This transcript was generated by whisper.ai.

Welcome to Daily Drive Time Devotions and day two of our look together through
Galatians chapter five. We're going to look at verses two to four today. We
talked yesterday about saying yes to freedom and verses two to four beginning
back in verse one actually.

Paul focuses on the fact that you have to say no to slavery as you're saying yes
to freedom, slavery of your soul, slavery to your own good works. So let me
begin back up in verse one again. So Christ has really set us free.

Now make sure that you stay free and don't get tied up again in slavery to the
law. The idea there of slavery to the law in that verse is the idea of a yoke.
Don't tie yourself to the yoke of slavery, Paul is saying.

It is the picture of a yoke that would be put on an oxen's neck that would be
used to bear a burden. And Paul is painting the picture for us here that the
yoke that you wear shows the master that you have. Whoever's yoke is on you,
that's the person that is controlling you.

Now the Bible tells us that we need a master. As human beings, we don't get to
run life on our own. You got to serve somebody, as Bob Dylan said.

He put on Jesus' yoke. When he becomes your master, he said, "I will give you
rest, for my yoke is easy, well-fitting. It is light.

It is the one we're meant to wear. We're meant for him to be the master of our
lives. " The yoke of Christ is a miraculous yoke.

It doesn't restrict you, it frees you. It doesn't make the burden weightier, it
makes it easier. That's what Jesus wants to do in our lives.

But Paul says there's a different kind of yoke you can put on, and it's the yoke
to slavery. He talks about, "Do not, do not let yourself put on that yoke again.
" And he emphasizes why that's so important in verses two to four.

Put on this yoke, Paul says, and look at what you receive, verses two to four.
Listen, I, Paul, tell you this. If you are counting on circumcision to make you
right with God, then Christ cannot help you.

I'll say it again. If you are trying to find favor with God by being
circumcised, you must obey all of the regulations and the whole law of Moses.
For if you're trying to make yourself right with God by keeping the law, you
have been cut off from Christ.

You have fallen away from God's grace. Paul is painting this picture in these
verses of the yoke that we decide to put on. And in this picture, he says, "If
you put on the yoke of doing it your way, of getting closer to God by your own
good works, of growing just by your own good works rather than by faith and
grace, and then the works are a product of the faith and grace rather than the
source of the faith and grace in your life.

" You see the difference? God wants good works in your life, but they should be
the product of your faith, not the source of your faith. You don't work your way
to better faith.

You just have faith, and because of that, you do better works, the things that
God wants you to do. And Paul says, if you get that reversed, if you try to get
closer to God and grow in God based just on what you do, here's the weight, he
says. Here's the yoke, he says, that you bear.

First of all, he says, you lose Christ's help. You're pulling the weight alone.
Christ is of no benefit to you, he says.

You set aside the benefit of knowing Jesus Christ and his help, his strength in
your daily life, if you try to put on the ill-fitting yoke of the law. You're
trying to do it all by yourself. And the picture Paul gives here is of
circumcision, trying to find favor with God by being circumcised.

Now, let me remind you once again, because several people have asked as we've
gone through this book, we're not talking about the medical practice of being
circumcised or even the cultural decision for your son to be circumcised.
Somebody wrote me, my son was circumcised at birth. Does this mean that Christ
will be of no value to him, no benefit to him?

Absolutely not. This is not talking about the medical practice. This is talking
about somebody deciding to be circumcised in order to be closer to God and
feeling like if I don't keep that law that was in the Old Testament for the
Jewish people back then, then I cannot be close to God.

And Paul says, if you go down, if you go down that road of depending on
yourself, then you're pulling the weight alone. You lose Christ's help. He says
a second thing happens when you go down that road.

You must obey it all, he says. You pulling the weight alone and you're also
pulling the weight of the entire law. You can't say, you know, I think it's
important that we keep the law, let's say for instance of worshipping on
Saturday because it said so in the Old Testament.

And that's the one I'm going to choose. And if you don't keep that one law, you
really can't be close to Christ. Paul says it's either all or nothing.

If you decide that any one law has to be kept in order to be closer to God,
you're saying I'm going to pull the weight of the entire law. You are obligated.
The picture is you are obligated to the one whose yoke you wear.

They control your life. And to wear the yoke of the law is not to be obligated
just to a part of the law, but to all of it. Paul makes it very clear.

You have to obey all the regulations of the whole law of Moses. He didn't want
him to miss this. That's where you're headed.

You see, it starts very simply. You think, well, I'll just keep this one little
rule, this one little law. That's all I need.

And if I keep that and get everybody else to keep that, that's what gets us
close to Christ. Paul says you go down that road and the end of that road is you
are pulling the weight of the entire law and you're pulling the weight alone. In
verse four he says when you do that, the third thing happens, you're cut off.

