Give Us This Day Devotionals, Volume 7: Galatians–Philemon

By Charles Erlandson

Give Us This Day is a unique daily devotional commentary for the entire New Testament based on the ancient method called lectio divina. Lectio divina, or "divine reading," is the method used by the early church and countless Christians through the centuries to read the Scriptures to form and transform the soul more than merely to inform the mind.

Give Us This Day deals in depth with entire passages and their contexts. Rather than selecting only certain portions of the New Testament to write about, Fr. Charles has written a devotional for each and every passage of the New Testament.

Fr. Charles writes for the whole person: he's not afraid to use his sense of humor, and he carefully relates the Bible not only to the individual's life but also to the life of the Church. At the end of each day's devotional, an appropriate Prayer is offered, as well as Points for Further Reflection on the day's lesson. Each devotional concludes with a suggested Resolution to put into effect what the Spirit has stirred up in the heart of the reader during the course of his reading, meditation, and prayer.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Release date: Mar 29, 2024
• ISBN: 9781725282650

Charles Erlandson

Charles Erlandson is a priest in the Reformed Episcopal Church and serves as the assistant rector at Good Shepherd Reformed Episcopal Church in Tyler, Texas, where he resides with his wife and children. He is a professor of church history and the director of communications at Cranmer Theological House in Dallas. His previous works include Orthodox Anglican Identity: The Quest for Unity in a Diverse Religious Tradition; Love Me, Love My Wife: Ten Reasons Christians Must Join a Local Church; and Take This Cup: How God Transforms Suffering into Glory and Joy.

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Introduction

Welcome to Give Us This Day, the daily Bible devotional I’ve written for every passage in the New Testament. I began to write Give Us This Day in the summer of 2006, in response to the promptings of the Holy Spirit for me to write a daily Bible devotional based on the ancient way of reading the Scriptures known as the lectio divina. Originally called Daily Bread for the first five years of its existence, my daily devotionals began as a daily e-mail I sent out to a growing readership. However, for some time it has been my goal to publish the entire series of devotionals so that there would be a daily Bible devotional for every passage of the New Testament. Some of you have been reading Give Us This Day from the beginning, and I thank all of you who have been its faithful readers over the years.

While I originally wrote Give Us This Day primarily for the Reformed Episcopal Church in Hot Springs, Arkansas at which I was serving as rector (St. Chrysostom’s then, but now called Christ Anglican), I became aware that many others might profit by these devotionals. When I first began writing, I surveyed the other daily devotionals that were out there and immediately noticed some differences between what I was writing and what others had written. I was concerned that most of the other devotionals only dealt with a verse of the Bible for each day, and I could find none that provided a devotional for every passage of the New Testament. I also noticed that what I had written was usually longer than the uniformly bite-sized devotionals that seemed to be the publishing norm. In addition, most other devotionals did not include suggestions for further meditations, and virtually none offered suggested resolutions to help put into effect what God had revealed through a given passage. At the end of each Give Us This Day meditation, I, therefore, offer not only a Prayer but also some Points for Further Reflection and a Daily Resolution.

This particular volume covers Paul’s letters to the Romans and the Corinthians (both 1 and 2 Corinthians), and is the xis in an eight-volume series that covers the entire New Testament. Give Us This Day will be made available as a printed book and an e-book and is also available as a daily devotional that is sent each day to those on my list.

Give us this day our daily bread is the most fundamental prayer we can ask on behalf of ourselves. Knowing this, our Lord not only commanded us to pray for this every day but also offers Himself to us as our daily bread.

As the Bread of Life that offers Himself to us each day as true spiritual food, Jesus comes to us in many ways. The feedings of the four thousand and five thousand (especially in the Gospel of St. John) remind us that it is through faithful participation in the covenantal meal of the Holy Communion that Jesus feeds us. Through the creatures of bread and wine, Jesus gives His Body and Blood to us and feeds us at His heavenly banquet.

