“True freedom lies in obedience to the counsels of God. … The gospel is not a philosophy of repression, as so many regard it. It is a plan of freedom that gives discipline to appetite and direction to behavior. Its fruits are sweet and its rewards are liberal”
when our religious observance is not done “mechanically” but “because of our love for the Lord, in complete freedom and faith, we narrow our distance from him and our relationship to him becomes intimate. We are released from the bondage of legalism, and we are touched by the spirit and feel a oneness with God” (in Conference Report, Apr. 1964, 36).
Paul admonished the Galatian Saints “stand fast in the liberty wherewith Christ that made use free” and not to become “entangled again with the yoke of bondage” (Galatians 5:1). While today we do not worry about becoming entangled with the law of Moses, we “sometimes either consciously or unwittingly bind ourselves to the things of the world. As we do so, we place ourselves in a comparable position to Paul’s opponents in Galatia…
Christian liberty does not come from an absence of law; it comes from willingly yoking ourselves to Christ.
The difficulty comes when we refuse to give up our other yokes, as did Paul’s opponents in Galatia. The yoke that they clung to was the law of Moses.
“In our day, our yoke, our law of Moses, is anything that prevents or impedes our total commitment to Christ and His gospel” (Gaye Strathearn, “Law and Liberty in Galatians 5–6,” in Go Ye into All the World: Messages of the New Testament Apostles [2002], 70–71; rsc.byu.edu).
