Breaking Free

Galatians 4:1-7

On call

“Call me anytime, day or night.” I had just met Frank (not his real name) that afternoon. He was not a member of the parish I served. Somehow we ended up at the same table at a city sponsored mental health conference. As the last speaker concluded his remarks, Frank slid his card across the table to me. I recognized the name. He was the president of the largest commercial construction company in the region.

We were walking out of the city auditorium when he added, “Pat, I’m an alcoholic. I’ve been sober for twenty-three years. I stay healthy by helping others get free. This is not an option for me.”

Thirty years ago, I had little idea of what he was talking about. Frank sensed my confusion. “Listen, I am sure you are a good preacher and all, but you can’t help an alcoholic get sober. You can’t hear what he or she is saying to you. So when someone like me shows up in your office, call me.” When we shook hands in the parking lot, Frank repeated, “Call me anytime, in the middle of the workday or in the middle of the night.”

Driving back to the church, I winced to think that I would ever contact Frank. He was a bit militant for my polite Episcopal tastes. Besides, I completed hours of pastoral counseling exercises and had served two clinical internships. How could a layman, a construction company magnate at that, be more capable than I would be with an addict?

Three months later, the answer showed up in my office. A local television news anchor and his wife made an appointment. When they arrived, I felt certain the handsome couple wanted to discuss a child’s baptism or how to join the church. It was none of the above, and they did not waste any time getting to the point. Their marriage was falling apart. Trying to look professional, I took out a yellow pad and asked them to describe the problems they were experiencing. The couple looked across the sofa at each other. After an uncomfortable pause, the man said, “My wife’s drinking is out of control.” I forced a smile and responded, “I feel certain we can forge a way to save your marriage.”

The wife abruptly interrupted me. “Don’t ask me to quit drinking.”

“What about your marriage?”

“I love my husband, but I am not going to quit drinking.” Her statement was as chilling as it was unequivocal. Ten minutes into the counseling session I was fresh out of answers. My blank yellow pad sat on my desk as a glaring indictment of my inadequacy.

I excused myself and stepped out of the office to call Frank. The receptionist informed me that he was in a board meeting. “I am Patrick Gahan, an Episcopal pastor, he…” She did not let me finish. “Oh yes, I’ll get him.”

Three or four minutes later Frank answered. I quickly described the couple and the problem. What he said next, I remember word for word, “I’m coming. Whatever you do, keep them in the office until I get there.”

When Frank arrived, he took over, and I left him alone with the couple. I was as ashamed as much as I was relieved to abandon the scene of my incompetence. The couple sat and talked to Frank for two hours or more. As they departed, I could tell the wife had been crying. I never saw the couple again, but as far as I know they were still married when I left the area several years later.

Frank and I frequently crossed paths in the ensuing years. However, he never disclosed anything about them or their progress, except to say, “Pat, you’re not an alcoholic, so you don’t know what its like to be trapped in addiction. She knows very well that drinking will destroy her, but she is even more afraid of being free of it.”

Starting over every day

My encounter with Frank and the fashionable couple proved to be a necessary warm up. The next parish I served in an artsy southern suburb of Austin, TX had over fifty recovering alcoholics in the pews. Those fifty took me to school. “Donna” (not her real name either) served as the “headmistress.”

Other than some Benedictine monks with whom I prayed from time to time, these were the first Christians I knew who declared they had to restart their faith walk with Jesus every day. Donna said, “There’s never a day, not one, that I don’t want to take a drink. Sometimes that is all Jesus and I talk about.” The fifty had no abstract notions about their faith in Christ. They clung to him as a matter of life and death.

Sometimes one of the fifty would act badly to a spouse, to a friend, to me, or lash out at some unsuspecting soul at the church. Occasionally, one would disappear for a day or two, go on an ill-advised spending spree, or send out a spat of angry emails. Donna would simply explain, “That’s their alcoholic behavior showing up again.” She was unfazed as she explained that even though God had delivered them from drinking, many of the hurts, fears, and attendant bad behaviors erupted now and again.

Because I was close to the fifty, I was not shielded from their ups and downs. Some had been sober for decades. Others for a handful of years or only months. Regardless, they all taught me what it means to truly need a Savior and to daily renew their trust in him. Alcoholics Anonymous Step #2 was a living reality for them: “We came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.”

The limits of willpower

Each one told me stories about families destroyed, jobs lost, friendships severed, and the tonnage of shame they bore. Subsequently, they did not give a polite nod to Christ. No, they cleaved to him like a life raft in a menacing ocean. I am not ashamed to admit that after getting to know Frank and Donna, I leaned on the recovery community wherever I served. Any notion that I could bring about the healing of an addict was abandoned. Someone from the inside of the illness was needed.

