Becoming Children

Galatians 3:23-29

May 10, 2026 (Mother’s Day) • Mount Pleasant UMC

Well, let me start off by wishing everyone a Happy Mother’s Day! Every year on this day, I think of Jerry Stowers, a parishioner at a previous church who has since gone home to be with Jesus. At this particular church, we had an annual Mother’s Day breakfast after worship, and when I got out to the fellowship hall, Jerry was the first in line. I said, “Jerry, it’s Mother’s Day! Shouldn’t you let your wife go first?” To which Jerry said, “She wouldn’t be a mother without me!” And Jerry went on through the line. So happy Mother’s Day, everyone, whether you are a mother or had a mother—motherhood is a good thing and a good reason to celebrate.

I think it’s appropriate that today, Mother’s Day, we come to this particular word in our journey through the New Testament “Words of Life”—because our word today is “faith.” Many if not most of us learned our faith from our mothers. Sorry, Dads, but it’s been that way for much (probably most) of history. Moms have a huge influence in the faith of their children. In the Biblical world, moms had a strong influence on those early years of development, and children would learn the stories of the faith in those days, often at their mother’s knee. Despite what some might try to say, the Bible is full of strong women and faith-filled mothers (we’ll come back to that idea in a bit).

But it’s also true that, in those ancient days “faith” wasn’t just a hobby or an afterthought like it is for many people today. Today, “faith” is something we have, something we do if we have extra time, and if we don’t we can just metaphorically put it on the shelf. Oh, and don’t get too radical about your faith today! People will call you names. But in the ancient world, “faith” was the central part of life and the central part of who a person was. Whether we’re talking about faith in the Greek and Roman “gods” or faith in the Jewish God Yahweh, faith was what held everything together. Dr. Nijay Gupta says, “‘Faith’ was not specifically something you set aside time for—it was life” ([a], 15 New Testament Words for Life, pgs. 72-73).

For the Jews, our spiritual ancestors, faith (and life) revolved around the Torah, which we usually translate as “Law” but is probably better translated as “instruction.” Torah was the way to live; it gave shape and dimension to life. But if we try to read all of those laws in the Old Testament and apply them, we struggle because we live in a different context. So usually we just ignore them, but if we do read them, they seem binding, restrictive. The word that comes to mind is not “life.” Our spiritual ancestors had a different perspective, which comes through in this section of Paul’s letter to the Galatian church. The Torah was not meant to restrict the people; it was meant to shape the people, to help them become children of God.

Galatia was not a city; it was an area of modern-day Turkey that was settled by people from central Europe as early as the third century BC. So Paul’s letter was probably circulated to several house churches in that area. The people there were gentiles (non-Jews) who had, at one time, worshipped many gods and goddesses but now they’ve had a radical change from those little idols to worshipping the one God reveled in Jesus Christ (Gupta [b], Galatians [Story of God Bible Commentary], pg. 5). When you lived in that sort of “many gods” world, you were always busy trying to please this god or that god, trying to guess which one might be upset with you today. It was a never-ending game. If you wanted good crops, you tried to please this god. If you wanted more children, you turned to that god. You were always trying to figure out and follow the right rules—because the gods wouldn’t tell you. And because they’ve lived in that world, some in Galatia are trying to turn faith in Christ into a list of rules as well; I mean, that’s all they had known. And, besides, didn’t Judaism also consist of a bunch of rules? Well, yes, Paul says, but he insists that the rules were never the point of the Torah. The Torah had a very different and specific purpose: to ultimately bring people to Christ.

Paul puts it this way: “The law was our guardian until Christ came” (3:24). That word “guardian” is very important there and he’s referring to a very specific sort of person in the ancient world called a “pedagogue.” This person was not a family member, but they were either a slave or were hired to supervise the child, to get him to and from school. The pedagogue was not a teacher per se; their job was to prevent harm from coming to the child and to promote good behavior in the child. Sometimes they would discipline the child so that the child might be better, but that wasn’t their primary role. Sometimes, though, the pedagogue forgot their role. Jewish historian Josephus tells of a pedagogue who was caught beating the cook because a child overate. The parent had to remind the pedagogue that his role was correcting the child, not the cook. Think of it this way: the pedagogue was like a crib, which serves a particular function for a child up to a certain point. It keeps a child safe and confined, protected from trouble, allowing them to sleep or even play in peace. But it’s only for a time; eventually the child outgrows the crib. Eventually the child outgrew the pedagogue. And eventually the people outgrew the law because, like I said, the law was, ultimately, meant to prepare them or to point them to Christ. Paul says it wasn’t meant to teach them how to live; it was meant to help them get safely to the true teacher (cf. Gupta [b] 145-146; Hansen, Galatians [IVPNTC], pgs. 107-108).

