Galatians: Trusting Jesus for God's Love

By Steve Behlke
August 8, 2008

One of the really important, really huge and awesome things that we trust Jesus for, is God's love.

Think of it, if we are not trusting Jesus for God's eternal love, what are we trusting Him for?! Forgiveness? Yes, but not just forgiveness; God's forgiveness so that we can be reconciled with God and in good fellowship, the good graces of God. Eternal life, yes, but what is eternal life but knowing and living in union with the God who so loved us that He spared nothing to reconcile us to Him?!

Knowing Jesus Christ as our God, and knowing God's love in Christ, is the very fuel of the Christian life, it is the motivation to trust and love God. And loving God, we pray; loving God, we obey; loving Christ, we tell others about Him; loving Christ, we deny ourselves, we love others, we follow His lead. It's quite exquisite how Christ's life is manifest when God's love in Christ is front and center.

So what do we trust Jesus for, ultimately, we trust Jesus for eternal life in a loving relationship with God — for union with God, God's love, His good graces, His blessed assurance, His sweet promises, His beautiful Self — now and always and forevermore (even more wonderfully in the "forevermore" aspect of life). This reality liberates us, gives us hope, courage, joy.

This is what we see in the lives of those who trusted Jesus in the New Testament accounts of Christ's earth-life. Take for instance, the woman at the well, Zachaeus, the woman busted in the act of adultery, and Matthew the tax-collector. Think of every "sinner" who met Jesus and who trusted Him.

What did they trust Him for? What did they receive from Jesus?

They each received forgiveness! They found incredible hope, based on reality, based in Jesus. They each felt loved by Christ and accepted by God! Clean! Whole! Profoundly free!

Freedom is so much a part of the Gospel, this is particularly clear in Galatians.

Having trusted Jesus, Matthew, Zachaeus, the woman at the well and the lady busted in adultery, put their hope in Jesus for God's love. That's what Jesus gave them.

Then two days later Jesus put each of them under new and rigorous rules, took away their freedom, made them question God's acceptance and told them to persevere in holiness or be booted off the team! WHAT? NO! OF COURSE NOT...

Jesus didn't put them under religious laws or oppress them or rub their face in their sinfulness.

Yes, Jesus was clear when He told the woman caught in adultery to stop it! "Cut it out!" he said. Of course He did! Grace never promotes sin. The Gospel offers liberation.

Jesus told her that He loves her and that she is forgiven and that He in no way condemns her; and He told her, in light of receiving His love and entering this new relationship with God through Him, to sin no more. You're free, sin no more.

And even in these words, from the heart of Jesus the thing that we sense most, and the thing that absolutely blew away each person who received the grace of God from Jesus, was a keen new sense of God's love, God's forgiveness, of "feeling clean", and knowing God's acceptance, and, no doubt, of incredible freedom in Christ, sweet freedom in Christ.

And knowing Jesus in this way, they wanted and we want to follow Jesus!

It's in being with Jesus, really being with Jesus, trusting Jesus and having God's love, our hearts are drawn toward holiness, repentance, purity, and even toward actually wanting God's will for our lives (which is the most unnatural thing in human imagination: wanting someone else's will for our lives).

But trusting Jesus for God's love, we want to obey Jesus no matter what! Trusting Jesus for God's love does that! Knowing Jesus in a way that we know God's love, does that! Mere commandments, threats, rules, hurdles, laws, etc., don't touch our hearts. Jesus does. God's love understood does.

When we trust Jesus for God's love...
When the Gospel really is Good News to us...
When our relationship with God is real and concrete and not subject to recall because on our sins...

... We want to obey God from our hearts, and we want to pray and love and forgive and be patient and kind. And we even begin to endure the crud of life, lulls in marital bless, teenagers, and bosses from hell...

... And when we do these things in response to God's love in Christ, filled with hope and the Spirit, we do them "freely," gladly, from the heart, as a product of faith, as a fruit of grace — of Christ Himself manifesting His life in ours. That's the Christian life.