Justification by faith is not just a theme in Sunday’s reading from the book of Galatians, it is the main point. Paul writes, “we know that a person is justified not by the works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ… we have come to believe in Christ Jesus, so that we might be justified by faith in Christ, and not by doing the works of the law… if justification comes through the law, then Christ died for nothing.” This also became a foundation stone of the Reformation 500 years ago.
Early on society and sometimes even the church tries to tell us differently, though. I remember proudly wearing my Sunday School perfect attendance pin as a badge of honor with its little number insert growing higher each year as a testimony to my trying to earn God’s favor by perfect attendance. (Secretly I was jealous of kids in other churches where their pins had those little banners that attached one after another in rows that reached from chest to navel!)
Society often echoes Frank Sinatra’s fifty year old tune with its classic line: “For what is a man, what has he got? If not himself, then he has naught.” And then the repetitive “I did it my way.” Or from the classics of literature the words of the 19th century English poet William Henley’s “Invictus”: “It matters not how strait the gate, How charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul”
To that Paul says: “You’ve got it all wrong.” Depend on yourself and you lose eternity. To be completely fair, society sometimes gets it right, as in the lyrics from The Boss’s Badlands, and its classic opening track from his 1978 album, Darkness on the Edge of Town,: “ I believe in the faith that could save me. I believe in the hope and I pray that some day it will raise me….”
Can you think of other instances when the world around us gets it right? Or not? When did you first learn that doing it “my way” just wasn’t going to work? What did you do to change course? Do things always go better after this realization?
