Galatians 5:1 Stand fast therefore in the liberty with which Christ has made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage. It is necessary that we first see generally what that "liberty" is, "wherewith Christ maketh His people free." I cannot hold any one "free," so long as his own conscience locks him up into the fear of death and punishment. The mind which has places which it is afraid to touch, can never expatiate every. where; and the mind which cannot go anywhere, never is "free." It is the sense of pardon which is that man's emancipation. Have we not all felt the difference. — to work that we may be loved, and to work because we are loved; to have a motive from without, or to have a motive from within; to be guided by a fear, or to be attracted by an affection? But, again, to obey any one isolated law, however good that law may be, and however we may admire and love the Lawgiver, may still carry with it a sense of confining and contraction. To do, not this or that command, but the whole will, because it is the will of one we love — to have caught His mind, to breathe His spirit, to be bound up with His glory — that has in it no littleness; there are no circumscribing confines there; and these are the goings out of the unshackled being in the ranges which match with his own infinity. And yet once more. Such is the soul of man, that all that in his horizon falls within the compass of time, however long — or of a present life however full — that man's circle being small, compared to his own consciousness of his own capability, through that disproportion, he feels a limitation. But let a man once look, as he may, and as he must, on that great world which lies beyond him as his scope and his home, and all that is here as only the discipline and the school-work by which he is in training, and immediately everything contains in it eternity. And very "free" will that man be "among the dead," because his faith is going out above the smallnesses which surround him, to the great, and to the absorbing, and to the satisfying things to come. It will not be difficult to carry out these principles, and apply them to the right performance of any of the obligations of life. It needs no words to show that whatever is done in this freedom will not only be itself better done, but it takes from that freedom a character which comports well with a member of the family of God; and which at once makes it edifying to Him, and acceptable and honouring to a heavenly Father. (J. Vaughan, M. A.) Parallel Verses KJV: Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage. |
    |