On the other hand, I learned from the recovery community that very little separated me or any other Christian from the struggles they faced. For one, not one of us is the woman or man we want to be. We have taken one detour after another and ended up disfiguring the person God created in His image. Although Christ has saved us from our sins and estrangement from God, we fall back into bad behaviors fueled by our selfishness, hurts, and fears. Second, we cannot become well or whole until we get brutally honest with ourselves and own up to our missteps and the messes we’ve made of our own life and the lives of those closest to us. When we quit equivocating and masking our sin, we are eager for the dawning of a new day so that we may start over in the light of Christ’s forgiveness and redirection. Third, and most importantly, we do not have enough willpower to get well without Christ. To keep trying is like spinning the wheels of our car in sand and repeatedly pushing the accelerator. We don’t get free but just sink deeper into our mess. Most any sober addict can tell us as much and for that we should be thankful. Pastor John Mark Comer candidly expresses the gratitude rank and file Christians owe to our sisters and brothers in recovery:

One of the many gifts of the addiction community has been its unsparing honesty about just how weak and in need of grace we all are, and just how inept our willpower is. (At some level, we are all addicts.) AA, from its start, acknowledged we needed a higher power to get free. We who got ourselves into this mess cannot get ourselves out. We are too broken to put ourselves back together again. Too lost to find ourselves. When we unmask the human facade of self-delusion, we realize just how utterly unlike Christ we are in the deepest recesses of our hearts. We are forced to confront our true natures—how warped and wounded we really are. We need help, power from beyond us. We need grace.

I have lost count of the many times I have attempted to reorder my life, undertake a promising self-help program, and declare the advent of a “new me,” only to fall on the rocks of my personal delusion. I cannot heal myself. Only God can. That is not to say that our willpower is of no consequence. God will use our efforts to make room for his grace to operate in our lives. Again, John Mark Comer is helpful here: “The main function of self-effort (willpower) in our formation is to do what we can do—make space to surrender to God via the practices of Jesus—so God can do what we can’t do: heal, liberate, and transform us into people of love.”

On my better days, I own up to Comer’s words. For example, I try each morning to “make space to surrender to God” by sitting in a quiet corner of the house. I take Jesus at his word that it is best to ‘go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father…’ (Matthew 6:6). I set the timer on my watch to ten to twenty minutes, during which time I will most often offer a repeated prayer with each breath — something like “Jesus, let me rest in your love.” I say it over and over until the prayer follows me around for the rest of the day. Occasionally, I will pray psalms I have memorized, such as Psalm 23 and 51. The Hand Prayer we teach to children continues to help me order my prayers around confession, thanksgiving, intercession, personal petition, and praise.

Without fail, when the timer alerts me, I kneel down and offer this well-worn prayer from the St. Augustine Prayer Book, authored in 1947 by the monks of the Holy Cross who founded my high school and, in doing so, changed the course of my life:

O God, thou art my God who has made me for thy self. O Lord, Heavenly Father, to thee I devote my heart and my entire life. Grant me thy grace I implore thee, that this day I may live as in thy presence, and walk in the path of thy commandments, following the example of my Savior Christ, and being made like unto him, Give me thy Holy Spirit that, trusting only in him I may overcome those sins which beset me.

Vouchsafe, O gracious God, to me and to …, such blessings as we need both temporal and spiritual. I ask in the name and through the merits of Jesus Christ our Lord. AMEN.

I do not hold myself up as some paragon of Christian devotion. Instead, I see myself as helpless as any one of those in the recovery community I’ve had the privilege to know. Like them, I need to make space every day for God to redirect my life and make me whole. My willpower must be used as the on-ramp of His transforming grace, certainly not as an end in itself, for that would send me back into the dead end cul de sac of self-reliance and self-worship.

Paul’s road to recovery

As I have become more honest about myself, Paul has spoken ever more persuasively to me. When he was knocked down into the dust of the Damascus Road, it was a lot like my being “taken to school” by Frank and Donna. When Paul took a hard look at himself, he realized, as I did, he could never attain a relationship with God, nor become the person he desired by relying on his own faculties, regardless of how clever and educated he had become. “Only a Power beyond himself could restore him.” So, it is best when we read Paul to realize that he is speaking to himself as much or more than he is lecturing anyone else. His heated warnings about strenuously relying on the Law as a ticket to transformation are spoken as a sympathetic insider and not as a critical outsider. All good preachers heed his example.