But He feeds us in other ways. In one of his sermons, St. Augustine expressed his belief that the feeding of the four thousand isn’t just about filling the bellies of men with bread and fish, nor is it solely about the Holy Communion. For St. Augustine and others, the Bread of Life is also the Holy Scriptures, upon which we are to feed every day, for they are the words of life. That the Word of God is also the Bread of God is satisfyingly illustrated by the Collect for the Second Sunday in Advent in the Book of Common Prayer, in which we ask God to Grant that we may in such wise hear them [the Scriptures], read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them.

However, Christians in the twenty-first century often do not properly eat or digest the Word of God. I’ve noticed some of you snacking in a sort of hit and run fashion, as you rush to lead your real life. I’ll squeeze in a chapter of Bible reading today, you think. Some of you are to be commended for devoting yourself to studying the Scriptures, but unfortunately it is in such a way that only the mind is fed. Meanwhile, the soul gets spiritual kwashiorkor, which may easily be identified by your distended spiritual belly.

Scripture must, therefore, be eaten with prayer, which may be likened to the spiritual blood into which the bread of life must be digested and ingested. Through a life of prayer, the Word of God is carried into every part of your life and becomes your life, just as a piece of digested food is broken down, enters the blood, and is carried to every part of your body. Only through a life of prayer, which is a third means by which Jesus becomes our daily bread, will the Word of God become spiritual food for us. After all, haven’t many of us had teachers of the Bible in college who have read and studied the Word but who, apart from a life of prayer and obedience, use their studies to starve themselves and others?

The most fruitful way I know of to receive my daily bread of Scripture is through the ancient practice of the lectio divina, or divine reading, with which I hope many of you are familiar. The essence of the lectio divina is not just another Bible study to inform our minds. Instead, the lectio divina is formative reading, in which we allow the Holy Scriptures, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, to form our very being. There are four basic steps in this divine reading:

1.lectio—reading/ listening

a.Cultivate the ability to listen deeply.

b.Your reading is slow, formative reading.

c.Your reading is based on previous reading and study.

2.meditation—meditation

a.Gently stop reading when you have found a word, phrase, or passage through which God is speaking to you personally.

b.Ruminate over this passage, as a cow ruminates or chews its cud.

c.Say the passage over and over, noticing different aspects—taste it!

d.Allow God’s Word to become His word for you at every level of your being and to interact with your inner world of concerns, memories, and ideas.

3.oratio—prayer

a.Pray—or dialogue with God—over the passage.

b.Interact with God as one who loves you and is present with you.

c.Allow God to transform your thoughts, memories, agendas, tendencies, and habits.

d.Re-affirm and repeat what God has just told you.

4.contemplation—contemplation

a.Rest in the presence of the One who has come to transform and bless you.

b.Rest quietly, experiencing the presence of God.

c.Leave with a renewed energy and commitment to what God has just told you.

Daily reading of the Holy Scriptures through the lectio divina is just the food we need to nourish and correct our impoverished spiritual lives, our over-emphasis on the intellect, and our random forages into the Bible that leave us unsatisfied.

A Few Words of Advice

1.Use what is profitable, and don’t worry about the rest.

2.Don’t feel the need to meditate on every part of every Give Us This Day. It’s not good to exhaust yourself spiritually. Also, don’t feel it necessary to keep up with a different Resolution every day: you’ll drive yourself crazy in the process and unnecessarily feel like a failure! Work on what God is calling you to work on. Use the Give Us This Day as it is most profitable for you.

3.If God stops you and tells you to do something different—for example, to meditate on one small part of the lesson and apply it to your life today—drop everything else and listen to Him!

4.Most importantly: once you’ve developed the godly habit of meditating on the Bible every day—don’t ever let go of it!

Ways to Profitably Eat Give Us This Day

1.Find and use some system for reading Scripture daily. I’ve organized Give Us This Day in the canonical order of the New Testament: from Matthew to Revelation. But many church traditions use a lectionary system of reading the New Testament. With your favorite lectionary in hand, you can read Give Us This Day with the daily New Testament assigned by that lectionary.

