Send us a textFamily is important. I think we all know this and spend a lot of time supporting our family in a lot of different ways. This is good. God has put us in families for our wellbeing and for the good of the world.Paul takes up his strong encouragement to these Christians in the Galatians churches to resist going down the road of keeping the Jewish Old Testament Law of God to try and earn God’s favour and blessing and return to how they began with him in the good news, that they are free to live in God’s favour and blessing by faith in Jesus, not keeping the Law.Here he draws the people into an allegory about family that the Jewish ‘gospel +’ protagonists would surely know. He heads back to Sarah and Abraham and that account of Hagar giving birth to Ishmael.Paul starts out where the protagonists might expect but then does a ‘switcheroo’ with this well-known story to turn the tables on them. Instead of regarding these law-keeping Jewish Christians as being in the family of promise, as they believe they surely are, he ends up telling them that by going back to keeping the law as a way of being sure of their peace and hope with God, they are in fact slaves who are placing themselves outside God’s new family of promise.For those who simply believe what they hear of Jesus and his crucified and risen love for them, the privilege of being in this vast, timeless family of God (the church) is fully theirs.Our genes or nationality or behaviour do not determine belonging in God’s family of promise. God’s promise delivered in Jesus determines our belonging in this family of faith.I pray you can believe this and experience the joy of belonging to this global, timeless family of grace.Pastor Adrian

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