So, in Galatians 4, when Paul marches out a son from a well-to-do Roman family as an example, it’s not a stretch to think he is talking about himself. Paul, after all, was born into a prosperous merchant class family in Tarsus, a booming commercial and influential Roman city. We are never told that Paul was an heir to a family inheritance; however, three times in the Scripture Paul plays his Roman citizenship card to demand a higher level of respect (Acts 16:37-39; 22:25-28; 25:10-12). The son that Paul uses in his example has not yet reached the age of his “majority;” he is still considered a minor and does not yet have legal say over his affairs:

As long as the heir is a minor, he has no advantage over the slave. Though legally he owns the entire inheritance, he is subject to tutors and administrators until whatever date the father has set for emancipation. That is the way it is with us: When we were minors, we were just like slaves ordered around by simple instructions (the tutors and administrators of this world), with no say in the conduct of our own lives. Galatians 4:1-3 Message

I am using Eugene Peterson’s Message version of Galatians 4 for clarity; however, most English translations render his ‘simple instructions’ as ‘elemental spirits.’ Peterson’s “simple instructions” is closer to its Greek counterpart — stoicheia. The word literally means “things lined up in a row,” like letters of the alphabet. These instructions are necessary, but as we mature, we transcend them. For Paul, the Mosaic Law is stoicheia, which reveals God’s will for humanity, but it is insufficient to save us or change us. For that, we need a “power greater than ourselves.” For that, we need Christ. So Paul continues:

When the time arrived that was set by God the Father, God sent his Son, born among us of a woman, born under the conditions of the law so that he might redeem those of us who have been kidnapped by the law. Thus we have been set free to experience our rightful heritage. You can tell for sure that you are now fully adopted as his own children because God sent the Spirit of his Son into our lives crying out, “Papa! Father!” Doesn’t that privilege of intimate conversation with God make it plain that you are not a slave, but a child? And if you are a child, you’re also an heir, with complete access to the inheritance. Galatians 4:4-7 Message

With Christ’s coming into the world, Paul is reminding the Galatians that they have reached their “majority.” Their day has come. No longer do they need the constraints of the Law to keep them in line. Christ’s death and resurrection have opened to them a new dimension of human existence. Whereas the Law reveals the way God desires them to live, Christ, by destroying the power sin and death, has freed them to meet God’s desires.

Christ’s gift of freedom is punctuated by restoring their intimate relationship with God. In effect, the communion that Adam and Eve have with God in the Garden, has been reestablished. Humanity’s alienation from God has miraculously ended. This is not some far-off, hoped-for panacea for the Galatian congregation. Immediately after Paul shared the gospel with them and they put their trust in Christ, they began experiencing the Holy Spirit in their individual lives and throughout their congregation. The Spirit has freed them to a have a relationship with God like Christ’s. So they now address God the way he does, ‘Papa! Father!’ (See Mark 14:36)

Knowing that the Galatian fellowship has experienced this staggering demonstration of the Spirit, Paul cannot understand how they have been seduced by opportunistic false teachers to step back and follow the intricate requirements of the Law. In so doing, they are dispensing with the expansive free life of grace they have been experiencing in Christ. Just a bit a earlier in the letter, Paul bluntly challenged his young congregation’s decision to jettison their liberty in the Spirit:

Answer this question: Does the God who lavishly provides you with his own presence, his Holy Spirit, working things in your lives you could never do for yourselves, does he do these things because of your strenuous moral striving or because you trust him to do them in you? Galatians 3:5 Message

Remaining Free

Paul’s fear is not that the people will respect the Law — he certainly does — but that they will depend on it, which is the same as solely trusting themselves (See Romans 3:31). The Law is instructive, but it has no power to save or change us. While Paul cannot understand how they could abandon grace so easily, he can see why. Human beings in every age default to willpower as a means of grasping for control. In so doing, they end up in a prison of their own making. Recall the wife of the new’s anchor who could not conceive of a life without alcohol. Freedom terrified her.

At one time, every Christian lived inside that prison. Paul did, and it turned him into a vicious bounty hunter and an accessory to murder (See Acts 9:1-2; 7:57-58). Frank and Donna did, too, and it dehumanized them and turned them against their families and friend, and it led to one job loss after another. Then Christ unlocked their prison doors as he did ours.

And Frank is right, we can only stay free by telling others how they, too, can get free.

SOURCES

Comer, John Mark, Practicing the Way: Be with Jesus, Become like him, Do as he did, New York: Waterbrook, 2024.

PHOTO CREDITS

Getting Free, compliments of Belinda Fewings, photo taken on Ponte Vecchio Bridge , Florence, Italy

Drinking Alone, photo by Zachary Kadolph, Greensboro, NC

AA Meeting, photo compliments of CNN

Two People Sharing, photo by Priscilla Du Preez, Northern Alberta, Canada