Paul wants them to know and understand this so that they can grasp the radical nature of faith in Christ. The Gospel is not about following the rules. “We are no longer under a guardian,” Paul says. “So in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith” (3:25-26). Faith. It’s one of those load-bearing words we use a lot but are hard pressed to explain or define. It’s this nebulous thing out there that somehow we summon up enough of when we need it. Or it’s that thing we don’t have enough of, people say, when we don’t get what we pray for. But none of that is what Paul is talking about here and it’s not what the earliest Christians understood “faith” to be. Mark Twain supposedly once said, “Faith is believin’ what you know ain’t so” (qtd. in Gupta [a] 70). Some go along with that, saying faith is holding onto strange beliefs. But, for Paul, faith was absolutely reasonable. However, it’s not about doctrines, thoughts or beliefs. Faith is much deeper than that (cf. Gupta [a] 70-71).

Here’s your Greek word for the week: pistis. That’s the word Paul uses here and it doesn’t mean just agreeing with an idea. It has to do with putting your whole trust in someone or something. Like the hokey pokey—you put your whole self in. I think of it being like when I went up to the top of the Willis Tower in Chicago. Up on the 103rd floor they have these ledges that are glass and hang out over the city—if I was going to experience the view, I had to believe, to trust, to put my faith in the glass ledge that it would hold me 1,343 feet above the city. Pistis—faith is putting your whole self in, and in this case, in Jesus. I am going to trust that you will hold me. For Paul, “faith” is a shorthand way of talking about having a personal relationship with Jesus—a relationship that exists every single day, not just on Sundays and not just on Christmas or Easter. Faith is not something we can turn on or off. Faith is an everyday, ongoing commitment to Christ, a commitment to have him as part of our lives. We can’t flip a switch and turn our faith on or off, and we can’t divide our lives into “sacred” and “secular.” It was not that way in the ancient world, and it’s still not that way today. Where once faith meant following the Torah, now faith means following Jesus (Gupta [a] 76, 81). It’s that simple, and that hard.

So that means everything we are, do, say, know or believe should be impacted by this faith, this “putting our whole self in.” And Paul gets at that in what is probably the most famous verse from this passage. In a very brief sentence, he describes the way this kind of faith transforms all of our lives: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (3:28). Contrary to what some will try to say, Paul is not telling us that these distinctions are removed or that they no longer matter. Of course not. We are still what we are. What Paul is talking about is the way this faith, this relationship with Jesus, changes the way we approach things like our ethnicity, our social status and even our gender. First, ethnicity, and when Paul says there are no longer Jews nor Greeks, he’s not saying we lose our ethnicity when we come to Christ. Jews are still Jews, Greeks are still Greeks, white, black, Asian, Native American and so on are all still the ethnicity they are. What he’s talking about is the way people use their ethnicity to presume they are more important than someone else. Jews believed that their chosenness made them more valuable than the gentiles. Greeks believed that their heritage made them more sophisticated than those backwater Jews. Paul says none of that matters anymore because you are one in Christ. Jews and Greeks (gentiles) alike are part of the same body, the same church, sharing the same table. But far too often it still isn’t so. Let’s put this in modern context: Martin Luther King Jr. said it decades ago, and it’s still sadly true. Sunday morning remains the most segregated time in America. I’ll just leave that there.

Then Paul moves to our social status: there is no longer “slave nor free.” Slavery was a big deal in the Roman empire. In fact, scholars estimate there were more slaves than citizens in the empire, which makes you realize if the slaves had risen up they probably could have taken over. But there were very strict social rules for slaves and free people. Slaves were lower class, subservient; free people were upper class, in command. The two did not mix. One had power, the other did not. In the letter to Philemon, which you will read in a few weeks, Paul is writing on behalf of Onesimus, an escaped slave who had come to know Christ under Paul’s ministry. He asks Philemon, who is the owner, to welcome his slave back “as a brother in the Lord” (Philemon 16). Philemon was a Christian, but it apparently had never occurred to him to share the good news with his slaves. Onesimus had to run away to meet Jesus and in Paul’s estimation that needed to change because slaves and owners were both children of God. By the way, some people have used such passages to say the New Testament approves of slavery. Nothing could be further from the truth. There is a trajectory in the Scriptures toward getting rid of slavery, and treating slaves as “brothers and sisters in the Lord” is a part of that—because can you really own or mistreat someone who is your sibling in Christ? Maybe that also has something to say to us about the way employers treat employees. Paul says there is no more slave or free because social status means nothing in the church.

