When Paul addresses the Galatians as “you dear idiots” in Galatians 3 (Phillips), it’s for good reason.
Paul is saying, “You understood the gospel so clearly! It was like Jesus had died right in front of you. Like you were there and saw his wounds and heard him say, ‘It is finished.’ But now, you’ve gone away from that.”
Then he asks a question: How did you first receive the Spirit?
Did it happen because you did something? Or because you ate the right things? Or went through some ritual? (Galatians 3:2)
No! It happened because you put your faith in the finished work of Christ:
After beginning by the Spirit, are you now finishing by the flesh? …. Does God give you the Spirit and work miracles among you by your doing the works of the law? Or is it by believing what you heard—just like Abraham who believed God, and it was credited to him for righteousness? Galatians 3:3-6 CSB
And then, he asks the game-changing question: If you initially received the Spirit by believing, why would you think growth in the Spirit would be achieved in any other way? Why would God start our salvation by faith in his provision, but then expect us to grow by us grabbing ahold of our boot straps and pulling ourselves up through obedience to the law?
The way we grow in the Christian life, Paul says, is the same way we began in the Christian life: through faith in Christ’s finished work.
The words “It is finished” are not just words that we believe one time to find forgiveness. They are words we believe again and again to experience spiritual power.
The first time we believed these words, we were released from the penalty of sin. As we continue to believe them, we are released from sin’s power through the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives.
Most Christians, however, are not quite sure what to do with the Holy Spirit.
On the one hand, certain groups are obsessed with him. He’s this mystical force always revealing himself through warm, fuzzy feelings and strange coincidences. Other groups, however, maybe in reaction to the first group, ignore him altogether. They believe in him, but kind of like I “believe” in the pituitary gland—I know it’s there and it serves a purpose, but I have no idea what exactly that purpose is. (I even looked it up just now, and I’m still not sure.)
Paul shows us in Galatians that neither of those viewpoints is correct. The Holy Spirit is real, and his power is absolutely essential to the Christian’s life.
But he’s not accessed through weird, mystical ceremonies or experienced primarily through random confluences of circumstances.
His ongoing power in us is released through renewed faith in the gospel. As we continue to put faith in the finished work of Christ, the power of the Spirit is continually released in us.
By believing “it is finished,” we gain the power to continue. The fire to do in the Christian life comes from being soaked in the fuel of what has been done.
The way to progress in the Christian life, Martin Luther said, is always to begin again. If you want to grow in Christ, you don’t go beyond the gospel; you go back to the beginning, and you go deeper into the gospel. The deeper you go into the gospel, the farther and wider and higher you will go in obedience.
One of the best pictures in the Bible of what salvation is in the book of Numbers. As a consequence of Israel’s sin, God sent serpents that bit them and killed many people. Israel cried out for mercy, and God told Moses to take an image of a bronze serpent and put it up on a pole on top of a hill. If the Israelites would look upward in faith, believing that salvation and healing belonged God, they would be healed.
That is a picture, Jesus said in John 3, of how we obtain forgiveness: As we look to Jesus on the cross and say, There is my salvation, his righteousness is imputed to us. Paul is saying in Galatians 3 that as you continue to believe it is finished, the healing power of righteousness will be infused into you. That is the way that you grow in the Christian life.
When you want to grow spiritually and you’re frustrated at the lack of spiritual fruit in your life, come back to the cross—to the message that “it is finished”—and rest there.
Thank God that his acceptance of you is not based on how much spiritual fruit you show but on Christ’s finished work. Believe this, and then you’ll start to bear spiritual fruit. The irony of the Christian life is that the only ones who “get better” are those who recognize that their acceptance before God is not conditional on them getting better.
You believed “it is finished” once to escape the penalty of sin. Now believe it again and again to release the power of the Holy Spirit in your life.
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