2.Give Us This Day was written with the conscious aim of encouraging the reader to think more actively about the act of interpretation. While the literal meaning of the text is always the beginning point, the Bible can legitimately be applied in other ways. I’ve especially tried to suggest that the Bible is best read with the interpretation of the entire Church in mind.

3.I’ve also written Give Us This Day so that it could serve as a reference point for Bible study: in other words, as a kind of commentary to be consulted and not only a daily devotional to be used only once.

4.The Resolutions found in each Give Us This Day are another resource that should not be neglected. It may be neither desirable nor possible to follow the prescribed Resolution for each day. But these Resolutions can be returned to for further reference and used even apart from the devotional for the day.

5.The Prayers of Give Us This Day, many of which have been taken from a variety of historical sources, are also a rich resource that bears repeated use. Together, the prayers form a kind of treasury of prayer that can be used in any of a variety of ways. They especially include several different ways to think about how to pray the Lord’s Prayer.

A Note on Interpretation

Most of us who believe the Bible is the Word of God naturally assume that God intends it all for me, but even if this is true, the question remains as to how it applies to me. This is the task of all interpretation, including teaching and preaching. Historically, the Church has read the Bible in four senses or kinds of interpretations: the literal, allegorical, moral (or tropological), and anagogical. The allegorical meaning, of which so many Bible-believing Christians are afraid, is simply applying a given passage to Jesus Christ or the Church Militant (the Church still here on earth). We interpret the Bible allegorically all the time whenever we read the Old Testament and find Jesus Christ in it, for the literal meaning may be about the entrance into the Promised Land or about kings or about the delicate art of sacrificing animals. Yet we know that such passages also teach us about Christ. The moral sense is also one we use all the time, even if we claim we are only being literal. A moral interpretation of a passage involves applying it to yourself or other Christians. The anagogical interpretation means applying the passage to the heavenly realities and is thus (here goes another big word) eschatological in nature, applying the Word of God to the end things, or the world to come, on which we think too infrequently.

Give Us This Day is designed to be primarily moral in its interpretation because I want each of you to apply the Word of God to your life. But your life is not merely your own: it belongs to Christ, and so we seek Jesus Christ in His Church (allegorical interpretation). And all who are truly Christians are part of the Body of Christ and hopefully part of a local body, and therefore much of what the Bible says must be allegorical in this sense.

May God bless you through Give Us This Day, however you choose to use it, however you allow God to use it in your life. It is, in essence, but one way to make sure God’s people are meditating on His Word even as they pray. Feel free to share it with friends and pass along those parts that may be profitable to your brothers and sisters in Christ.

Galatians 1:1–10

Heresy begins not in the head but in the heart. Show me a heretic, and I’ll show you someone in rebellion against God. Naturally, there are some who, through ignorance, follow false teachers. But usually, a turn from correct doctrine is a direct turn from God.

This seems to be Paul’s major point in his letter to the Galatians. Unlike the modern church, St. Paul takes doctrine, or the gospel in the Church, seriously. He takes it so seriously that when he castigates the Galatians, it’s not just because they’ve gotten a few minor points of theology wrong, and it’s not just that they’ve forsaken the gospel as it was first taught to them: it’s that in so doing they have in reality turned away from the Father, which is to turn away from the Son. He says in verse 6 of Chapter 1: I marvel that you are turning away so soon from Him who called you in the grace of Christ, to a different gospel.

St. Paul would be amazed at how easily we modern and now postmodern Christians separate Jesus Christ from the very means by which He comes to us. We like to believe that we can love Jesus, even while rejecting what He taught. More subtly, we like to believe that we can love Jesus while rejecting what He has taught through His appointed means and men. So some, more radically, accept the words of Jesus when they are in red letters but not when they are in black letters through the writings of Paul.

But, since the Bible requires interpretation, we believe that we can receive the words of Jesus Christ without receiving the Body of Jesus Christ, the Church, through which Jesus Christ acts and speaks today. Those who have a low view of the Church as the Body of Christ are likely to end up in heresy sooner or later.

