Love sisters, love.  What a challenge!  Apart from this love thing, our freedom diminishes into anarchy.  “Every man did what was right in his own eyes.”  If we spend our time biting and ravaging each other, consumed with one another, watch out, in no time, we will annihilate each other, and where will our precious freedom be then? 

Paul gives us fifteen one-word illustrations of what not to be.  

(list from Aramaic Bible in Plain English, definition from The Message)

*Fornication—-repetitive, loveless, cheap sex which destroys intimacy

*Impurity—-a stinking accumulation of mental and emotional garbage that divides the common from the holy and profanes it 

*Whoredom—-frenzied and joyless grabs for happiness makes intimacy boring

*The worship of idols—-trinket gods that disconnect our worship from the mystery of the trinity and commercialize it.

*Witchcraft—-magic-show religion severs means from ends and trivializes everything

*Hate—-paranoid loneliness isolates outrage from its context in righteousness

*Contention—-cutthroat competition tears the values of goodness and makes ruthless competition of it

*Rivalry—-all-consuming-yet-never-satisfied wants empties freely offered admiration of its inner core of reverence

*Rage—-a brutal temper splits a natural yearning for justice from the great body of truth 

*Insolence—-an impotence to love or be loved cuts the legitimacy of personal needs adrift 

*Dissensions—-divided homes and divided lives—-splinters pieces of the finite from the infinite and makes chaos.

*Divisions—-small-minded and lopsided pursuits partition off one favorite truth from the mansion of truth and narrow it

*Envy—-the vicious habit of depersonalizing everyone into a rival, disengaging the elements of diversity from their design

*Drunkenness—-uncontrolled and uncontrollable addictions divorces appetite from nourishment

*Orgies—-ugly parodies of community that split apart ecstasy from liturgy and result in nothing but headaches and nausea

Take heed, Paul says, that you are not consumed by one another.  Where there is no connectedness, there is no freedom.  Get rid of phrases like “free to be yourself” or “Do your own thing.”  Those perceptions promise freedom but never deliver it.  Each of those fifteen words pretends to speak freedom.  They violate the reality of freedom rooted first in God’s love and then outward to love one another.  Freedom without love is like a blind man with no guidance.  We must remember the devil is a conjurer and a liar.  Sin never admits its true character.

The letter to the Galatians reminds us that the whole law is summed up and fulfilled “through love.”  When we love someone as ourselves, we fulfill the law.  However, to love my neighbor less than myself is to treat them as a means to my own end, self-gain.  To love them more than myself would set them up for using me as a means to their end.  This command to love…as ourselves protects our freedom.  We must carefully guard our freedom.  It is a gift that no one can take it away.  However, we can walk out of it.  

We aren’t in control of this uphill climb.  We encounter others squandering freedom. We must not focus on them or what they are doing.  It is up to us to keep our focus and be led by the Spirit.  A raging storm between the flesh and the Spirit occurs internally and externally.  The Spirit who leads us by gentle waters is stronger than the storm that rages.  

Reshaping our preconceived notions and breaking our preconditioned response patterns takes a minute.  We battle because it’s not our or the world’s nature.  This love is born out of a relationship with God in Christ.  It is the only way.    

Sisters, we are free to love.  We are free to respond to a relationship with God and develop relationships.  We are free to do that; we really are!  This freedom from a life of faith has a quiet naturalness to it.  It comes from a balance of being led by the Spirit and walking with the Spirit.