Thirdly, Paul talks about gender, a hot button item then as well as now. “Nor is there male and female,” he writes. Again, he does not mean we give up our gender or our sexuality when we come to Christ and become some generic thing in between. That’s not what he’s saying at all. He’s talking about hierarchy, about cultures in which men typically rule over women, where women are expected to be subservient to men just because of their gender. In Paul’s world, women found their sole worth in marriage and child-bearing; that was considered to be their “civic duty” (Gupta [b] 150). It was all about who had the power. We still see this today in the church in the ongoing battles about whether or not women can be pastors and leaders. Rick Warren’s church was kicked out of their denomination not too long ago because he began ordaining women and because they had a female teaching pastor, something we in the United Methodist Church have been doing for decades. I think about my Sunday School teachers when I was a kid and if women hadn’t been allowed to teach, there would have been empty classrooms. Paul is tearing down a hierarchy here; he’s tearing down a wall. Elsewhere in his writings, he acknowledges the contributions of both women and men to his ministry, co-laborers because all are one in Christ. All are welcome in Christ. Men have certain gifts to give to the church, and women have other gifts. They don’t cease being who and what they are; they each contribute the gifts God has given them for the betterment of the church, for the building up of Christ’s kingdom.

So—ethnicity, status and gender. In each of these areas, Paul is pointing out that our highest priority is not to any of those things. Our highest priority is to Jesus, the focus of our faith. Anything else violates the truth of the gospel (cf. Hansen 112; cf. McKnight, James and Galatians, pgs. 176-177). So with one simple verse, Paul has “scrambled the normal classification systems” of his world (cf. Gupta [b] 149) and ours, for that matter. These are the things that happen when we become children of God through faith in Jesus Christ—it upends our world because the values of his kingdom, the values of this faith, are so very different from the values of the world around us. I would even say the values of his kingdom are better than the values of the world around us. And that leads me to ask why, then, we put ourselves back in the “old” world rather than the world of faith in Christ. Paul is quite clear: faith in Jesus leads us to a life of freedom. And so what do most of us do with it? We start creating rules and laws again in order to determine who is really in and who is really out, who is fully acceptable and who is fully devoted, and to make sure we know exactly how we can be “in.” We start building walls that Paul here is trying to tear down. We ask questions like: what church do you go to? What is your understanding of baptism? What translation of the Bible do you use? Who is your favorite pastor? What is your political party? Who did you vote for in the last election? Who are you going to vote for in this election? Where do you live? Have you read this book or that book? Do you support this policy or that policy? New Testament scholar Scot McKnight says, “If any of these questions point to an answer that leads you to exclude someone from being fully devoted,” you need to ask Paul’s main question once again: do you and they believe in Jesus (cf. McKnight 172)? That’s what it’s all about. That’s one of the reasons I love John Wesley; he infused the early Methodist movement with that spirit. In his famous sermon, “Catholic Spirit” (where “catholic” means “universal”), Wesley said we don’t have to have all the same opinions, we don’t have to have all the same ways of worship, we don’t have to convince each other that we are right (I wonder what he would have thought of all the Christians arguing on Facebook). He said we can be convinced that different methods of church government, of baptism, of prayer are better than others and not have to change each other’s opinions. The only question that needs to be asked, according to Wesley, is this: Is your heart right with God and with your neighbor? If the answer to that is “yes,” then, Wesley said, “Give me your hand” (Jackson, ed., The Works of John Wesley, Vol. V, pgs. 497-499).

When we put ourselves back under laws and rules, we’re living as if Christ had never come (Hansen 109). Paul puts it this way: “Now that this faith has come, we are no longer under a guardian” (3:25). We don’t have to keep living like we once did. I like this example that I stole from a new favorite author. Suppose you were stranded in the jungle and had only a small tent to live in. For a long time, you lived in the tent and you got really used to the tent. Then, one day, you are found and rescued from the jungle and brought home to live in a mansion. Now, suppose as you pulled up to the mansion, you said to your rescuers, “You know, I’ve really gotten used to my tent. And the more shelter, the better, right? I’m just going to set up my tent inside the mansion and continue to live in my tent.” That’s what it’s like to live under law when the grace of Jesus Christ is offered to us. We’re choosing something small and confining when Jesus offers us a relationship full of life and hope and peace and joy. “One can either live according to the law’s blessings and curses or live in Christ; you can’t have it both ways” (Gupta [b] 146-147). So which will it be: will you insist on following all the rules or will you follow Jesus? Which one will be the object of your faith?

Faith is the “essential condition or means of being a child of God in Christ” (Gupta [b] 148) and it will change your world. Or it should. If faith for you is just a matter of mental agreement, or a matter of doing certain things and not doing other things, or just attending church on Sunday mornings—in other words, if faith doesn’t affect your life and upend your world, Paul would wonder what kind of faith you have. Gathering together for worship is important and vital. Agreeing with the doctrines and beliefs of the church is good and soul-shaping. But faith is first and foremost about loving Jesus, being in a relationship with Jesus. And when you love someone, when you are in a relationship with someone, you want to do things that make them happy—not because you have to but because you want to. “Faith means listening to God [through his word, through prayer, through other people] and doing what pleases him, and so often this means extending love and care to the other” (Gupta [a] 84). Or, to use Paul’s words again, “In Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith” (3:26). If your life doesn't look like love toward others, maybe it’s not faith in Jesus that you have. Without that kind of faith, you won’t become a child of God. So, what kind of faith do you want? Let’s pray.