But back to doctrine. Paul has such a high view of the importance of doctrine that he actually curses anyone who preaches a different gospel than the one that Paul gave to the Galatians. Paul doesn’t just say that such false teachers are wrong or simply point the finger: he says, Let them be accursed!

Like every period of church history, there are false teachers in the church. Some are very obvious, such as those who deny the divinity of Christ or His Resurrection or those who deny that the Scriptures are the Word of God. But there are more subtle false teachers as well. There are those who sound more like self-help gurus than proclaimers of the grace of Jesus Christ to sinners. And now many are denying the Bible’s teaching on anthropology, the question of who man is, including his sexuality.

And then there is you and me. We all have a tendency towards practical heresy if left unchecked. We are all tempted to reject the teaching of God (doctrine) where it doesn’t suit our purposes. As Christians, we don’t do this because the doctrine doesn’t make sense or we can’t believe it: we do it because we don’t like the way that such doctrine interrupts our selfish lives.

As I reflect on the current crisis in worldwide Anglicanism, I sometimes wonder which came first: the chicken or the egg; the rejection of the Bible as the Word of God in the mind or the rejection of the Word of God in the heart because it interferes with my chosen lifestyle. Actually, I think it’s both, and so we must guard hand and head and heart. This is why the rejection of the clear biblical teaching that homosexuality is a sin is not really about homosexuality at all: it’s about our faith; it’s about our attitude towards God’s Word, and this means it’s about the attitude of our hearts towards God Himself.

I believe in Jesus Christ, but I also believe that there’s nothing wrong with homosexuality. I’ve heard this attitude frequently in recent years among those who call themselves Christians. (And you could easily substitute other words for homosexuality.)

To which St. Paul would say: How can you love Jesus Christ when you have rejected Him?

"I haven’t rejected Him—only what some have taught about a personal lifestyle choice."

The One who has taught this intolerant truth about this ‘lifestyle choice’ was the Lord Himself, not only through His own mouth but also through the mouths of the ones He has sent—His apostles.

St. Paul clearly understood this. Here is how he begins his letter: "Paul, an apostle (not from men nor through man, but through Jesus Christ and God the Father who raised Him from the dead"). For St. Paul, which means for Jesus Christ, we cannot separate the Father from Jesus Christ, from the Word of God, from the ones who teach the Word of God from the Church. The minute you begin to pit one of these against the other, or even one against itself (such as using the Word of God against the Word of God), we aren’t just in danger of becoming heretics and following a different gospel: we’re in danger of following a different Lord.

It’s all too easy, though, to point the finger at the Galatians or the heretics in the church today. As always, the point is for each of us to apply this passage to ourselves. Yes, this means guarding the Scriptures and guarding the Church. But this work of guarding begins by guarding our hands and heads and hearts.

Have you fully accepted the Word of God as The Word of God? Have you accepted God’s Word not only in theory but in practice? Have you accepted not just the authority of St. Paul but the authority of your local church leaders while holding them accountable to the faith once delivered to the saints? It is so easy to turn the Word of God into the words of men and to turn the Body of Jesus Christ into a human fellowship.

This morning, St. Paul warns us not to do such things, for in rejecting God’s Word, whether in heart or head or hands, and in rejecting God’s leaders, we are rejecting the one who gave Himself for our sins, that He might deliver us from this present evil age, according to the will of our God and Father, to whom be glory forever and ever. Amen!

Prayer: Deliver us, good Lord, from false teachers and false teaching; deliver us from the false inclinations of our hearts and heads and hands. By Your grace, keep us from turning to the left or right, and teach us to hear Your Word as Your Word that we might give ourselves to Him who gave Himself for our sins, and that we might be delivered from this present evil age, according to Your will, our God and Father, to whom, along with the Son and the Holy Spirit, be glory forever and ever. Amen. (Charles Erlandson)

Resolution and Point for Meditation:

I resolve to examine myself and see if there are any ways in which I am practically rejecting the authority of God by rejecting the authority of His Word or His appointed teachers.

