like to be rid of that; we would like to be free from it. 

            Paul says one way to be free from it is, in his Letter to Galatians, to declare your independence, to declare your independent self, to lean upon the fruit of the spirit.  Don’t lean upon the law; it won’t free you.  He says, “Becoming right with God is only possible through faith in Jesus Christ.”  See, we aren’t given permission to do what we want to do whatever that might be.  Freedom in Christ is freedom to, freedom to do what Christ would do; freedom to serve like Christ served us.  And in fact, Paul challenges us that way—To love one another as Christ loved us.  To serve each other as Christ served us.  That’s more of an uplifting outcome of religion than just the legal side of it.  Paul says, “There is no law against these things.”   

There is no law against the fruit of the spirit of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness and self-control.  There is no law against it.  But you know, it does make people uncomfortable.  Has anybody ever said to you, “Stop being so nice to me.  You’re killing me with kindness”?  This week my sister got a phone call from a friend of her husbands.  Billy Jackson called my sister Julie and said, “Julie, you got to stop Jack from doing this.  He’s just giving me too much.”  She said, “Well, he likes to share things with you.  You know, whether its sea food, the truck, whatever it is.  I just like for him to get a chance to do that because he’s not had a brother and you’re the closest thing Jack has to a brother.  What do you mean that I have to get Jack to quit giving you things?”  (Now he didn’t give him his truck forever, but he did let him use it)  And she said, “Jack loves to do that.”  And he said, “Well, you’ve just go to get him to quit doing that.”  He says, “I’m really tired of writing those thank you notes.  Stop being so nice to me.”  See in the South if you don’t write a thank you note within 24-hours, your name is mud.  In fact, they even have a book called, Death is No Excuse.  Really, I have a copy of it! 

We didn’t have many people in our lives, have we that have said, “You know, you’re being so free with your expression of love I just can’t stand it.”  But Jesus says that.  Jesus says, “I will pause for you, I will allow you to be on a roundabout.  I will allow you access.”  And it doesn’t mean a merry-go-round of works righteousness.  Maybe we’ve never had anybody say that to us because we’ve not exercised our freedom in that type of excess.   

You know, it can be done and it is not even necessary to do it with someone that you don’t know—to exercise the freedom that Christ gives.  A friend of mine I had lunch with.  She’s been married now for more than 25 years.  And she said, “Nancy, I’ve got to tell you something.  I learned something this spring that saved my marriage.” I said, “Well, tell me what that is so that I can, you know, maybe utilize that in my pastoral counseling for young couples.”  And she said, “I can’t believe it took 25 years for me to know this.”  And she said, “I’ve been going to church since I was knee-high to a grasshopper.  I come in (and she’s a hospital administrator) and there is Al sitting on the couch watching TV.  (Her husband who works with corporate real estate trying to sell commercial real estate.)  And it looks like he’s not done anything all day.  I mean even the dishwasher has not been emptied and the grass has not been mowed. And so I’m thinking, ‘What have you been doing all day’.”  And she said, “I used to come in from work like that.  I’d be working until like 6:00 p.m. and I’d come in and there wouldn’t be any food fixed and it looked like he was just hanging out all day.”  She said, “I tried something different.”  She said, “I cam in and I almost said that, ‘Well, what have you been doing?’  Instead, I said, ‘Well, honey, how was your day?  Did you make any sales today?  What things are going on in your life?’”  And she said, “Nancy, you’re not going to believe this.  Al, who barely says two words, all at once he was just telling me how his life was.  And the calls that he had made, the rejections that he had had, the successes that he had, the way that he felt and what he was hopeful for.”  And she said, “You know really, I just treated him like I wanted to be treated.”   

I thought, “That’s not anything new, that’s the Golden Rule.”  So I just had to pull that out of my pastoral bag.  The Golden Rule—treat others the way you want to be treated.  She said, “When I talk to him the way that I would like to be talked to when I came through the door, all at once the communication between us has started flowing so much better.”  In fact they even spent a week together, just the two of them at home in a house that they got remodeled. And they didn’t kill each other! 

Bernie Siegel wrote a book called, Love, Medicine, and Miracles.  And it was a great help to a lot of folks who were dealing with cancer.  But he wrote another book of many books, but one was called, Peace, Love, and Healing.  And he said in that book, he says “I recommend this to people.  Try to go 24-hours without judging anyone.  Instead try to love and ask yourself, ‘How would I behave if I were a loving person?’”  He says, “Experiment with it—not judging, but loving everyone you meet and see.” He says, “It’s incredible how that changes your relationship with people.”  That freedom to not judge, that freedom to yield the right-of-way, that freedom to pause, that freedom to serve, freedom to serve others to give others place.   

Paul says that pursuing as we often talk about pursing happiness, pursuing a purpose in life, trying to find meaning will only happen as we serve one another, not as we use one another to satisfy our own personal desires.  In fact, Paul says in Verse 15 that what happens then is if we use others as means to satisfy our own desires, he uses the word “consume”, we literally consume one another.  Paul says that it is not so much the law that is given to us that allows us freedom as they were thinking of the law in the Jewish context, but it is the instructions that God has given.  We have freedom to follow those instructions.  We have freedom to follow God’s instructions in how best to relate to one another, to relate to God and to relate to the world around us following the example of Christ allowing and yielding to the fruit of the spirit that that might grow in our life. 

Jay Packer says in his book, Knowing and Doing God’s Will, love--those fruits of the spirit that you see listed in Galatians 5--he says those are nothing more than Christ-like reactions.  Love is a Christ-like reaction to those who have malice.  Joy is a Christ-like reaction in depressing circumstances.  Peace is a Christ-like reaction when troubles and threats and invitations to anxiety come at us.  And patience would be a Christ-like reaction to all that is maddening in our world, even the roundabouts.  And kindness would be the Christ-like reaction to all that are unkind.  Goodness, the Christ-like reaction to those who are bad people and have bad behavior.  While faithfulness and gentleness are Christ-like reactions to those who are living lies and are full of fury.  And lastly, self-control is the Christ-like reaction to any situation that goads you to lose your cool and hit back.

 That sounds like a good way to help others while exercising our freedom to.  It sort of is like the Salem roundabout that we yield the right-of-way to others, that we exercise our freedom so that others might get in the flow of God’s love that we won’t hold back or demand that they can conform, that they wait until they can do it the way that we say.  It is incredible how that might change our relationship with people.  Its incredible how that may make us better witnesses as followers of Christ just using our freedom to yield, to yield to Christ that works within us who is able to accomplish far more than we can imagine, think or believe.  It is for freedom that Christ has set us free.   

And this morning it is Christ that says, “Do you feel un-free?  Do you have resentments that you have below the surface that are keeping you on a roundabout?  Do you have anxieties that you just can’t put down?”  The Lord says, “I gave my life that you might be free, that you might know that wherever you are in life, God wants you to step off the merry-go-round of self-service, God wants you to step off the merry-go-round and the roundabout of always having to have the right answer.  God wants you to step off the roundabout and step in to His love.  He loves you as you are fully, completely.  And He desires that sweet, sweet communion that comes with the freedom to boldly access the throne of grace.  Thanks be to God in Christ Jesus.  Amen and Amen.

E-mail Comments to: Pastor Nancy Blevins

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