What is it that saves us from the penalty our sins deserve? What is it that makes us righteous in God’s sight? Most of the philosophies and religions of the world would tell us that we need to do something, that the key to a fulfilled life is to observe the 5 pillars of Islam, or to follow the Buddha’s 8-fold path, or to develop the 7 habits of highly-effective people, or to reduce your carbon footprint or just to eat less processed food and get more exercise.

In contrast, Paul points to the experience of Abraham, a man who lived over 4000 years ago. In Genesis 12 and 15 and 17 and 18, God promised Abraham over and over again that he would have as many descendants as the stars in the heavens, even though he had no children. God repeated this promise to Abraham for many years – even to the point where he was 99 and his wife Sarah was 90, well past the age at which it was possible for them to have children. There was absolutely nothing Abraham could do to make this impossible event happen – he just had to believe, he just had to trust God to do for him what he and Sarah could not do for themselves.

And we are all in the same helpless condition where it comes to salvation. For the fact is that we can’t do anything to save ourselves – we have all broken God’s law of love in one way or another. Even though God created all of us in His image so that we might live in perfect fellowship with Him, we have considered ourselves to be more important than He is. Even though God designed us to love one another unconditionally and self-sacrificially, we continue to put ourselves first and to push other people away in various ways.

And so, because we have turned away from God and from one another, we have severed our connection with the only One Who is light and life. And that means that spiritually speaking we are walking in the darkness. We are dead in our sins. The battery on the cellphone of our lives has run down, we can’t see the outlet in the wall, and we have no strength to plug it in if we could.

So what’s the answer? It’s not something we do – it’s something Jesus has done. The good news of the gospel is that Jesus paid the penalty that all our sins deserve. And He rose from the dead so that we might have new life, and so that we might walk in the light. Like Abraham, our job is simply to hear the promises of God and then trust that Jesus will fulfill them for us, that He will plug us back into God’s light and love.

But the good news is also that, as we trust in Him, we can be certain that He has, as Paul says in verse 8, justified us, declared us to be holy and righteous in God’s sight, fully acceptable to God. As we trust in Him, we can be certain that we have indeed become sons and daughters of Abraham, not because of our ethnic background, but because we share in Abraham’s faith. And that means that all the promises God made to His Old Testament people are ours too, that we have become part of a family of faith that stretches across the miles and the millennia.

So stop trying to fix yourself. Stop trying to save yourself with more self control. Just trust Jesus and follow Him. And you’ll be amazed at what He does with you, and what He does through you.

Galatians 3:5-9 (ESV)

5 Does he who supplies the Spirit to you and works miracles among you do so by works of the law, or by hearing with faith–
6 just as Abraham “believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness”?
7 Know then that it is those of faith who are the sons of Abraham.
8 And the Scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, preached the gospel beforehand to Abraham, saying, “In you shall all the nations be blessed.”
9 So then, those who are of faith are blessed along with Abraham, the man of faith.