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Day 1: Who’s Your Daddy?

Excerpted from Galatians: Breakaway to Freedom by Sarah Howell, author of the Heart Stealers Bible Studies series for women (AMG Publishers).

Read Galatians 4:1–5.

Little Timmy was a slave. He was a slave to his father’s anger, serving as his punching bag when the fury was too much for his father to bear. Timmy’s mother, Betty, would throw herself into the brawl in an attempt to protect her eldest child, but a grown man’s wrath can be consuming, enslaving not only himself, but all those around him.

Timmy and his family were enslaved to their father’s anger. Read Galatians 4:1–3. To what were the children of God enslaved?

Timmy’s father, Horace Smith, was a truck driver and a slave to alcohol. As a result of his alcoholism, the Smith family became enslaved to the bouts of rage his drinking incited. It was a classic case of cause and effect. The alcohol was the cause; the abuse was the effect. The children of God were also enslaved, not necessarily to alcohol and subsequent abuse, but rather they succumbed to the principle of cause and effect. That is what Paul implies in verse 3 when he refers to the basic principles of this world. Our world is indeed governed by cause and effect. Even the laws of science concur. Newton’s Third Law of Motion, is commonly defined, “For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.”

The Law of Moses, given to the Jews during the Exodus, was based upon the law of cause and effect. If the Jews obeyed God’s commandments, then God would bless them as they lived in the Promised Land. If they disobeyed God’s commandments, God would punish them and banish them from the Promised Land. A short study of the Old Testament reveals that they did indeed disobey
God’s commandments; therefore, he exiled them to the pagan nations of Assyria and Babylon.

The Old Testament signified the slavery of the children of God because the law of cause and effect governed God’s relationship with his people. This led the Jews into the bondage of legalism. Legalism, which is defined as a strict adherence to a law or code of conduct, gives the allusion of spiritual maturity. In reality, it is an indication of one’s spiritual immaturity. In the infancy stage of their relationship with the Lord, God allowed his children to be enslaved to legalism. But they were not destined to remain under legalism forever. At the appointed time, God’s intent was to offer his people grace.

Grace overrode the law of cause and effect. It withheld from God’s people the punishment their actions deserved and offered them forgiveness instead. It was the direct opposite of legalism.

God desired to offer grace to his people in order to emancipate them from their bondage of legalism. However, before he could give them grace, he first had to release them from the law they had initially agreed to follow in the Old Testament (see Exodus 19–31, 34). The key to their freedom lay in the offering of a perfect sacrifice, a sacrifice that had not sinned against the law, as they had. So in order to release them from the covenant they made with him, God had to offer a perfect sacrifice on their behalf.

Read Galatians 4:4, 5 and explain how God freed his people from legalism.

God sent his Son as the perfect sacrifice to free the Jews and all mankind from a relationship with him based on cause and effect. No longer would we have to wallow in a state of spiritual infancy. When Christ came, God allowed us a mature relationship with him based on his grace.

According to verse 5, what was another reason God sent his son to redeem us?

In 1977, when Timmy was ten years old, his mother and father divorced. No longer was he a slave to his father’s rage, but he was still destined to live forever as the son of an abusive drunk. For God, it was not enough to remove us from the slavery of legalism, he desired to adopt us, make us his sons, and give us the full rights of sons.

Read John 8:35. Why do you think God wanted to make us his sons?

Timmy spent the first eleven years of his life believing he would forever belong to Horace Smith. But in 1978, Timmy was looking through some old pictures and files when he ran across his birth certificate, a document that would forever change the way he viewed himself. There, on his birth certificate under the title of father, was not the name, Horace Smith, truck driver, but rather the name Tug McGraw, professional baseball player. The same Tug McGraw whose baseball card hung on Timmy’s wall. In a state of disbelief, he confronted his mother and she verified the truth: Tug McGraw, star pitcher for the Philadelphia Phillies, was Timmy’s real father.

Timmy, known by fans as Tim McGraw, lived the first decade of his life in slavery under a guardian who was not even his father. But when the appropriate time came, his mother took her children and fled from Horace Smith. No longer a slave, Tim McGraw became a son. Not the son of an abusive drunk, but the son of a baseball legend.

Even though Tim McGraw’s story is an inspirational one, it’s still based upon the basic principles of this world. His paternity was based on cause and effect. The cause was a summer romance in 1966 between Tim’s mother, Betty Trimble, and Tug McGraw. The two met in Jacksonville, Florida, while Tug was pitching for the minor league team, the Jacksonville Suns. After a few dates, Tim was conceived, Tug was called back up to the majors to play for the Mets, and Betty fled home to her parents’ house in Louisiana.

Tim’s paternity was based on his parents’ cause and effect, but it had nothing to do with his actions. Such is the case with our paternity. God caused his Son to redeem us from the law and the effect of that one act of redemption was that we were adopted as sons into the family of God, forever. Our paternity is based upon God’s actions, not ours. If it had been based upon our actions, we would have remained slaves forever—constantly feeling that in order to become sons of God, we first had to do something to earn it.

Read Romans 8:15. What can enslave us?

A relationship with God based upon legalism is motivated by fear. Not a healthy, respectful fear of God, but rather a fear of God’s wrath. In order to alleviate our fear, God made us his sons, independent of our actions. What a loving Father we have! A God who initiates a relationship with us, independent of the law of cause and effect, deserves a relationship from us without the fear of cause and effect.

Think about your relationship with the Lord; does legalism (or the law of cause and effect) play a role in your relationship with him? If so, how?

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