Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 248 · September 5
Entangled Again
“Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage.”
We are better at getting out than at staying out. Everybody has watched somebody set free and then watched the slow walk back, and some of us have done the walking.
The Galatians went back to church. That is what makes this letter uncomfortable. Men had arrived with a procedure, a calendar and a knife, and the congregation was taking it up: ye observe days, and months, and times, and years. Paul's alarm is personal. I am afraid of you, lest I have bestowed upon you labour in vain. Ye did run well; who did hinder you that ye should not obey the truth?
Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage. A yoke is a working animal's collar. Peter said the same at the Jerusalem council, objecting that the men proposing this one had never carried it: why tempt ye God, to put a yoke upon the neck of the disciples, which neither our fathers nor we were able to bear?
Twelve verses on he guards the other side of the road. Ye have been called unto liberty; only use not liberty for an occasion to the flesh, but by love serve one another. One yoke does get offered, and Jesus states the terms: take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart.
You did the setting free, Lord, and we keep fitting ourselves back into the collar, because a collar tells us where to stand. Show us which one we have on and who buckled it. Keep our freedom from becoming an excuse for something cheap. And if we are to be under a yoke at all, let it be his. Amen.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 248 is Written Before Birth (Psalm 139:16).