I read this this excerpt this morning while doing Tim Keller’s Galatians Bible study (one of the most life-changing & liberating explorations of Scripture I have ever come across) and the truth of it is piercing my heart of stone. I think that I generally do not feel free from accusation, I readily judge my standing before God upon my present “achievements” or “failures”or how I’m presently feeling… I think that the modernist thought that “it matters not what others think of you- only what you think about yourself” has grown so engrained into my thought-process (though a 2002 NY Times article, among dozens of others, showed that our modern beliefs about self-esteem seem to be enitrely faulty) that I struggle daily to escape it. Oh, may I believe & live in faith like Paul, who wrote in 1 Cor 4, that “it is a very small thing that I should be judged by you or by any human court. In fact, I do not even judge myself.” Keller also has a sermon on this passage called ”Blessed Self-Fogetfulness”, and it is one of the best I’ve ever heard in my life. He argues that our egos should be as our toes: as long as they are working properly, we shouldn’t notice them… Instead, they are empty, painful, busy, & fragile because we try to puff them up instead of fill them up. Someone whose ego is filled by Christ can enjoy another’s success like he enjoys the sunrise… We are free from accusation in Christ, because the verdict has already been handed down… It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. You can find a free twenty-minute clip of the sermon here.

Richard Lovelace, The Dynamics of Spiritual Life ( Downers Grove, Ill.:IVP, 1979)

A conscience which is not fully enlightened both to the seriousness of its condition

before God, and to the grandeur of God’s merciful provision of redemption, will

inevitably fall prey to anxiety, pride, sensuality and all the other expressions of that

unconscious despair which Kierkegaard called “the sickness unto death.” [So] we start

each day with our personal security resting not on…the sacrifice of Christ but on our

present feelings or recent achievements… Since these arguments will not quiet the

human conscience, we are inevitably moved either to discouragement and apathy or to

a self-righteousness which falsifies the record to achieve a sense of peace

Much that we have interpreted as a defect of sanctification in church people is really

an outgrowth of their loss of bearing with respect to justification. Christians who are no

longer sure that God loves and accepts them in Jesus, apart from their present spiritual

achievements, are subconsciously radically insecure persons — much less secure than

non-Christians, because of the constant bulletins they receive from their Christian

environment about the holiness of God and the righteousness they are supposed to

have. Their insecurity shows itself in pride, a fierce, defensive assertion of their own

righteousness and defensive criticism of others. They come naturally to hate other

cultural styles and other races in order to bolster their own security and discharge their

suppressed anger. They cling desperately to legal, pharisaical righteousness, but envy,

jealousy and other branches on the tree of sin grow out of their fundamental insecurity…

It is often said today, in circles which blend popular psychology with Christianity, that

we must love ourselves before we can be set free to love others… But no realistic

human beings find it easy to love or forgive themselves, and hence their self-

acceptance must be grounded in their awareness that God accepts them in Christ…

[There is much evidence in our experience against the idea that we are children of God,

but] the faith that surmounts the evidence and is able to warm itself at the fire of God’s

love, instead of having to steal love and self-acceptance from other sources, is actually

the root of holiness…

My prayer for you & my prayer for myself: “For this reason, because I have heard of your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love toward all the saints, I do not cease to give thanks for you, remembering you in my prayers, that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of him, having the eyes of your hearts enlightened, that you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints, and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power toward us who believe, according to the working of his great might that he worked in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places… [and] that according to the riches of his glory he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith—that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.”

Tags: freedom, galatians, tim keller