For freedom Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery. Galatians 5:1

When he was ten years old, our son was very independent and truly did not understand why he needed parents.

We were homeschooling so I gave him an assignment. He was to write an essay explaining what he would do if we gave him one day without parents. The understanding was that I would perform no motherly duties: no hugs when hurt, no instruction on school assignments for the day, no cooking, no cleaning up.

The essay would determine whether he got a “day off.”

There was one memorable sentence in the essay. “If I had the day off I would ride my bike down Spring Street and feel the freedom.”  (Spring Street was a busy street with a steep hill that was strictly off limits.)

Today, I have been studying Galatians and I can “feel the freedom!”

Paul is trying to get the Galatians to remember the teaching that he had given to them, and they had accepted, that grounded them in the faith. Since then, Paul had moved on and some false teachers had come in and were adding to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. They were adding circumcision and starting to “observe days and months and seasons and years (Galatians 4:10)!”

Paul calls all these laws that were being reintroduced, “elementary principles of the world,” that they had learned as children. He reminds the Galatians that “when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth His Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons (Galatians 4:4-5).”

Christ subjected Himself to the law, took the punishment of the law, so that He could secure our redemption from it! This is freedom – not from keeping the law as best we can, but from having to perfectly follow it in order to be saved from Hell. No one can possibly do that, except the One who did, Jesus Christ.

In my Facebook feed and Tweets on Twitter, I see evidence that there are more Galatians around. These Christians have heard the Gospel of Jesus Christ in all its fullness, but are listening to teaching that says we must observe “this” day or “that” feast.

They are getting all tied up in the law that Christ has fulfilled and ignoring the mercy and grace of Jesus Christ in His atoning sacrifice for our sin.

My fear is that by being bound by the keeping of the “days and months and seasons and years,” precious time is being taken from our call to love and serve our neighbors.

We must love the law of God and try to keep it with the power of the Holy Spirit as it applies today. But, please enjoy the knowledge that, through faith in Jesus Christ, you, too, can feel the freedom from those elementary principles of the world.