Click this link to hear an audio version of the below text narrated by SOTH member Jerry Rhinehart: http://sothrichfield.podbean.com
Galatians 6:12-15 (NIV)
12 Those who want to impress people by means of the flesh are trying to compel you to be circumcised. The only reason they do this is to avoid being persecuted for the cross of Christ. 13 Not even those who are circumcised keep the law, yet they want you to be circumcised that they may boast about your circumcision in the flesh. 14 May I never boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which[a] the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world. 15 Neither circumcision nor uncircumcision means anything; what counts is the new creation.
Ok, today is more about what a church is not. At the end of his letter to the church in Galatia, Paul says that a church is not like the rest of the culture. Most people try to put on a “good showing in the flesh” so that they are accepted by their peers. But a Holy Spirit led church that is rooted in the radical, one-way love of God that comes to us in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ will always be at odds with the world around it. A church is meant to stick out like a sore thumb. It is the only place where the free grace of God is proclaimed loud and clear for any who would listen. Let us pray that the Holy Spirit guards Shepherd of the Hills so that we would only and always boast “in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ”.