“Now if you belong to Christ, then indeed you are Abraham’s descendants, heirs according to the promise.” Galatians 3:29 CEB

Paul begins Galatians 3 almost sounding exasperated. The Galatians had heard the good news of Jesus Christ. They had believed. They had received the Holy Spirit. God was already at work among them. And now they were being told that something else was required.

Faith in Christ was apparently not enough. If these Gentile believers really wanted to belong to the people of God, they needed to take another step and place themselves under the requirements of the Jewish law.

Paul’s response is essentially: Think about how this started. You didn’t receive the Spirit because you had finally gotten everything right. You didn’t earn your place in God’s family by proving yourself worthy. God met you with grace. You heard the gospel. You trusted Christ. The Spirit began working among you. So why would you now try to finish through human effort what God began by grace?

Paul reaches all the way back to Abraham. Long before Moses, long before the law, God made a promise: Abraham would have a family, and through that family all the nations of the earth would be blessed. Abraham believed God. The promise came first.

Paul’s opponents seem to be telling the Galatians that they need the law in order to become full members of Abraham’s family. Paul says they have the story backward. God’s promise to Abraham was always moving toward a worldwide family formed through faith. The law had an important place in that story. Paul isn’t dismissing it as evil or suggesting that God made a mistake by giving it. The law guarded and instructed Israel while God’s promise moved toward its fulfillment.

But the law could not give life. Christ could.

Jesus entered the place where sin, condemnation, and the curse had brought humanity and carried that burden to the cross. Through Christ, the blessing promised to Abraham could finally flow outward to the nations, and the promised Spirit could be received through faith.

Everything has been moving toward Christ. That's why Paul’s warning is so strong. Going backward to the law as the basis of belonging would not be spiritual progress. It would mean treating something temporary as though it were the destination.

Paul isn't arguing against obedience. He is arguing against using obedience to establish our standing before God. Those are very different things. As Wesleyans, we speak often about holiness, sanctification, obedience, and becoming like Christ. We should. Grace really does transform us. The Holy Spirit changes our desires, our habits, our relationships, and the way we live. But holiness is never our attempt to graduate beyond grace.

We begin by grace. We grow by grace. We become holy as we cooperate with grace. And whatever Christ forms within us remains the work of grace from beginning to end. Sometimes we can forget that.

We may begin the Christian life trusting Jesus and then slowly start measuring ourselves by other standards. How disciplined have I been? How much Scripture have I read? How much have I served? How well am I doing compared with someone else? Those practices can be wonderful means through which God shapes us. But they make terrible measures of whether we belong.

Our confidence is Christ. And because our identity rests in Christ, Paul can make the declaration at the end of the chapter that everyone who belongs to Christ belongs to Abraham’s family and shares in the promise. Jew and Greek. Slave and free. Male and female. The distinctions that so often determine status in the world cannot determine anyone’s standing in the family of God. We are one in Christ.

That doesn’t erase everything distinctive about us. It means that none of those distinctions give one Christian a better place at the table than another. The cross has leveled the ground.

Baptized into Christ, we have “put on Christ.” Our deepest identity is no longer secured by ancestry, accomplishment, social status, or religious performance. We belong because Christ has welcomed us into the family God promised from the beginning. That should shape both the way we see ourselves and the way we see one another.

We don’t need to prove that we deserve our place. And we don’t get to demand that someone else prove they deserve theirs. God’s promise still stands. Christ has fulfilled it. The Spirit is still at work. Our calling is to keep trusting the grace that brought us into the family and allow that same grace to form us into people who increasingly look like Jesus.

Notice one place today where you are tempted to measure your standing with God by your performance. Name it honestly in prayer, then return to the truth of Galatians 3: you belong to Christ by grace. Ask the Holy Spirit to let obedience grow from that security rather than from the need to prove yourself.