You're pulling away from Jesus. You're pulling away from grace. This picture of
pulling the wrong yoke.

You're pulling the weight alone. You're pulling the weight of the entire law and
you're pulling away. You're pulling the wrong direction.

You're pulling away from Jesus and away from grace. He says you are cut off from
Christ. Someone has to hold the reins.

Someone has to be master of your life. And if you say it's going to be the law,
then you're cutting yourself off from Christ because Jesus is not about the law.
He is about grace.

If you say it's going to be the law, the rules that I can keep is what makes me
closer to God. And Paul says what's happened is you've fallen from grace. You're
pulling the burden of the law.

Now that phrase, fallen from grace, Paul is writing to Christians here. Is he
saying that they're somehow cut off from salvation, that they've fallen from
eternal life? I don't believe that's what he's saying at all.

In these verses, he's talking about being cut off from the growth that can only
happen in a close relationship to Christ. The daily experience of grace that is
to be yours as a believer, they were cutting themselves off from that by
deciding to depend on the law. He's not talking about losing your salvation.

He's talking about cutting yourself off from the source of growth and fellowship
abiding in Christ. I've walked through these verses talking about the law and
cutting yourself off and what it means to take on that burden. Here's the
question.

What does this yoke look like now? For them, it was circumcision. For them, it
was the days on which they worshiped.

It's not that way today for most of us. It's no longer circumcision in the
Jewish law, but the principle is still the same. Here is the principle.

Anytime you trust what you do rather than who he is, you've put on a yoke. So
are there places in your life that you're doing that? We can do it even with
religious things.

In fact, they were doing it with religious things, very religious things, verses
that were in the Old Testament they were using to trust in what they could do
rather than who Christ is. The moment Jesus died on that cross and the moment he
was resurrected, he is saying, "Trust in me. I am the way, the truth, and the
life.

I am the power that you need. " Are there places in your life where you're
putting on a yoke of slavery? Do you feel like that unless you have a daily
quiet time, spend time with God, or unless you listen to drive time devotions
every day, that somehow God can't bless your life?

You've put on a yoke of slavery. You've put in some rule between you and Christ.
It's a good thing to have a daily quiet time.

It's a great thing to listen to drive time devotions, but if that becomes a rule
that you have to have in your life, and if you feel like if I broke that rule,
then Jesus can no longer be closer to me, you've done the very thing they were
doing in that day, the exact thing. For other people, it's about weekend
worship. I can't miss one weekend of worship.

God wants you at worship every week. You should be at worship with your church
fellowshipping, but you twist this just a little bit and all of a sudden it
becomes what you do. I've got to be at worship every week.

If I'm not at worship, God can't bless my family. God can't bless my business.
God can't bless my life.

Oh, I missed worship one week. That's why that bad thing happened to me. If you
begin to think that way at any point in your life, you're putting on the yoke of
slavery.

Here's what Martin Luther said about this when he was struggling through what
this meant. He wrote, "When I was a monk, I tried ever so hard to live up to the
strict rules of my order. I used to make a list of my sins, and I was always on
the way to confession, and whatever penances were enjoined upon me, I performed
religiously.

In spite of it all, my conscience was always in a fever of doubt. The more I
sought to help my poor, stricken conscience, the worse it got. The more I paid
attention to the regulations, the more I transgressed them.

" So how about you? Are there places in your life where your total focus is on,
"I can't do the wrong thing"? You're trying so hard not to fall to that
temptation that all you can think about is that temptation, and you keep falling
to doing the wrong thing.

You have freedom in Christ. You don't have to do that wrong thing. But the way
to get to not doing the wrong thing is to focus on the right thing, to focus on
Jesus Christ and the freedom that he has given you.

Stop listening to Satan's doubts. Stop listening to his accusations. Focus on
the right thing.

Are there places in your life where you're trying to do the right thing, and you
think by that you're earning God's favor, whether it's going to church or
reading the Bible or doing acts of service or going on a mission trip. You
think, "That's how I'm earning God's favor. " You have God's favor, whether you
do any of those things or not.

Have you discovered the freedom of knowing that? You have God's favor and love,
whether you do any of those things or not. Take just a minute to pray with me in
what, for some of you, might be the most significant prayer of your life.

And just say in prayer, "Father, I realize, I realize the freedom that you love
me no matter what, no matter what I do. That's what it means that Christ has
forgiven me. " And from this point on, I want to learn to live my life in the
freedom, in the freedom of knowing that you love me so that what I do for you is
not to earn your love, but it's in response to your love.

Jesus Christ, thank you for loving me. You proved it on the cross. You proved it
in the resurrection.

I see it clearly. Help me to live in the freedom of that love today. In your
name I pray, amen.

Tomorrow as we continue to walk through chapter 5, we're going to talk about why
false teaching is so dangerous. And we're going to talk about the most powerful
way to confront false teaching.