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Good morning dear friends,
Today is Friday May 24, the beginning the long Memorial Day weekend.
This weekend each year draws me to much contemplation. No secular holiday comes as close to celebrating the essentials of the Gospel as Memorial Day.
On this weekend in America, we remember and we honor those who have paid the ultimate price in the battle for freedom. With the exception of the Revolutionary war and Civil war, those fallen soldiers and their families whom we honor this weekend have, for the most part, fallen in battle far away from mainland America.
Most of our fallen were not defending our shores, our liberties, they were fighting to defend or earn freedom for others in their countries, as enemies seeking to enslave or destroy them were attacking them.
Does that sound like Jesus?
The battle for our freedom from sin was not waged in heaven where Jesus lived, it was waged here, were we sinful people were enslaved to the enemy of humanity. Jesus came here, battled Satan here, paid the ultimate price here… so we could be set free here, live free here and enjoy eternity in heaven with Him! Ponder that friends…
Today we are in Galatians 4. May I invite you to begin reading with Galatians 3:26? Both here and in Romans 8:14-17 Paul does a masterful job of explaining the wonder of spiritual adoption (John 1:12). As part of our miracle of salvation, we are actually adopted by God into His family…we become His sons & daughters. Unlike human adoption, we don’t pay one penny and we aren’t selected because we are in excellent physical or intellectual condition with great promise. We are purchased by Jesus’ blood and adopted by God as heirs of His magnificent inheritance. In addition, as you see in vs 6 God sends the Holy Spirit to live within His children so we can call Him “Abba Father”!
This entire weekend we’ll see this same deliverance theme from several different perspectives in Galatians 4, 5, and 6, so may I urge you to look closely today and then again tomorrow in chapter 5 and finally Sunday in Chapter 6, and keep filtering these three chapters through what you understand Memorial Day weekend commemorates, honors, remembers.
Think about what Europe might be like today if D Day had failed and Hitler had been victorious. . . and not only killed every Jew in the world, but imposed the Nazi swastika flag and all it represented over every city and home all across Europe and the Middle East and Africa!
Or, or what if the entire US Pacific fleet had been sunk at Pearl Harbor, or the allies had not been victorious at Iwo Jima or Guadalcanal? What would Asia be like today?
Now consider one more thing. . . God raised up the greatest wave of missionaries in the years following WW2. Deeply impacted by what they had seen in battle, they heard the call of God and Gospel missionaries returned to France, Italy, Germany, Russia, North Africa and Eastern Europe.
Deeply touched by the horrifying atrocities in the Pacific, hundreds of Christian missionaries return to the Philippines, Japan, China, Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia and so many other Asian nations.
Now, 75 years later, the Gospel has profoundly impacted every nation where the bullets flew, the bombs fell and the fallen were buried.
And what about here… the nation which sent both the soldiers and the missionaries. What has happened here in 75 years? How different we are as America, especially morally and spiritually, than who we were in 1941! Why my friends, why? Consider that question as you read Galatians 4. Moral & Spiritual drift was why Paul wrote Galatians and it’s been the problem in America these 75 years.
I pray that this weekend is very special for God’s people, here and around the world, as we consider the power of Galatians 4,5,6.
Pastor Doug Anderson 262.441.8785
“Let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us, with our eyes fixed on Jesus…” (Heb. 12:1,2)
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