Children of Abraham

Galatians 3:2-3
You received the Spirit because you believed the message you heard about Christ. How foolish can you be? After starting your Christian lives in the Spirit, why are you now trying to become perfect by your own human effort? (NLT)

According to Wikipedia, perfection is, broadly, a state of completeness and flawlessness. This is an impossible state for us as mere humans to obtain. There was only one perfect man and that is Jesus.

There are many good people trying hard to be as perfect as they can be. They follow a moral standard. That standard might be the Jewish laws still in practice today. Perhaps it is the standards they learned as children growing up in a moral society. Maybe it is simply rules they have been given in the church they attend.

Some just think before they act and wonder WWJD or what would Jesus do in this situation? They analyze and then act.

Yet each of these are all about us changing our behavior according to the beliefs we hold. Does this have anything to do with being an Christian or living by the Spirit? I do not think so.

Galatians 3:5
Does God give you the Holy Spirit and work miracles among you because you obey the law? Of course not! It is because you believe the message you heard about Christ.

I believe He gave us the Holy Spirit to live in us because we are followers of Jesus. The perfect spirit is inside us, but we have to give Him permission to come forth. We can let Him hide backstage watching us blunder through life on our own, in our human effort. Or we can bring Him on stage with us and let Him take the lead.

Galatians 3:6
"Abraham believed God, and God counted him as righteous because of his faith." The real children of Abraham, then, are those who put their faith in God.

And are we not those children? Yes, we are because we have asked Jesus, the son of the one true God, into our heart. We have asked for forgiveness for our sins and confessed our faith in Him whose name is above all names and in Him who is part of the triune Godhead--the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

The blood relatives of Abraham were not all counted as his children. Blood does run deep. However, it is the blood of Jesus and our faith that makes us the real children of Abraham. Many in his mortal blood line did not become counted as his "children".

It does not matter where the ancestral line comes from. We are counted as soon as we put our faith in Jesus.

Galatians 3:8-9
The Scriptures looked forward to this time when God would declare the Gentiles to be righteous because of their faith. God proclaimed this good news to Abraham long ago when he said, "All nations will be blessed through you." So all who put their faith in Christ share the same blessing Abraham received because of his faith.

So because of Christ, we are as Abraham was and receive the same blessing from our Father God.

Galatians 3:10-12
But those who depend on the law to make them right with God are under his curse, for the Scriptures say, "Cursed is everyone who does not observe and obey all the commands that are written in God's Book of the Law." So it is clear that no one can be made right with God by trying to keep the law. For the Scriptures say, "It is through faith that a righteous person has life." This way of faith is very different from the way of law, which says, "It is through obeying the law that a person has life."

Because of Jesus who took away all sin on the cross, we are righteous in Him. Because of Him we do not depend on the law, on a set of rules, on works of man, to become right with God. And if we do depend on them, we are cursed because we cannot obey them all. It is only through faith that we have life and life everlasting.

Galatians 3:13-14
But Christ has rescued us from the curse pronounced by the law. When he was hung on the cross, he took upon himself the curse for our wrongdoing. For it is written in the Scriptures, "Cursed is everyone who is hung on a tree." Through Christ Jesus, God has blessed the Gentiles with the same blessing he promised to Abraham, so that we who are believers might receive the promised Holy Spirit through faith.

And so we believe and therefore we have the promised Holy Spirit. The evidence of that are the apparent changes in our life, the fruit of the Spirit evident in us. And as Mark 16:15-18 tells us, the gift of speaking with new tongues, our prayer language, allowing us to pray in the spirit at all times.