Free In Christ: A 6-Day DevotionalSample

In the view of many, you can choose your race, your gender, your lifestyle, your vision of marriage, your economic goals. And no matter what you have chosen, your life is commendable provided you live in line with your choices. That’s what makes you authentic, and to be authentic is to be wholly admirable. Intrinsically, of course, such a stance is antiauthoritarian: it is suspicious of all sources of authority that threaten the self-chosen paths of the individual. Family, tradition, government, parents, church, even God himself, must be viewed with suspicion and judged by my drive toward authenticity. Small wonder, then, that for many people Christianity seems narrow, limiting, twisted, enslaving, precisely because Christians find their identity is bound up with Christ and his lordship.

According to the Bible, what starts off looking like the most amazing freedom regularly ends up as the most bitter slavery—slavery to sin, to self, to the spirit of the age. What appears to be a religion of slavery turns out to be the glorious freedom of the sons and daughters of God. 

Galatians 4 introduces us to fresh dimensions of the antithesis between slavery and freedom. They are tied to Paul’s arguments about the nature of the law of God, about the nature of the gospel of grace. 

—D. A. Carson