If I have been rejecting God’s authority in this way, I resolve to turn back to the Lord by turning back to His teaching and teachers.

Galatians 1:11–24

But it pleased God, who separated me from my mother’s womb and called me through His grace, to reveal His Son in me, that I might preach Him among the Gentiles (verse 15).

This is an absolutely amazing statement! But how many times have you read the book of Galatians and not noticed it in your rush to get to the real message of Galatians and Paul’s teaching on legalism? The truth is that this time through Paul’s letter to the Galatians (and I’ve made it through the first chapter now), I see another real message from Paul, and it’s this four-part gospel:

1.God is absolutely sovereign.

2.God, by His grace, has called us before we were even born.

3.God sovereignly chooses to use those whom He has called to reveal His Son to the world.

4.Once God’s chosen us to reveal His Son, He graces our natural gifts so that we can truly participate in His work of reclaiming the world for Himself.

This, I contend, is the real message of St. Paul, not only in his letter to the Galatians but also throughout his corpus of letters. The lawlessness that Paul later addresses in Galatians is only an attempt to remedy the fact that the Galatians have not paid proper attention to Paul’s real message, which I have outlined above. They have forgotten about God and His sovereignty; they have forgotten His grace; and they are in the process of forfeiting the incredible privilege of being the means by which God reveals His Son to the world.

Paul’s gospel is so heavy and dense with meaning to me that I need to try to digest it slowly. The first part—that God is sovereign—is the easiest part for me to accept, at least intellectually. God is sovereign, I read. To which I respond, Well, duh! Of course, God is sovereign—that’s why He’s God!

But what is easy to accept with the head is not always easy to remember with the heart. You could ask me at any time of day on any day if I believed God was absolutely sovereign, and I’d say, Yes, of course, without hesitation. But if you then bothered to hang out with me the rest of the day, you’d notice something incredible: that soon, I would begin to act in ways that strongly suggested I didn’t believe God was completely in charge. In our lives, and often even in our theologies, we act as if God is not completely in control of everything. We act as if it is up to us to save ourselves or save the world. (Sometimes by doing the most paltry and non-salvific and humorous things, such as screwing in a fluorescent light bulb. There ya go world, I say, after manfully fighting with the threads of a light bulb and mightily descending from the stool with a vanquished incandescent light bulb in hand. I, Sir Charles, have saved you. To which the world goes, Then how come I still groan so much!)

We act as if we are the ones who first seek out God and first love Him and first choose Him. Boo hoo hoo hoo! What about free will!! The problem is that our free wills, left unchosen by God, have freely chosen to be in bondage. Help, I’m a human, and I can’t get up! we cry. But we really don’t want to because it means giving up our paltry sovereignty.

And the first part of Paul’s gospel, that God is sovereign, is the easy part for me to understand! The second part is both easier and more difficult: God, by His grace, has called us before we were even born. Once I’ve accepted that God is sovereign, everything else falls into place, and nothing is impossible. That’s the easy part: that a sovereign God could and would have chosen me before I was even born. It’s then that I remember that God is outside of time and that all time is like the present to Him. He sees it all at once so that the following things are with Him together all the time: a) when He existed before time, b) when He created the world, c) when He chose me to live with Him, and d) when He chose me to write what I am now writing.

That part is a little harder to understand. But even this is not the hardest part, because it only affects my head and gives me Excedrin Headache #10,317. What is much bigger and more overwhelming is not that God chooses men but that He chose me. Before I had done good or evil, before I loved Him, knowing that I would sin and not love Him, seeing all things at once—God chose me. It’s not just St. Paul but also you and me that God has chosen to separate from the world from our mother’s wombs.

