Justified By Love Not By Law

May the words of my lips and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer.  Amen.

Whatever is Paul talking about?  That is one of his more convoluted arguments.  I think it needs a bit of unpacking to have any idea of what he means.

Paul uses a few very key words in our reading today: justified, the law, faith, Christ, and grace.

That first word, justified, means to be made right or proved to be right with God; in other words, to be shown or made to be righteous.  Being justified is the core of what Paul is talking about.

How do we become justified with God?  … How do we become righteous?

The Bible is full of rules.  Can anyone think of a set of rules in the Bible?  How about the Ten Commandments.  Or how about the summary of the law.  The Galatians ask Paul if we are made right with God by following all these rules.  What do you think he answered?  … “No one will be justified by the works of the law.”  That’s a pretty emphatic answer.  Has anyone here read “The Year of Living Biblically?”  A. J. Jacobs did a very good job of showing just how impossible it is to follow all of the laws all of the time.  I thank God that this is not the way to be right with God.

Paul even takes it one step further that Jacobs did.  Paul reminds us that Christ himself broke the law: “is Christ then a servant of sin?”  On several occasions, the Bible makes a point of telling us that Jesus is breaking the rules set down in God’s law.  Matthew, Mark, and Luke all talk about Jesus eating with tax collectors and sinners.  This is important because it breaks the ritual purity laws.  All of the Gospels talk about Jesus breaking the Sabbath.  He heals and does other work on the Sabbath and makes the point that the Sabbath (and other laws) are made for us, not the other way around.  That is extremely important.  The law is given to us.  We are not given to the law.

Back to the question: how do we become justified with God?

“And we have come to believe in Christ Jesus, so that we might be justified by faith in Christ, and not by doing the works of the law.”

This is where grace comes in.  Being righteous is about knowing that God loves us and responding to that.  It is about faith.  All it takes for our relationship with God to be right is for us to truly believe that we have a relationship with God and that God loves us.  God became human and walked among us to show us what this relationship looks like and to prove that love to us.

So if the law does not make us right with God, why do we have it?  Does it matter at all?

Absolutely!  The law is very important.  All of those rules show us how people throughout history have felt God’s call.  When we look at them either individually or as a whole, they show us what is important to God.  There are rules about taking care of ourselves.  There are rules about taking care of the poor and the sick.  There are rules about respecting each other.  There are rules about respecting and honouring God.  There are rules that show us where society was going wrong.

All of these rules are important.  All of them can teach us something about God.  Many of them require us to understand the people who wrote them for them to mean anything to us today, but they are all important.

Jesus told us that of all the laws, if we follow two specific ones, we have understood the heart of the law.  I believe those two laws are impossible to break if you are truly living by faith.  We call them the summary of the law.

“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.  You shall love your neighbor as yourself."

God calls us to love.  First we are to love God.  Next we are to love ourselves and everyone else equally.

If we follow the other rules but break these we are being ruled by the law.  If we follow these two rules we are living by faith.  If we break any other rule in order to keep the laws of love, we have understood God’s gift of the law to us.  We are justified.  By the grace of God, we are right with God.

Thanks be to God.