God chose me—the weakest, smallest member of the team! Why would He do such a thing? Usually those who are the most powerful don’t give the weakest and smallest the time of day. Why would the One who is Powerful do this? His sovereign power alone can’t explain it: it must be because of His Sovereign Grace, which is to say His Sovereign Love. The All-Powerful One gives what He did not have to give to one who did not deserve it.

That’s why this point is so difficult—because it is so overwhelmingly different from the way of the world and because it is so profoundly good for me! It might be scary to think that I’m not actually in control, but when I remember that the One who is sovereign over my life is both all-powerful and full of love, then it’s actually a rather warm and cozy place to be.

But it doesn’t stop there. God, the Sovereign One, isn’t done with me yet. He has chosen me not just because He can but also because He wants to reclaim me and re-create me in His image. He wants to show His glory through me, saying in effect, If you thought my first trick in creating the world and creating Charles David Erlandson was a good one, wait ‘til the second act, where I’ll take this worthless creature of mine, give him new life, and then make him the very one by whom I will re-create others. Ha!

God called Paul, the Saul of Tarsus who persecuted the church of God beyond measure and tried to destroy it, through His grace, to reveal His Son in him. Now that’s amazing! Not just that God chooses men to use to reveal Himself but that He chose him—that despicable creature, Saul of Tarsus, who persecuted Jesus Christ and wanted to kill Him by killing His Church!

And this is why God has chosen me and you—not just Paul: He desires to use you to reveal His Son, Jesus Christ, to others. What is your response to this? When God says, "I am God and am absolutely sovereign and have chosen you before you were born—so that I could show myself to other people through you—what’s your response? Do we suddenly doubt God’s sovereignty? Do we manufacture a false humility, batting our eyes and coyly saying, Why, little ol’ me?" Do we doubt that God has chosen us so that He might use us as He used Paul?No, I’m not called to be St. Paul, and neither are you. But you and I are called to be you and I, re-created in the image of God, built up in the image of the Son, graced by the Holy Spirit with every good gift necessary to do God’s will, and commissioned by Almighty God to make disciples of the nations. Do you disbelieve that God has made you an apostle, a sent one, sent to do His will, sent to reveal His Son to others? These things are undoubtedly true, but I find that only a small percentage of Christians act as if they truly believe them. Incredible, yes, but true nonetheless.

Finally, when the sovereign Lord chooses you to reveal His Son, He reclaims and restores and recreates and redeems and renews what He has already created in you. I don’t believe that the spiritual gifts we receive from God are usually entirely new gifts given at baptism or at some other point, in which case we would look and feel to everyone else to be a truly different person (and not just different in our spiritual condition). I believe that when God gives us His Spirit, He redeems and reclaims the natural gifts He has already given us but that are marred by sin and used for evil purposes.

This would explain why, even though God sovereignly chooses us and commissions and equips us, it often takes a long time and seems imperceptible or altogether invisible. God didn’t destroy the world and make a new one: He redeemed the old one, including us. He uses the natural means in our lives: in fact, He glories to work in small and natural ways, hiding Himself in His creation, as He hid Himself in the humanity of Jesus Christ. Jesus looked like a normal first-century Jew, and yet He wasn’t. I look like a normal twenty-first-century American (Yes, I know, I’ve just left myself open for about five minutes worth of one-liners—and that’s just inside my own head!), but having the Holy Spirit dwell in me—I’m not.

Even the great St. Paul, after He had seen the most amazing revelation of Jesus Christ, didn’t immediately get up and become Super Apostle (imagine dramatic superhero music playing here). He spent time in Arabia and then back at Damascus. God made use of Paul’s training as a Pharisee and as a student at the university at Tarsus. After three years, he went up to Jerusalem to see Peter. And then, fourteen years later, Paul went up to Jerusalem again with Barnabas, and only then is he revealed as St. Paul: Super Apostle.

And Paul was a Super Apostle, made Super by the true superhero of our lives: Jesus Christ, who shares His super powers with us. The same sovereign Lord who chose us, chose us in Jesus Christ, chose us to reveal Jesus Christ in us as we are in Him, and chose to use